Search Results

Search found 4413 results on 177 pages for 'knowledge'.

Page 173/177 | < Previous Page | 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177  | Next Page >

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 05, 2012Popular ReleasesSimple Injector: Simple Injector v1.4.1: This release adds two small improvements to the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll. No changes have been made to the core library. New features and improvements in this release for the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll The RegisterManyForOpenGeneric extension methods now accept non-generic decorator, as long as they implement the given open generic service type. GetTypesToRegister methods added to the OpenGenericBatchRegistrationExtensions class which allows to customize the behavior. Note that the...SQL Scriptz Runner: Application: Scriptz Runner source code and applicationCommonLibrary: Code: CodePowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.5.2: Added support for PowerGUI 3.2.Path Copy Copy: 10.0: New version with the following biggest new features: Regular expression support in custom commands (see this work item) Import/export feature for custom commands (see this work item) This version also addresses the following work items: 11353 11348 This version is a recommended upgrade for all users. Note: new custom commands that user regular expressions won't be compatible with earlier versions (if installed by registry manipulation or via network installation), but everything else is ...VidCoder: 1.3.1: Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.6 release (svn 4472). Removed erroneous "None" container choice. Change some logic and help text to stop assuming you have to pick the VIDEO_TS folder for a DVD scan. This should make previewing DVD titles on the Queue Multiple Titles window possible when you've picked the root DVD directory.ASP.NET MVC Framework - Abstracting Data Annotations, HTML5, Knockout JS techs: Version 1.0: Please download the source code. I am not associating any dll for release.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.0: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-03-04 v3.1.0 -??Hidden???????（〓?〓）。 -?PageManager??...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.1: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...Windows Phone Commands for VS2010: Version 1.0: Initial Release Version 1.0 Connect from device or emulator (Monitors the connection) Show Device information (Plataform, build , version, avaliable memory, total memory, architeture Manager installed applications (Launch, uninstall and explorer isolate storage files) Manager core applications (Launch blocked applications from emulator (Office, Calculator, alarm, calendar , etc) Manager blocked settings from emulator (Airplane Mode, Celullar Network, Wifi, etc) Deploy and update ap...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.01.00: Changes on Version 06.01.00 Fixed issue on GraySmallTitle container, that breaks the layout Fixed issue on Blue Metro7 Skin where the Search, Login, Register, Date is missing Fixed issue with the Version numbers on the target file Fixed issue where the jQuery and jQuery-UI files not deleted on upgrade from Version 01.00.00 Added a internal page where the Image Slider would be replaces with a BannerPaneMedia Companion: MC 3.433b Release: General More GUI tweaks (mostly imperceptible!) Updates for mc_com.exe TV The 'Watched' button has been re-instigated Added TV Menu sub-option to search ALL for new Episodes (includes locked shows) Movies Added 'Source' field (eg DVD, Bluray, HDTV), customisable in Advanced Preferences (try it out, let us know how it works!) Added HTML <<format>> tag with optional parameters for video container, source, and resolution (updated HTML tags to be added to Documentation shortly) Known Issu...Picturethrill: Version 2.3.2.0: Release includes Self-Update feature for Picturethrill. What that means for users is that they are always guaranteed to have a fresh copy of Picturethrill on their computers with all latest fixes. When Picturethrill adds a new website to get pictures from, you will get it too!Simple MVVM Toolkit for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone: Simple MVVM Toolkit v3.0.0.0: Added support for Silverlight 5.0 and Windows Phone 7.1. Upgraded project templates and samples. Upgraded installer. There are some new prerequisites required for this version, namely Silverlight 5 Tools, Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 (until the SDK is released), Windows Phone 7.1 SDK. Because it is in the experimental band, I have also removed the dependency on the Silverlight Testing Framework. You can use it if you wish, but the Ria Services project template no longer uses ...CODE Framework: 4.0.20301: The latest version adds a number of new features to the WPF system (such as stylable and testable messagebox support) as well as various new features throughout the system (especially in the Utilities namespace).MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.2 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Orchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesNetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...New ProjectsAbsolute Risk Game: Risk Game is a classic "World Domination Risk" game where you try to conquer the world.Architecture Document Catalog: The Architecture Document Catalog is a catalog for various documentation used by software solution architects. The initial architecture framework supported is from Rozanski and Woods, also called Viewpoints and Perspectives. It's in C#, Silverlight, WCF RIA Services.Background Worker Job Execution & Job Scheduler: Background worker is a multi-threaded job execution and scheduling engine. Very similar to Quartz, but with a slightly different focus.BWOS: preparing a new operating system. and name BWOS. CommonLibrary: Common modules and componentesCustomizeTool: CustomizeToolData Foundry: Data Foundry is a Swiss army knife for database administrator. With capabilities to cross reference check data between tables to find orphaned data and table relations.Data Grid Extensions: Modular extensions for the DataGrid control. Attach filtering capabilities to your existing DataGrid.dk.Helper: dk.Helper makes it easier for tribal wars game players (divoke-kmene.sk) to manage common activities in game. It's developed in C#.ExEn: ExEn is a high-performance implementation of a subset of the XNA API that runs on Silverlight, iOS and Android.Extended Methods for .NET: Developed in VB.NET, this DLL includes some functions I came across over the internet. Originally they were functions. I made some changes to suit my work and recreated them as Extended methods. Currently includes two extended methods for the Image class and one extended method for the String class. I will update it with new methods as I go along.GestionarComenzi: Gestioneaza Comenzi - Firma transporturiGIS Library Management: GIS Library Management System.iFinity Cache Master for DotNetNuke: The iFinity DotNetNuke Cache Master is an Administration module for DotNetNuke. This module allows administrators to inspect the current contents of the ASP.NET Cache in their running DotNetNuke installation. A very useful tool for developers working with the DotNetNuke cache.intelliEssay Document Format Checker: This is a product that tries to check a document's format to see if it conforms to certain given standard.Just T[he]IP: "Just The IP" leverages the Bing API v2 and the ip: Bing Advanced Operator to list the other web sites hosted at this IP Address (that are indexed by Bing).KTool: Ktool is a tool for learning japanese kanji. This program is still in developed. Current version can only display and find a kanji word (Press ctrl-F on main screen for search). Developed in WPF, .NET 4.0Lab Checker: Lab Checker makes it easy for teacher to check students' programs. It allows a student to test his program on a set of test cases which eliminates the need to run the program manually.MeoBox Vera Control Plugin: This is my project for creating a plugin to control my MeoBox ( Scientific Atlanta ) using Vera ( www.micasaverde.com ) Should work with other TV2Client boxesNUnitTestHelper: NUnitTestHelper is a helper class for developing unit tests for C# applications with NUnit framework. This helper library provides set of classes and method which can be used for accomplishing faster unit test development for any kind of project. NUnitTestBase – Supports basic functionality for writing a unit test with NUnit framework. This base class provides built in support for mocking framework. This version provides support for Rhino mocking framework.OnlineExam: Common online examination system based on Asp.net MVC3 can used for knowledge test, I/Q test, college test or most other test project.Orchard Code Generation Extensions: Code Generation Extensions module for Orchard.OrchardTranstion_CN: Orchar?? OsAvatar: to next step showOwnTools: About my toolsPhone Finder App: PhoneFinder will be a Windows Phone platform app alternative for finding a lost or stolen phone. Our plan is to have additional functionality the Windows software does not include. It will be developed using ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, C#, etc.PoshChat: PoshChat is a client/server chat program written in PowerShell. Supports multiple client connections to a single server to chat.Process Attachment And Secure Text: ProcessAttachmentAndSecureText is an Exchange Transport Agent DLL and associated ASPX page. It is used to 1) strip out attachments and send them to an upload portal, and 2) to strip out text from emails and send it to an upload portal. It is currently coded for Exchange 2010Resource Viewer - Visual Studio Extension: Simply put the “resource viewer extension” enables you to visually view your ResourceDictionary. To open it go to: View – Other Windows – Resource Viewer. When working with WPF/Silverlight you put your reusable resources in a common ResourceDictionary, those resources might be of type Style, SolidColorBrush, DrawingBrush, BitmapImage and more. The problems starts when you have that ResourceDictionary you have no way to see how your resources look like, making the work process (of both t...Scumm XNA: Scumm XNA is an engine that runs old school LucasArts graphical adventure games. It is written completely in C# and will run on PC, Xbox 360 and Windows phone. The code is inspired by ScummVM but this project is not a port, it is a complete rewrite in order to optimize the engine for the CLR. Of course, you will need to own the orinigal games in order to use it. Currently, I will focus my work on the great "Day of Tentacle" game specifically the CD version.SDX DataGrid: SDXDataGrid is a comprehensive data grid component for Microsoft .NET 3.5 web application developers. It is designed to ease the exhausting process of implementing the necessary code for sorting, navigation, grouping, searching and data editing in a data representation object.SQL Scriptz Runner: Features are : Drag And Drop script files Run a directory of script files Sql Script out put messages during execution Script passed or failed that are colored green and red (yellow for running) Stop on error option Open script on error option Run report with time taken for each uComponents Demo: A demo for the code of running uComponents in Umbraco siteUnixTable: UnixTable makes it easier to realize application to access database, with no code but only with visual instrument at runtime. You'll no longer have to write query or code to read table from database. It's developed in Visual Basic for .NET 4. VOA Player.NET: VOA Player is a lightweight windows client for listening VOA Special English. Because of GFW blocking it fetch RSS data via rss2proxy.appspot.com indirectly. User can view article page and listen MP3 stream. The project is a C# implementation of voaplayer.sinaapp.com.Windows Metafile Library: The library supports reading and writing WMF files. Source code is written in pure .NET from scratch following the Windows Metafile Format Specification.Windows Phone 7.1 + MicroFramework (a phone device as remote control): Windows Phone 7.1 + .Net MicroFramework (How use a windows phone device as remote control of a Fez Panda II/MicroFramework board). A windows phone device can be connected to a wifi network (for example a wifi router). If you have also a MicroFramework board connected to the wifi network; you can send some http rest commands from the windows phone device to the MicroFramework board. The microframework board, it must support the tcp/ip protocol through a connect shield. In this exaple it will...XBMC Cache Manager: A Windows Service to manage a shared XBMC MySQL database and shared cache folder.

  Read the article

• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples.         After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped.         Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run.   Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test.   Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through.  As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete.      Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’.    Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap   Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You!   Share this post : CodeProject

  Read the article

• Install Control Center Agent on Oracle Application Server

  - by qianqian.wu

  Control Center Agent (CCA) The Control Center Agent is the OWB component that runs the Template Mappings in the Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) server; also referred to as the J2EE Runtime. The Control Center Agent provides a Java-based runtime environment that can be installed on Oracle and non-Oracle database hosts. The Control Center Agent provides fundamental infrastructure for the heterogeneous, Code Template-based mapping support and Web services-related features of OWB in this release. In Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 the Control Center Agent, by default will run in the built-in OC4J that is bundled in the Oracle Home. Besides that, you also have ability to install the Control Center Agent in an Oracle Application Server install. In this article, you will find step-by-step instructions how to install the Control Center Agent on an Oracle Application Server instance. The instructions cover the following tasks: Task 1: Install and Configure the Application Server Task 2: Deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server Task 3: Optional Configuration Tasks   Task 1: Install and Configure the Application Server Before configuring the Application Server, you need to install it from Oracle Application Server CD-ROM, or by downloading the installation program from Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Once the installation is completed, you are ready to configure the Application Server. The purpose of the configuration task is to make sure the Control Center Agent ear file can be deployed and runs in the Application Server successfully. The essential configuration tasks are outlined below: · Modify the OC4J Startup Script · Set up Control Center Agent Server Side Logging · Set up Audit Table Data Source · Copy ct_permissions.properties File · Set up Security Roles for Control Center Agent · Create JMS Queues · Install JDBC Drivers to OC4J Modify the OC4J Startup Script The OC4J startup script “opmn.xml” is located in Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/opmn/conf. $AS_HOME stands for the root home directory of the application server. Open the file opmn.xml in a text editor, and alter the contents of the file as displayed in the following sample. You need to make sure that: The MaxPerSize is set to 128M. This is to ensure that you allocate enough PermGen space to OC4J to run Control Center Agent. This will prevent java.lang.OutOfMemoryError when running the agent. The Python.path sets the path for the Python library files used by the Control Center Agent: jython_lib.zip and jython_owblib.jar. These two files are in the $OWB_HOME/owb/lib/int directory, where $OWB_HOME is the directory where owb is installed. · The km_security_needed determines whether restrictions will be applied to the kinds of operating system commands allowed to be executed by the OWB Code Template script executed by Control Center Agent. Setting km_security_needed to “true” enforces such restriction while setting it to “false” removes such restrictions. Set up Control Center Agent Server Side Logging Ensure that you are in the Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config. Open the file j2ee-logging.xml in a text editor and add the following lines to the log handler section. The jrt-internal-log-handler is the handler used by Control Center Agent runtime logger to create log files. Then add the following entry into the loggers section to create the logger for Control Center Agent runtime auditing. Set up Audit Table Data Source To enable Audit Table logging, a managed data source and connection pool need to be set up before Control Center Agent deployment. Ensure that you are in the Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config. Open the file data-sources.xml in a text editor. Define the audit data source shown below in the file, <managed-data-source name="AuditDS" connection-pool-name="OWBSYS Audit   Connection Pool" jndi-name="jdbc/AuditDS"/> <connection-pool name="OWBSYS Audit Connection Pool">   <connection-factory factory-class="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource"     user="owbsys_audit" password="owbsys_audit"     url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/ORCL"/> </connection-pool> Copy ct_permissions.properties File The ct_permissions.properties can be obtained from $OWB_HOME /owb/jrt/config/ directory. You need to copy the file to $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory.This properties file takes effect when the setting km-security is set to true in Control Center Agent. By default the ALLOWED_CMD is commented out in ct_permissions.properties file. This prevents all system command from being invoked from scripts executed in Control Center Agent (when km-security is set to true). To allow certain system commands to be invoked, ALLOWED_CMD needs to be uncommented out, and the system commands (allowed to be invoked) need to be added to the ALLOWED_CMD. Set up Security Roles for Control Center Agent You can set up the Control Center Agent security roles through Oracle Enterprise Manager. In a web browser, navigate to Enterprise Manager Homepage (e.g. http://hostname:8889/em). 1. Log in using the oc4jadmin credentials. After the Cluster Topology page is loaded, click home (the OC4J instance). This takes you to the home page of the OC4J instance. On the OC4J home screen, click the Administration tab. On the Administration Tasks screen, expand Security. Click the task icon next to Security Providers. 2. On Security Providers page click on the button “Instance Level Security”. On Instance Level Security page, go to “Realms” tab. You will see a row for the default realm “jazn.com” in the results table. It has a “Roles” column and a “Users” column. Click on the number in “Roles” column. In the “Roles” page it will display all the roles available for the realm. Click on “Create” button to create a new role “OWB_J2EE_ EXECUTOR”. 3. On the Add Role screen, enter Name OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR, and click OK. 4. Follow the same steps as before, and create a new role “OWB_J2EE_OPERATOR”. 5. Assign role “oc4j-administrators” and “OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR” to the role “OWB_J2EE_OPERATOR” by moving these roles from “Available Roles” and click “OK” to save. 6. Go back to Instance Level Security page and create a new role “OWB_J2EE_ADMINISTRATOR”. 7. Assign roles “OWB_J2EE_ OPERATOR” and “OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR” to the role “OWB_J2EE_ ADMINISTRATOR” by moving these roles from “Available Roles” and click “OK” to save. 8.Go back to Instance Level Security page. This time, click on the number in “Users” column for the realm “jazn.com”. In the “Users” page, it shows all the users defined for this realm. Locate the user “oc4jadmin” in the results table and click on it. 9. Assign the roles “OWB_J2EE_ADMINISTRATOR” and “oc4j-app-administrators” to this user by moving the role from the “Available Roles” selection box to “Selected Roles” box and click “Apply” to save. 10. Go back to Instance Level Security page and create a new role “OWB_INTERNAL_USERS”, assign no user or role to this role. Simply click “OK” to create this role. Now you have finished creating the security roles required for Control Center Agent. Create JMS Queues You need to create two JMS queues for Control Center Agent: owbQueue and abort_owbQueue. 1. Now go to OC4J home Page. On the OC4J home screen, click the Administration tab. On the Administration Tasks screen, expand Services and then expand Enterprise Messaging Service. Click the task icon next to JMS Destinations. 2. On JMS Destinations page, click “Create New” button to create a new JMS queue. On Add Destination page, choose “Queue” as Destination Type. Put “owbQueue” as Destination Name. Select “In Memory Persistence Only” as the Persistence Type and put “jms/owbQueue” as JNDI Location and click on “OK” to finish. 3. Follow the same instruction as above to create the owb_abortQueue. Now you have finished creating the JMS queues required for Control Center Agent. Install JDBC Drivers to OC4J In order to execute Code Templates using commercial databases other than Oracle, e.g. DB2, SQL Server etc, the corresponding jdbc driver files need to be added to $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/applib directory. 1. To install other JDBC drivers to OC4J, first obtain the .jar file containing the JDBC driver. All the external JDBC drivers .jar files can be found in the directory: $OWB_HOME/owb/lib/ext/. For DB2, the files needed are db2jcc.jar and db2jcc_license_cu.jar. For SQL Server the file is sqljdbc.jar. For sunopsis JDBC drivers, the file needed is snpsxmlo.jar. 2. Copy the required JDBC driver file into the directory $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/applib. Now you have finished the Application Server configuration. To make the configuration to take an effect, you need to restart the Application Server.   Task 2: Deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server Now you can deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server. In a web browser, navigate to Enterprise Manager Homepage (e.g. http://hostname:8889/em). 1. Log in using the oc4jadmin credentials. After the Cluster Topology page is loaded, click home (the OC4J instance). This takes you to the home page of the OC4J instance. On the OC4J home screen, click the Applications tab. Click Deploy to begin deploying Control Center Agent. 2. On the Deploy: Select Archive screen, under Archive, select Archive is present on local host. Upload the archive to the server where Application Server Control is running. Click Browse and locate the jrt.ear file in the $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/applications directory. Under Deployment Plan, select Automatically create a new deployment plan. Click Next. 3. Wait for the ear file to be uploaded to Application Server. On the Deploy: Application Attributes screen, enter Application Name jrt, and Context Root jrt. Leave the other attributes at their default values. Click Next. 4. On Deploy: Deployment Settings screen, leave all attributes at their default values, and click Deploy. This will take about 1 minute or so and when the application is deployed successfully, a confirmation message will be displayed. Now the Control Center Agent is started automatically. Go back to OC4J home page and click on Applications tab to make sure the deployed application jrt is showing in the applications list.   Task 3: Optional Configuration Tasks The optional configuration tasks contain: · Secure Control Center Agent Web Service · Setting the PATH Environment Variable Secure Control Center Agent Web Service If you want to use JRTWebService with a secure website, you need to do the following steps, 1. Create a file “secure-web-site.xml” in the $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. The file can be obtained from $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/config directory. A sample secure-web-site.xml is shown as below. We need to modify the “protocol” to “https”, and “secure” to “true”, also choose an port as the secure http port. Also we need to add the entry “ssl-config” in the file. Remember to use the absolute path for the key store file. 2. Modify the file “server.xml” that is located at $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. Then add the <web-site> element in the file for the secure-web-site. 3. Create a key store file “serverkeystore.jks” in the $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. The file can be obtained from $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/config directory. After the three files are altered, restart the application server. Now you can access the JRTWebService in SSL way through https://hostname:4443/jrt/webservice. Setting the PATH Environment Variable Sometimes, some system commands such as linux ls, sh etc, can not be executed successfully during the script execution due to they are not found in PATH. To ensure they work normally, you can setup the environment variable PATH. Let’s navigate to the Enterprise Manager Homepage. 1. Go to OC4J home screen and click the Administration tab. Expand Administration Tasks, then expand Properties. Click the task icon next to Server Properties. 2. On the Server Properties screen, scroll down to Environment Variables section. Under Environment Variables, click Add Another Row. Enter PATH in Name, and fill Value with directories that contain the system commands. Click Apply.   After you work through this article, I believe you have developed a deeper understanding of the Control Center Agent installation process, and you can apply this knowledge in other installation plan such as Control Center Agent installation on Standalone OC4J.

  Read the article

• Beware Sneaky Reads with Unique Indexes

  - by Paul White NZ

  A few days ago, Sandra Mueller (twitter | blog) asked a question using twitter’s #sqlhelp hash tag: “Might SQL Server retrieve (out-of-row) LOB data from a table, even if the column isn’t referenced in the query?” Leaving aside trivial cases (like selecting a computed column that does reference the LOB data), one might be tempted to say that no, SQL Server does not read data you haven’t asked for.  In general, that’s quite correct; however there are cases where SQL Server might sneakily retrieve a LOB column… Example Table Here’s a T-SQL script to create that table and populate it with 1,000 rows: CREATE TABLE dbo.LOBtest ( pk INTEGER IDENTITY NOT NULL, some_value INTEGER NULL, lob_data VARCHAR(MAX) NULL, another_column CHAR(5) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.LOBtest pk] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (pk ASC) ); GO DECLARE @Data VARCHAR(MAX); SET @Data = REPLICATE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), 'x'), 65540);   WITH Numbers (n) AS ( SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2 ) INSERT LOBtest WITH (TABLOCKX) ( some_value, lob_data ) SELECT TOP (1000) N.n, @Data FROM Numbers N WHERE N.n <= 1000; Test 1: A Simple Update Let’s run a query to subtract one from every value in the some_value column: UPDATE dbo.LOBtest WITH (TABLOCKX) SET some_value = some_value - 1; As you might expect, modifying this integer column in 1,000 rows doesn’t take very long, or use many resources.  The STATITICS IO and TIME output shows a total of 9 logical reads, and 25ms elapsed time.  The query plan is also very simple: Looking at the Clustered Index Scan, we can see that SQL Server only retrieves the pk and some_value columns during the scan: The pk column is needed by the Clustered Index Update operator to uniquely identify the row that is being changed.  The some_value column is used by the Compute Scalar to calculate the new value.  (In case you are wondering what the Top operator is for, it is used to enforce SET ROWCOUNT). Test 2: Simple Update with an Index Now let’s create a nonclustered index keyed on the some_value column, with lob_data as an included column: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX dbo.LOBtest some_value (lob_data)] ON dbo.LOBtest (some_value) INCLUDE ( lob_data ) WITH ( FILLFACTOR = 100, MAXDOP = 1, SORT_IN_TEMPDB = ON ); This is not a useful index for our simple update query; imagine that someone else created it for a different purpose.  Let’s run our update query again: UPDATE dbo.LOBtest WITH (TABLOCKX) SET some_value = some_value - 1; We find that it now requires 4,014 logical reads and the elapsed query time has increased to around 100ms.  The extra logical reads (4 per row) are an expected consequence of maintaining the nonclustered index. The query plan is very similar to before (click to enlarge): The Clustered Index Update operator picks up the extra work of maintaining the nonclustered index. The new Compute Scalar operators detect whether the value in the some_value column has actually been changed by the update.  SQL Server may be able to skip maintaining the nonclustered index if the value hasn’t changed (see my previous post on non-updating updates for details).  Our simple query does change the value of some_data in every row, so this optimization doesn’t add any value in this specific case. The output list of columns from the Clustered Index Scan hasn’t changed from the one shown previously: SQL Server still just reads the pk and some_data columns.  Cool. Overall then, adding the nonclustered index hasn’t had any startling effects, and the LOB column data still isn’t being read from the table.  Let’s see what happens if we make the nonclustered index unique. Test 3: Simple Update with a Unique Index Here’s the script to create a new unique index, and drop the old one: CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [UQ dbo.LOBtest some_value (lob_data)] ON dbo.LOBtest (some_value) INCLUDE ( lob_data ) WITH ( FILLFACTOR = 100, MAXDOP = 1, SORT_IN_TEMPDB = ON ); GO DROP INDEX [IX dbo.LOBtest some_value (lob_data)] ON dbo.LOBtest; Remember that SQL Server only enforces uniqueness on index keys (the some_data column).  The lob_data column is simply stored at the leaf-level of the non-clustered index.  With that in mind, we might expect this change to make very little difference.  Let’s see: UPDATE dbo.LOBtest WITH (TABLOCKX) SET some_value = some_value - 1; Whoa!  Now look at the elapsed time and logical reads: Scan count 1, logical reads 2016, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 36015, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 15992.   CPU time = 172 ms, elapsed time = 16172 ms. Even with all the data and index pages in memory, the query took over 16 seconds to update just 1,000 rows, performing over 52,000 LOB logical reads (nearly 16,000 of those using read-ahead). Why on earth is SQL Server reading LOB data in a query that only updates a single integer column? The Query Plan The query plan for test 3 looks a bit more complex than before: In fact, the bottom level is exactly the same as we saw with the non-unique index.  The top level has heaps of new stuff though, which I’ll come to in a moment. You might be expecting to find that the Clustered Index Scan is now reading the lob_data column (for some reason).  After all, we need to explain where all the LOB logical reads are coming from.  Sadly, when we look at the properties of the Clustered Index Scan, we see exactly the same as before: SQL Server is still only reading the pk and some_value columns – so what’s doing the LOB reads? Updates that Sneakily Read Data We have to go as far as the Clustered Index Update operator before we see LOB data in the output list: [Expr1020] is a bit flag added by an earlier Compute Scalar.  It is set true if the some_value column has not been changed (part of the non-updating updates optimization I mentioned earlier). The Clustered Index Update operator adds two new columns: the lob_data column, and some_value_OLD.  The some_value_OLD column, as the name suggests, is the pre-update value of the some_value column.  At this point, the clustered index has already been updated with the new value, but we haven’t touched the nonclustered index yet. An interesting observation here is that the Clustered Index Update operator can read a column into the data flow as part of its update operation.  SQL Server could have read the LOB data as part of the initial Clustered Index Scan, but that would mean carrying the data through all the operations that occur prior to the Clustered Index Update.  The server knows it will have to go back to the clustered index row to update it, so it delays reading the LOB data until then.  Sneaky! Why the LOB Data Is Needed This is all very interesting (I hope), but why is SQL Server reading the LOB data?  For that matter, why does it need to pass the pre-update value of the some_value column out of the Clustered Index Update? The answer relates to the top row of the query plan for test 3.  I’ll reproduce it here for convenience: Notice that this is a wide (per-index) update plan.  SQL Server used a narrow (per-row) update plan in test 2, where the Clustered Index Update took care of maintaining the nonclustered index too.  I’ll talk more about this difference shortly. The Split/Sort/Collapse combination is an optimization, which aims to make per-index update plans more efficient.  It does this by breaking each update into a delete/insert pair, reordering the operations, removing any redundant operations, and finally applying the net effect of all the changes to the nonclustered index. Imagine we had a unique index which currently holds three rows with the values 1, 2, and 3.  If we run a query that adds 1 to each row value, we would end up with values 2, 3, and 4.  The net effect of all the changes is the same as if we simply deleted the value 1, and added a new value 4. By applying net changes, SQL Server can also avoid false unique-key violations.  If we tried to immediately update the value 1 to a 2, it would conflict with the existing value 2 (which would soon be updated to 3 of course) and the query would fail.  You might argue that SQL Server could avoid the uniqueness violation by starting with the highest value (3) and working down.  That’s fine, but it’s not possible to generalize this logic to work with every possible update query. SQL Server has to use a wide update plan if it sees any risk of false uniqueness violations.  It’s worth noting that the logic SQL Server uses to detect whether these violations are possible has definite limits.  As a result, you will often receive a wide update plan, even when you can see that no violations are possible. Another benefit of this optimization is that it includes a sort on the index key as part of its work.  Processing the index changes in index key order promotes sequential I/O against the nonclustered index. A side-effect of all this is that the net changes might include one or more inserts.  In order to insert a new row in the index, SQL Server obviously needs all the columns – the key column and the included LOB column.  This is the reason SQL Server reads the LOB data as part of the Clustered Index Update. In addition, the some_value_OLD column is required by the Split operator (it turns updates into delete/insert pairs).  In order to generate the correct index key delete operation, it needs the old key value. The irony is that in this case the Split/Sort/Collapse optimization is anything but.  Reading all that LOB data is extremely expensive, so it is sad that the current version of SQL Server has no way to avoid it. Finally, for completeness, I should mention that the Filter operator is there to filter out the non-updating updates. Beating the Set-Based Update with a Cursor One situation where SQL Server can see that false unique-key violations aren’t possible is where it can guarantee that only one row is being updated.  Armed with this knowledge, we can write a cursor (or the WHILE-loop equivalent) that updates one row at a time, and so avoids reading the LOB data: SET NOCOUNT ON; SET STATISTICS XML, IO, TIME OFF;   DECLARE @PK INTEGER, @StartTime DATETIME; SET @StartTime = GETUTCDATE();   DECLARE curUpdate CURSOR LOCAL FORWARD_ONLY KEYSET SCROLL_LOCKS FOR SELECT L.pk FROM LOBtest L ORDER BY L.pk ASC;   OPEN curUpdate;   WHILE (1 = 1) BEGIN FETCH NEXT FROM curUpdate INTO @PK;   IF @@FETCH_STATUS = -1 BREAK; IF @@FETCH_STATUS = -2 CONTINUE;   UPDATE dbo.LOBtest SET some_value = some_value - 1 WHERE CURRENT OF curUpdate; END;   CLOSE curUpdate; DEALLOCATE curUpdate;   SELECT DATEDIFF(MILLISECOND, @StartTime, GETUTCDATE()); That completes the update in 1280 milliseconds (remember test 3 took over 16 seconds!) I used the WHERE CURRENT OF syntax there and a KEYSET cursor, just for the fun of it.  One could just as well use a WHERE clause that specified the primary key value instead. Clustered Indexes A clustered index is the ultimate index with included columns: all non-key columns are included columns in a clustered index.  Let’s re-create the test table and data with an updatable primary key, and without any non-clustered indexes: IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.LOBtest', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE dbo.LOBtest; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.LOBtest ( pk INTEGER NOT NULL, some_value INTEGER NULL, lob_data VARCHAR(MAX) NULL, another_column CHAR(5) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.LOBtest pk] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (pk ASC) ); GO DECLARE @Data VARCHAR(MAX); SET @Data = REPLICATE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), 'x'), 65540);   WITH Numbers (n) AS ( SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2 ) INSERT LOBtest WITH (TABLOCKX) ( pk, some_value, lob_data ) SELECT TOP (1000) N.n, N.n, @Data FROM Numbers N WHERE N.n <= 1000; Now here’s a query to modify the cluster keys: UPDATE dbo.LOBtest SET pk = pk + 1; The query plan is: As you can see, the Split/Sort/Collapse optimization is present, and we also gain an Eager Table Spool, for Halloween protection.  In addition, SQL Server now has no choice but to read the LOB data in the Clustered Index Scan: The performance is not great, as you might expect (even though there is no non-clustered index to maintain): Table 'LOBtest'. Scan count 1, logical reads 2011, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 36015, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 15992.   Table 'Worktable'. Scan count 1, logical reads 2040, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 34000, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 8000.   SQL Server Execution Times: CPU time = 483 ms, elapsed time = 17884 ms. Notice how the LOB data is read twice: once from the Clustered Index Scan, and again from the work table in tempdb used by the Eager Spool. If you try the same test with a non-unique clustered index (rather than a primary key), you’ll get a much more efficient plan that just passes the cluster key (including uniqueifier) around (no LOB data or other non-key columns): A unique non-clustered index (on a heap) works well too: Both those queries complete in a few tens of milliseconds, with no LOB reads, and just a few thousand logical reads.  (In fact the heap is rather more efficient). There are lots more fun combinations to try that I don’t have space for here. Final Thoughts The behaviour shown in this post is not limited to LOB data by any means.  If the conditions are met, any unique index that has included columns can produce similar behaviour – something to bear in mind when adding large INCLUDE columns to achieve covering queries, perhaps. Paul White Email: [email protected] Twitter: @PaulWhiteNZ

  Read the article

• When is a SQL function not a function?

  - by Rob Farley

  Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a procedure). SQL Server is no different. You can call stored procedures, even from within other stored procedures, and you can call functions and use these in other queries. Stored procedures might query something, and therefore ‘return data’, but a function in SQL is considered to have the type of the thing returned, and can be used accordingly in queries. Consider the internal GETDATE() function. SELECT GETDATE(), SomeDatetimeColumn FROM dbo.SomeTable; There’s no logical difference between the field that is being returned by the function and the field that’s being returned by the table column. Both are the datetime field – if you didn’t have inside knowledge, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which was which. And so as developers, we find ourselves wanting to create functions that return all kinds of things – functions which look up values based on codes, functions which do string manipulation, and so on. But it’s rubbish. Ok, it’s not all rubbish, but it mostly is. And this isn’t even considering the SARGability impact. It’s far more significant than that. (When I say the SARGability aspect, I mean “because you’re unlikely to have an index on the result of some function that’s applied to a column, so try to invert the function and query the column in an unchanged manner”) I’m going to consider the three main types of user-defined functions in SQL Server: Scalar Inline Table-Valued Multi-statement Table-Valued I could also look at user-defined CLR functions, including aggregate functions, but not today. I figure that most people don’t tend to get around to doing CLR functions, and I’m going to focus on the T-SQL-based user-defined functions. Most people split these types of function up into two types. So do I. Except that most people pick them based on ‘scalar or table-valued’. I’d rather go with ‘inline or not’. If it’s not inline, it’s rubbish. It really is. Let’s start by considering the two kinds of table-valued function, and compare them. These functions are going to return the sales for a particular salesperson in a particular year, from the AdventureWorks database. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS TABLE AS  RETURN (     SELECT e.LoginID as EmployeeLogin, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ) ; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_multi(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS @results TABLE (     EmployeeLogin nvarchar(512),     OrderDate datetime,     SalesOrderID int     ) AS BEGIN     INSERT @results (EmployeeLogin, OrderDate, SalesOrderID)     SELECT e.LoginID, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ;     RETURN END ; GO You’ll notice that I’m being nice and responsible with the use of the DATEADD function, so that I have SARGability on the OrderDate filter. Regular readers will be hoping I’ll show what’s going on in the execution plans here. Here I’ve run two SELECT * queries with the “Show Actual Execution Plan” option turned on. Notice that the ‘Query cost’ of the multi-statement version is just 2% of the ‘Batch cost’. But also notice there’s trickery going on. And it’s nothing to do with that extra index that I have on the OrderDate column. Trickery. Look at it – clearly, the first plan is showing us what’s going on inside the function, but the second one isn’t. The second one is blindly running the function, and then scanning the results. There’s a Sequence operator which is calling the TVF operator, and then calling a Table Scan to get the results of that function for the SELECT operator. But surely it still has to do all the work that the first one is doing... To see what’s actually going on, let’s look at the Estimated plan. Now, we see the same plans (almost) that we saw in the Actuals, but we have an extra one – the one that was used for the TVF. Here’s where we see the inner workings of it. You’ll probably recognise the right-hand side of the TVF’s plan as looking very similar to the first plan – but it’s now being called by a stack of other operators, including an INSERT statement to be able to populate the table variable that the multi-statement TVF requires. And the cost of the TVF is 57% of the batch! But it gets worse. Let’s consider what happens if we don’t need all the columns. We’ll leave out the EmployeeLogin column. Here, we see that the inline function call has been simplified down. It doesn’t need the Employee table. The join is redundant and has been eliminated from the plan, making it even cheaper. But the multi-statement plan runs the whole thing as before, only removing the extra column when the Table Scan is performed. A multi-statement function is a lot more powerful than an inline one. An inline function can only be the result of a single sub-query. It’s essentially the same as a parameterised view, because views demonstrate this same behaviour of extracting the definition of the view and using it in the outer query. A multi-statement function is clearly more powerful because it can contain far more complex logic. But a multi-statement function isn’t really a function at all. It’s a stored procedure. It’s wrapped up like a function, but behaves like a stored procedure. It would be completely unreasonable to expect that a stored procedure could be simplified down to recognise that not all the columns might be needed, but yet this is part of the pain associated with this procedural function situation. The biggest clue that a multi-statement function is more like a stored procedure than a function is the “BEGIN” and “END” statements that surround the code. If you try to create a multi-statement function without these statements, you’ll get an error – they are very much required. When I used to present on this kind of thing, I even used to call it “The Dangers of BEGIN and END”, and yes, I’ve written about this type of thing before in a similarly-named post over at my old blog. Now how about scalar functions... Suppose we wanted a scalar function to return the count of these. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_scalar(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS int AS BEGIN     RETURN (         SELECT COUNT(*)         FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o         LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e         ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID         WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid         AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')         AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ); END ; GO Notice the evil words? They’re required. Try to remove them, you just get an error. That’s right – any scalar function is procedural, despite the fact that you wrap up a sub-query inside that RETURN statement. It’s as ugly as anything. Hopefully this will change in future versions. Let’s have a look at how this is reflected in an execution plan. Here’s a query, its Actual plan, and its Estimated plan: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, dbo.FetchSales_scalar(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; We see here that the cost of the scalar function is about twice that of the outer query. Nicely, the query optimizer has worked out that it doesn’t need the Employee table, but that’s a bit of a red herring here. There’s actually something way more significant going on. If I look at the properties of that UDF operator, it tells me that the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.337999. If I just run the query SELECT dbo.FetchSales_scalar(281,2003); we see that the UDF cost is still unchanged. You see, this 0.0337999 is the cost of running the scalar function ONCE. But when we ran that query with the CROSS JOIN in it, we returned quite a few rows. 68 in fact. Could’ve been a lot more, if we’d had more salespeople or more years. And so we come to the biggest problem. This procedure (I don’t want to call it a function) is getting called 68 times – each one between twice as expensive as the outer query. And because it’s calling it in a separate context, there is even more overhead that I haven’t considered here. The cheek of it, to say that the Compute Scalar operator here costs 0%! I know a number of IT projects that could’ve used that kind of costing method, but that’s another story that I’m not going to go into here. Let’s look at a better way. Suppose our scalar function had been implemented as an inline one. Then it could have been expanded out like a sub-query. It could’ve run something like this: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, (SELECT COUNT(*)     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = p.SalesPersonID     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,y.year-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,y.year-2000+1,'20000101')     ) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; Don’t worry too much about the Scan of the SalesOrderHeader underneath a Nested Loop. If you remember from plenty of other posts on the matter, execution plans don’t push the data through. That Scan only runs once. The Index Spool sucks the data out of it and populates a structure that is used to feed the Stream Aggregate. The Index Spool operator gets called 68 times, but the Scan only once (the Number of Executions property demonstrates this). Here, the Query Optimizer has a full picture of what’s being asked, and can make the appropriate decision about how it accesses the data. It can simplify it down properly. To get this kind of behaviour from a function, we need it to be inline. But without inline scalar functions, we need to make our function be table-valued. Luckily, that’s ok. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline2(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS table AS RETURN (SELECT COUNT(*) as NumSales     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); GO But we can’t use this as a scalar. Instead, we need to use it with the APPLY operator. SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, n.NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID OUTER APPLY dbo.FetchSales_inline2(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS n; And now, we get the plan that we want for this query. All we’ve done is tell the function that it’s returning a table instead of a single value, and removed the BEGIN and END statements. We’ve had to name the column being returned, but what we’ve gained is an actual inline simplifiable function. And if we wanted it to return multiple columns, it could do that too. I really consider this function to be superior to the scalar function in every way. It does need to be handled differently in the outer query, but in many ways it’s a more elegant method there too. The function calls can be put amongst the FROM clause, where they can then be used in the WHERE or GROUP BY clauses without fear of calling the function multiple times (another horrible side effect of functions). So please. If you see BEGIN and END in a function, remember it’s not really a function, it’s a procedure. And then fix it. @rob_farley

  Read the article

• Sorting Algorithms

  - by MarkPearl

  General Every time I go back to university I find myself wading through sorting algorithms and their implementation in C++. Up to now I haven’t really appreciated their true value. However as I discovered this last week with Dictionaries in C# – having a knowledge of some basic programming principles can greatly improve the performance of a system and make one think twice about how to tackle a problem. I’m going to cover briefly in this post the following: Selection Sort Insertion Sort Shellsort Quicksort Mergesort Heapsort (not complete) Selection Sort Array based selection sort is a simple approach to sorting an unsorted array. Simply put, it repeats two basic steps to achieve a sorted collection. It starts with a collection of data and repeatedly parses it, each time sorting out one element and reducing the size of the next iteration of parsed data by one. So the first iteration would go something like this… Go through the entire array of data and find the lowest value Place the value at the front of the array The second iteration would go something like this… Go through the array from position two (position one has already been sorted with the smallest value) and find the next lowest value in the array. Place the value at the second position in the array This process would be completed until the entire array had been sorted. A positive about selection sort is that it does not make many item movements. In fact, in a worst case scenario every items is only moved once. Selection sort is however a comparison intensive sort. If you had 10 items in a collection, just to parse the collection you would have 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2=54 comparisons to sort regardless of how sorted the collection was to start with. If you think about it, if you applied selection sort to a collection already sorted, you would still perform relatively the same number of iterations as if it was not sorted at all. Many of the following algorithms try and reduce the number of comparisons if the list is already sorted – leaving one with a best case and worst case scenario for comparisons. Likewise different approaches have different levels of item movement. Depending on what is more expensive, one may give priority to one approach compared to another based on what is more expensive, a comparison or a item move. Insertion Sort Insertion sort tries to reduce the number of key comparisons it performs compared to selection sort by not “doing anything” if things are sorted. Assume you had an collection of numbers in the following order… 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 There are 8 elements in the list. If we were to start at the front of the list – 10 18 25 & 30 are already sorted. Element 5 (23) however is smaller than element 4 (30) and so needs to be repositioned. We do this by copying the value at element 5 to a temporary holder, and then begin shifting the elements before it up one. So… Element 5 would be copied to a temporary holder 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 4 would shift to Element 5 10 18 25 30 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 3 would shift to Element 4 10 18 25 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 2 (18) is smaller than the temporary holder so we put the temporary holder value into Element 3. 10 18 23 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23   We now have a sorted list up to element 6. And so we would repeat the same process by moving element 6 to a temporary value and then shifting everything up by one from element 2 to element 5. As you can see, one major setback for this technique is the shifting values up one – this is because up to now we have been considering the collection to be an array. If however the collection was a linked list, we would not need to shift values up, but merely remove the link from the unsorted value and “reinsert” it in a sorted position. Which would reduce the number of transactions performed on the collection. So.. Insertion sort seems to perform better than selection sort – however an implementation is slightly more complicated. This is typical with most sorting algorithms – generally, greater performance leads to greater complexity. Also, insertion sort performs better if a collection of data is already sorted. If for instance you were handed a sorted collection of size n, then only n number of comparisons would need to be performed to verify that it is sorted. It’s important to note that insertion sort (array based) performs a number item moves – every time an item is “out of place” several items before it get shifted up. Shellsort – Diminishing Increment Sort So up to now we have covered Selection Sort & Insertion Sort. Selection Sort makes many comparisons and insertion sort (with an array) has the potential of making many item movements. Shellsort is an approach that takes the normal insertion sort and tries to reduce the number of item movements. In Shellsort, elements in a collection are viewed as sub-collections of a particular size. Each sub-collection is sorted so that the elements that are far apart move closer to their final position. Suppose we had a collection of 15 elements… 10 20 15 45 36 48 7 60 18 50 2 19 43 30 55 First we may view the collection as 7 sub-collections and sort each sublist, lets say at intervals of 7 10 60 55 – 20 18 – 15 50 – 45 2 – 36 19 – 48 43 – 7 30 10 55 60 – 18 20 – 15 50 – 2 45 – 19 36 – 43 48 – 7 30 (Sorted) We then sort each sublist at a smaller inter – lets say 4 10 55 60 18 – 20 15 50 2 – 45 19 36 43 – 48 7 30 10 18 55 60 – 2 15 20 50 – 19 36 43 45 – 7 30 48 (Sorted) We then sort elements at a distance of 1 (i.e. we apply a normal insertion sort) 10 18 55 60 2 15 20 50 19 36 43 45 7 30 48 2 7 10 15 18 19 20 30 36 43 45 48 50 55 (Sorted) The important thing with shellsort is deciding on the increment sequence of each sub-collection. From what I can tell, there isn’t any definitive method and depending on the order of your elements, different increment sequences may perform better than others. There are however certain increment sequences that you may want to avoid. An even based increment sequence (e.g. 2 4 8 16 32 …) should typically be avoided because it does not allow for even elements to be compared with odd elements until the final sort phase – which in a way would negate many of the benefits of using sub-collections. The performance on the number of comparisons and item movements of Shellsort is hard to determine, however it is considered to be considerably better than the normal insertion sort. Quicksort Quicksort uses a divide and conquer approach to sort a collection of items. The collection is divided into two sub-collections – and the two sub-collections are sorted and combined into one list in such a way that the combined list is sorted. The algorithm is in general pseudo code below… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Quicksort the lower sub-collection Quicksort the upper sub-collection Combine the lower & upper sub-collection together As hinted at above, quicksort uses recursion in its implementation. The real trick with quicksort is to get the lower and upper sub-collections to be of equal size. The size of a sub-collection is determined by what value the pivot is. Once a pivot is determined, one would partition to sub-collections and then repeat the process on each sub collection until you reach the base case. With quicksort, the work is done when dividing the sub-collections into lower & upper collections. The actual combining of the lower & upper sub-collections at the end is relatively simple since every element in the lower sub-collection is smaller than the smallest element in the upper sub-collection. Mergesort With quicksort, the average-case complexity was O(nlog2n) however the worst case complexity was still O(N*N). Mergesort improves on quicksort by always having a complexity of O(nlog2n) regardless of the best or worst case. So how does it do this? Mergesort makes use of the divide and conquer approach to partition a collection into two sub-collections. It then sorts each sub-collection and combines the sorted sub-collections into one sorted collection. The general algorithm for mergesort is as follows… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Mergesort the first sub-collection Mergesort the second sub-collection Merge the first sub-collection and the second sub-collection As you can see.. it still pretty much looks like quicksort – so lets see where it differs… Firstly, mergesort differs from quicksort in how it partitions the sub-collections. Instead of having a pivot – merge sort partitions each sub-collection based on size so that the first and second sub-collection of relatively the same size. This dividing keeps getting repeated until the sub-collections are the size of a single element. If a sub-collection is one element in size – it is now sorted! So the trick is how do we put all these sub-collections together so that they maintain their sorted order. Sorted sub-collections are merged into a sorted collection by comparing the elements of the sub-collection and then adjusting the sorted collection. Lets have a look at a few examples… Assume 2 sub-collections with 1 element each 10 & 20 Compare the first element of the first sub-collection with the first element of the second sub-collection. Take the smallest of the two and place it as the first element in the sorted collection. In this scenario 10 is smaller than 20 so 10 is taken from sub-collection 1 leaving that sub-collection empty, which means by default the next smallest element is in sub-collection 2 (20). So the sorted collection would be 10 20 Lets assume 2 sub-collections with 2 elements each 10 20 & 15 19 So… again we would Compare 10 with 15 – 10 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10) leaving us with 20 & 15 19 Compare 20 with 15 – 15 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15) leaving us with 20 & 19 Compare 20 with 19 – 19 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15 19) leaving us with 20 & _ 20 is by default the winner so our sorted collection is 10 15 19 20. Make sense? Heapsort (still needs to be completed) So by now I am tired of sorting algorithms and trying to remember why they were so important. I think every year I go through this stuff I wonder to myself why are we made to learn about selection sort and insertion sort if they are so bad – why didn’t we just skip to Mergesort & Quicksort. I guess the only explanation I have for this is that sometimes you learn things so that you can implement them in future – and other times you learn things so that you know it isn’t the best way of implementing things and that you don’t need to implement it in future. Anyhow… luckily this is going to be the last one of my sorts for today. The first step in heapsort is to convert a collection of data into a heap. After the data is converted into a heap, sorting begins… So what is the definition of a heap? If we have to convert a collection of data into a heap, how do we know when it is a heap and when it is not? The definition of a heap is as follows: A heap is a list in which each element contains a key, such that the key in the element at position k in the list is at least as large as the key in the element at position 2k +1 (if it exists) and 2k + 2 (if it exists). Does that make sense? At first glance I’m thinking what the heck??? But then after re-reading my notes I see that we are doing something different – up to now we have really looked at data as an array or sequential collection of data that we need to sort – a heap represents data in a slightly different way – although the data is stored in a sequential collection, for a sequential collection of data to be in a valid heap – it is “semi sorted”. Let me try and explain a bit further with an example… Example 1 of Potential Heap Data Assume we had a collection of numbers as follows 1[1] 2[2] 3[3] 4[4] 5[5] 6[6] For this to be a valid heap element with value of 1 at position [1] needs to be greater or equal to the element at position [3] (2k +1) and position [4] (2k +2). So in the above example, the collection of numbers is not in a valid heap. Example 2 of Potential Heap Data Lets look at another collection of numbers as follows 6[1] 5[2] 4[3] 3[4] 2[5] 1[6] Is this a valid heap? Well… element with the value 6 at position 1 must be greater or equal to the element at position [3] and position [4]. Is 6 > 4 and 6 > 3? Yes it is. Lets look at element 5 as position 2. It must be greater than the values at [4] & [5]. Is 5 > 3 and 5 > 2? Yes it is. If you continued to examine this second collection of data you would find that it is in a valid heap based on the definition of a heap.

  Read the article

• Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

  - by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

    Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments.  In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE.  In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts.  First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources.  There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves.  Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters.  Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards.   After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server.  It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis.  It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules.  The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client.     Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL.  The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server.  Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users.  The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources.  For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL   Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01  Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01  Billed Qty  (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1       WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2,      sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from      Product T879 /* A05 Product */ ,      Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ ,      FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2   Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX.  However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory.  Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests.  This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher.   The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result.  The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request.  When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries.  That's the left to right flow in the diagram below.  When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases.   Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing.  This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole.  It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary.  For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well.  This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies.  It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next.  The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time.  This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases.  It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model.  This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions.  For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries.  Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM.  The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source.  In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape.  If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape.  If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release.  This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer.  For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics.  This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation.  It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users.  Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database.  The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer.  When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used.  These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources.  These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model.  Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns.  For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively.  (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM.  In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.)  Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users.  Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security.  The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users.  Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience.  Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables.  The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer.  In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers.  These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors).  There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis.  Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software.   The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept.  When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail.  We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model.  Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

  Read the article

• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

  Read the article

• MVVM in Task-It

  As I'm gearing up to write a post about dynamic XAP loading with MEF, I'd like to first talk a bit about MVVM, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, as I will be leveraging this pattern in my future posts. Download Source Code Why MVVM? Your first question may be, "why do I need this pattern? I've been using a code-behind approach for years and it works fine." Well, you really don't have to make the switch to MVVM, but let me first explain some of the benefits I see for doing so. MVVM Benefits Testability - This is the one you'll probably hear the most about when it comes to MVVM. Moving most of the code from your code-behind to a separate view model class means you can now write unit tests against the view model without any knowledge of a view (UserControl). Multiple UIs - Let's just say that you've created a killer app, it's running in the browser, and maybe you've even made it run out-of-browser. Now what if your boss comes to you and says, "I heard about this new Windows Phone 7 device that is coming out later this year. Can you start porting the app to that device?". Well, now you have to create a new UI (UserControls, etc.) because you have a lot less screen real estate to work with. So what do you do, copy all of your existing UserControls, paste them, rename them, and then start changing the code? Hmm, that doesn't sound so good. But wait, if most of the code that makes your browser-based app tick lives in view model classes, now you can create new view (UserControls) for Windows Phone 7 that reference the same view model classes as your browser-based app. Page state - In Silverlight you're at some point going to be faced with the same issue you dealt with for years in ASP.NET, maintaining page state. Let's say a user hits your Products page, does some stuff (filters record, etc.), then leaves the page and comes back later. It would be best if the Products page was in the same state as when they left it right? Well, if you've thrown away your view (UserControl or Page) and moved off to another part of the UI, when you come back to Products you're probably going to re-instantiate your view...which will put it right back in the state it was when it started. Hmm, not good. Well, with a little help from MEF you can store the state in your view model class, MEF will keep that view model instance hanging around in memory, and then you simply rebind your view to the view model class. I made that sound easy, but it's actually a bit of work to properly store and restore the state. At least it can be done though, which will make your users a lot happier! I'll talk more about this in an upcoming blog post. No event handlers? Another nice thing about MVVM is that you can bind your UserControls to the view model, which may eliminate the need for event handlers in your code-behind. So instead of having a Click handler on a Button (or RadMenuItem), for example, you can now bind your control's Command property to a DelegateCommand in your view model (I'll talk more about Commands in an upcoming post). Instead of having a SelectionChanged event handler on your RadGridView you can now bind its SelectedItem property to a property in your view model, and each time the user clicks a row, the view model property's setter will be called. Now through the magic of binding we can eliminate the need for traditional code-behind based event handlers on our user interface controls, and the best thing is that the view model knows about everything that's going on...which means we can test things without a user interface. The brains of the operation So what we're seeing here is that the view is now just a dumb layer that binds to the view model, and that the view model is in control of just about everything, like what happens when a RadGridView row is selected, or when a RadComboBoxItem is selected, or when a RadMenuItem is clicked. It is also responsible for loading data when the page is hit, as well as kicking off data inserts, updates and deletions. Once again, all of this stuff can be tested without the need for a user interface. If the test works, then it'll work regardless of whether the user is hitting the browser-based version of your app, or the Windows Phone 7 version. Nice! The database Before running the code for this app you will need to create the database. First, create a database called MVVMProject in SQL Server, then run MVVMProject.sql in the MVVMProject/Database directory of your downloaded .zip file. This should give you a Task table with 3 records in it. When you fire up the solution you will also need to update the connection string in web.config to point to your database instead of IBM12\SQLSERVER2008. The code One note about this code is that it runs against the latest Silverlight 4 RC and WCF RIA Services code. Please see my first blog post about updating to the RC bits. Beta to RC - Part 1 At the top of this post is a link to a sample project that demonstrates a sample application with a Tasks page that uses the MVVM pattern. This is a simplified version of how I have implemented the Tasks page in the Task-It application. Youll notice that Tasks.xaml has very little code to it. Just a TextBlock that displays the page title and a ContentControl. <StackPanel>     <TextBlock Text="Tasks" Style="{StaticResource PageTitleStyle}"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource StandardSpacerStyle}"/>     <ContentControl x:Name="ContentControl1"/> </StackPanel> In List.xaml we have a RadGridView. Notice that the ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model class call Tasks, SelectedItem is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem, and IsBusy is bound to a property in the view model called IsLoading. <Grid>     <telerikGridView:RadGridView ItemsSource="{Binding Tasks}" SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}"                                  IsBusy="{Binding IsLoading}" AutoGenerateColumns="False" IsReadOnly="True" RowIndicatorVisibility="Collapsed"                IsFilteringAllowed="False" ShowGroupPanel="False">         <telerikGridView:RadGridView.Columns>             <telerikGridView:GridViewDataColumn Header="Name" DataMemberBinding="{Binding Name}" Width="3*"/>             <telerikGridView:GridViewDataColumn Header="Due" DataMemberBinding="{Binding DueDate}" DataFormatString="{}{0:d}" Width="*"/>         </telerikGridView:RadGridView.Columns>     </telerikGridView:RadGridView> </Grid> In Details.xaml we have a Save button that is bound to a property called SaveCommand in our view model. We also have a simple form (Im using a couple of controls here from Silverlight.FX for the form layout, FormPanel and Label simply because they make for a clean XAML layout). Notice that the FormPanel is also bound to the SelectedItem in the view model (the same one that the RadGridView is). The two form controls, the TextBox and RadDatePicker) are bound to the SelectedItem's Name and DueDate properties. These are properties of the Task object that WCF RIA Services creates. <StackPanel>     <Button Content="Save" Command="{Binding SaveCommand}" HorizontalAlignment="Left"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource StandardSpacerStyle}"/>     <fxui:FormPanel DataContext="{Binding SelectedItem}" Style="{StaticResource FormContainerStyle}">         <fxui:Label Text="Name:"/>         <TextBox Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay}"/>         <fxui:Label Text="Due:"/>         <telerikInput:RadDatePicker SelectedDate="{Binding DueDate, Mode=TwoWay}"/>     </fxui:FormPanel> </StackPanel> In the code-behind of the Tasks control, Tasks.xaml.cs, I created an instance of the view model class (TasksViewModel) in the constructor and set it as the DataContext for the control. The Tasks page will load one of two child UserControls depending on whether you are viewing the list of tasks (List.xaml) or the form for editing a task (Details.xaml). // Set the DataContext to an instance of the view model class var viewModel = new TasksViewModel(); DataContext = viewModel;   // Child user controls (inherit DataContext from this user control) List = new List(); // RadGridView Details = new Details(); // Form When the page first loads, the List is loaded into the ContentControl. // Show the RadGridView first ContentControl1.Content = List; In the code-behind we also listen for a couple of the view models events. The ItemSelected event will be fired when the user clicks on a record in the RadGridView in the List control. The SaveCompleted event will be fired when the user clicks Save in the Details control (the form). Here the view model is in control, and is letting the view know when something needs to change. // Listeners for the view model's events viewModel.ItemSelected += OnItemSelected; viewModel.SaveCompleted += OnSaveCompleted; The event handlers toggle the view between the RadGridView (List) and the form (Details). void OnItemSelected(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Show the form     ContentControl1.Content = Details; }   void OnSaveCompleted(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Show the RadGridView     ContentControl1.Content = List; } In TasksViewModel, we instantiate a DataContext object and a SaveCommand in the constructor. DataContext is a WCF RIA Services object that well use to retrieve the list of Tasks and to save any changes to a task. Ill talk more about this and Commands in future post, but for now think of the SaveCommand as an event handler that is called when the Save button in the form is clicked. DataContext = new DataContext(); SaveCommand = new DelegateCommand(OnSave); When the TasksViewModel constructor is called we also make a call to LoadTasks. This sets IsLoading to true (which causes the RadGridViews busy indicator to appear) and retrieves the records via WCF RIA Services.         public LoadOperation<Task> LoadTasks()         {             // Show the loading message             IsLoading = true;             // Get the data via WCF RIA Services. When the call has returned, called OnTasksLoaded.             return DataContext.Load(DataContext.GetTasksQuery(), OnTasksLoaded, false);         } When the data is returned, OnTasksLoaded is called. This sets IsLoading to false (which hides the RadGridViews busy indicator), and fires property changed notifications to the UI to let it know that the IsLoading and Tasks properties have changed. This property changed notification basically tells the UI to rebind. void OnTasksLoaded(LoadOperation<Task> lo) {     // Hide the loading message     IsLoading = false;       // Notify the UI that Tasks and IsLoading properties have changed     this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.Tasks);     this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.IsLoading); } Next lets look at the view models SelectedItem property. This is the one thats bound to both the RadGridView and the form. When the user clicks a record in the RadGridView its setter gets called (set a breakpoint and see what I mean). The other code in the setter lets the UI know that the SelectedItem has changed (so the form displays the correct data), and fires the event that notifies the UI that a selection has occurred (which tells the UI to switch from List to Details). public Task SelectedItem {     get { return _selectedItem; }     set     {         _selectedItem = value;           // Let the UI know that the SelectedItem has changed (forces it to re-bind)         this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.SelectedItem);         // Notify the UI, so it can switch to the Details (form) page         NotifyItemSelected();     } } One last thing, saving the data. When the Save button in the form is clicked it fires the SaveCommand, which calls the OnSave method in the view model (once again, set a breakpoint to see it in action). public void OnSave() {     // Save the changes via WCF RIA Services. When the save is complete, call OnSaveCompleted.     DataContext.SubmitChanges(OnSaveCompleted, null); } In OnSave, we tell WCF RIA Services to submit any changes, which there will be if you changed either the Name or the Due Date in the form. When the save is completed, it calls OnSaveCompleted. This method fires a notification back to the UI that the save is completed, which causes the RadGridView (List) to show again. public virtual void OnSaveCompleted(SubmitOperation so) {     // Clear the item that is selected in the grid (in case we want to select it again)     SelectedItem = null;     // Notify the UI, so it can switch back to the List (RadGridView) page     NotifySaveCompleted(); } Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

  Read the article

• The Inkremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #4 - Make increments tangible

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/12/the-inkremental-architectacutes-napkin---4---make-increments-tangible.aspxThe driver of software development are increments, small increments, tiny increments. With an increment being a slice of the overall requirement scope thin enough to implement and get feedback from a product owner within 2 days max. Such an increment might concern Functionality or Quality.[1] To make such high frequency delivery of increments possible, the transition from talking to coding needs to be as easy as possible. A user story or some other documentation of what´s supposed to get implemented until tomorrow evening at latest is one side of the medal. The other is where to put the logic in all of the code base. To implement an increment, only logic statements are needed. Functionality like Quality are just about expressions and control flow statements. Think of Assembler code without the CALL/RET instructions. That´s all is needed. Forget about functions, forget about classes. To make a user happy none of that is really needed. It´s just about the right expressions and conditional executions paths plus some memory allocation. Automatic function inlining of compilers which makes it clear how unimportant functions are for delivering value to users at runtime. But why then are there functions? Because they were invented for optimization purposes. We need them for better Evolvability and Production Efficiency. Nothing more, nothing less. No software has become faster, more secure, more scalable, more functional because we gathered logic under the roof of a function or two or a thousand. Functions make logic easier to understand. Functions make us faster in producing logic. Functions make it easier to keep logic consistent. Functions help to conserve memory. That said, functions are important. They are even the pivotal element of software development. We can´t code without them - whether you write a function yourself or not. Because there´s always at least one function in play: the Entry Point of a program. In Ruby the simplest program looks like this:puts "Hello, world!" In C# more is necessary:class Program { public static void Main () { System.Console.Write("Hello, world!"); } } C# makes the Entry Point function explicit, not so Ruby. But still it´s there. So you can think of logic always running in some function. Which brings me back to increments: In order to make the transition from talking to code as easy as possible, it has to be crystal clear into which function you should put the logic. Product owners might be content once there is a sticky note a user story on the Scrum or Kanban board. But developers need an idea of what that sticky note means in term of functions. Because with a function in hand, with a signature to run tests against, they have something to focus on. All´s well once there is a function behind whose signature logic can be piled up. Then testing frameworks can be used to check if the logic is correct. Then practices like TDD can help to drive the implementation. That´s why most code katas define exactly how the API of a solution should look like. It´s a function, maybe two or three, not more. A requirement like “Write a function f which takes this as parameters and produces such and such output by doing x” makes a developer comfortable. Yes, there are all kinds of details to think about, like which algorithm or technology to use, or what kind of state and side effects to consider. Even a single function not only must deliver on Functionality, but also on Quality and Evolvability. Nevertheless, once it´s clear which function to put logic in, you have a tangible starting point. So, yes, what I´m suggesting is to find a single function to put all the logic in that´s necessary to deliver on a the requirements of an increment. Or to put it the other way around: Slice requirements in a way that each increment´s logic can be located under the roof of a single function. Entry points Of course, the logic of a software will always be spread across many, many functions. But there´s always an Entry Point. That´s the most important function for each increment, because that´s the root to put integration or even acceptance tests on. A batch program like the above hello-world application only has a single Entry Point. All logic is reached from there, regardless how deep it´s nested in classes. But a program with a user interface like this has at least two Entry Points: One is the main function called upon startup. The other is the button click event handler for “Show my score”. But maybe there are even more, like another Entry Point being a handler for the event fired when one of the choices gets selected; because then some logic could check if the button should be enabled because all questions got answered. Or another Entry Point for the logic to be executed when the program is close; because then the choices made should be persisted. You see, an Entry Point to me is a function which gets triggered by the user of a software. With batch programs that´s the main function. With GUI programs on the desktop that´s event handlers. With web programs that´s handlers for URL routes. And my basic suggestion to help you with slicing requirements for Spinning is: Slice them in a way so that each increment is related to only one Entry Point function.[2] Entry Points are the “outer functions” of a program. That´s where the environment triggers behavior. That´s where hardware meets software. Entry points always get called because something happened to hardware state, e.g. a key was pressed, a mouse button clicked, the system timer ticked, data arrived over a wire.[3] Viewed from the outside, software is just a collection of Entry Point functions made accessible via buttons to press, menu items to click, gestures, URLs to open, keys to enter. Collections of batch processors I´d thus say, we haven´t moved forward since the early days of software development. We´re still writing batch programs. Forget about “event-driven programming” with its fancy GUI applications. Software is just a collection of batch processors. Earlier it was just one per program, today it´s hundreds we bundle up into applications. Each batch processor is represented by an Entry Point as its root that works on a number of resources from which it reads data to process and to which it writes results. These resources can be the keyboard or main memory or a hard disk or a communication line or a display. Together many batch processors - large and small - form applications the user perceives as a single whole: Software development that way becomes quite simple: just implement one batch processor after another. Well, at least in principle ;-) Features Each batch processor entered through an Entry Point delivers value to the user. It´s an increment. Sometimes its logic is trivial, sometimes it´s very complex. Regardless, each Entry Point represents an increment. An Entry Point implemented thus is a step forward in terms of Agility. At the same time it´s a tangible unit for developers. Therefore, identifying the more or less numerous batch processors in a software system is a rewarding task for product owners and developers alike. That´s where user stories meet code. In this example the user story translates to the Entry Point triggered by clicking the login button on a dialog like this: The batch then retrieves what has been entered via keyboard, loads data from a user store, and finally outputs some kind of response on the screen, e.g. by displaying an error message or showing the next dialog. This is all very simple, but you see, there is not just one thing happening, but several. Get input (email address, password) Load user for email address If user not found report error Check password Hash password Compare hash to hash stored in user Show next dialog Viewed from 10,000 feet it´s all done by the Entry Point function. And of course that´s technically possible. It´s just a bunch of logic and calling a couple of API functions. However, I suggest to take these steps as distinct aspects of the overall requirement described by the user story. Such aspects of requirements I call Features. Features too are increments. Each provides some (small) value of its own to the user. Each can be checked individually by a product owner. Instead of implementing all the logic behind the Login() entry point at once you can move forward increment by increment, e.g. First implement the dialog, let the user enter any credentials, and log him/her in without any checks. Features 1 and 4. Then hard code a single user and check the email address. Features 2 and 2.1. Then check password without hashing it (or use a very simple hash like the length of the password). Features 3. and 3.2 Replace hard coded user with a persistent user directoy, but a very simple one, e.g. a CSV file. Refinement of feature 2. Calculate the real hash for the password. Feature 3.1. Switch to the final user directory technology. Each feature provides an opportunity to deliver results in a short amount of time and get feedback. If you´re in doubt whether you can implement the whole entry point function until tomorrow night, then just go for a couple of features or even just one. That´s also why I think, you should strive for wrapping feature logic into a function of its own. It´s a matter of Evolvability and Production Efficiency. A function per feature makes the code more readable, since the language of requirements analysis and design is carried over into implementation. It makes it easier to apply changes to features because it´s clear where their logic is located. And finally, of course, it lets you re-use features in different context (read: increments). Feature functions make it easier for you to think of features as Spinning increments, to implement them independently, to let the product owner check them for acceptance individually. Increments consist of features, entry point functions consist of feature functions. So you can view software as a hierarchy of requirements from broad to thin which map to a hierarchy of functions - with entry points at the top.   I like this image of software as a self-similar structure on many levels of abstraction where requirements and code match each other. That to me is true agile design: the core tenet of Agility to move forward in increments is carried over into implementation. Increments on paper are retained in code. This way developers can easily relate to product owners. Elusive and fuzzy requirements are not tangible. Software production is moving forward through requirements one increment at a time, and one function at a time. In closing Product owners and developers are different - but they need to work together towards a shared goal: working software. So their notions of software need to be made compatible, they need to be connected. The increments of the product owner - user stories and features - need to be mapped straightforwardly to something which is relevant to developers. To me that´s functions. Yes, functions, not classes nor components nor micro services. We´re talking about behavior, actions, activities, processes. Their natural representation is a function. Something has to be done. Logic has to be executed. That´s the purpose of functions. Later, classes and other containers are needed to stay on top of a growing amount of logic. But to connect developers and product owners functions are the appropriate glue. Functions which represent increments. Can there always be such a small increment be found to deliver until tomorrow evening? I boldly say yes. Yes, it´s always possible. But maybe you´ve to start thinking differently. Maybe the product owner needs to start thinking differently. Completion is not the goal anymore. Neither is checking the delivery of an increment through the user interface of a software. Product owners need to become comfortable using test beds for certain features. If it´s hard to slice requirements thin enough for Spinning the reason is too little knowledge of something. Maybe you don´t yet understand the problem domain well enough? Maybe you don´t yet feel comfortable with some tool or technology? Then it´s time to acknowledge this fact. Be honest about your not knowing. And instead of trying to deliver as a craftsman officially become a researcher. Research an check back with the product owner every day - until your understanding has grown to a level where you are able to define the next Spinning increment. ? Sometimes even thin requirement slices will cover several Entry Points, like “Add validation of email addresses to all relevant dialogs.” Validation then will it put into a dozen functons. Still, though, it´s important to determine which Entry Points exactly get affected. That´s much easier, if strive for keeping the number of Entry Points per increment to 1. ? If you like call Entry Point functions event handlers, because that´s what they are. They all handle events of some kind, whether that´s palpable in your code or note. A public void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {…} might look like an event handler to you, but public static void Main() {…} is one also - for then event “program started”. ?

  Read the article

• DualLayout for SharePoint 2010 WCM Quick Start

  - by svdoever

  DualLayout for SharePoint 2010 WCM is a solution to provide you with complete HTML freedom in your SharePoint Server 2010 publishing pages. In this post I provide a quick start guide to get you up and running quickly so you can try it out for yourself. This quick start creates a simple HTML5 site with a page to show-case the basics and the power of DualLayout. We will create the site in its own web application. Normally there are many things you have to do to create a clean start point for your SharePoint 2010 WCM site. All those steps will be provided in later posts. For now we want to give you the minimal set of steps to take to get DualLayout working on your machine. Create an authenticated web application with hostheader cms.html5demo.local on port 80 for the cms side of the site. Click the Create Site Collection link on the Application Created dialog box and create a Site Collection based on the Publishing Portal site template. Before we can click the site link in the Top-Level Site Successfully Created dialog we need to add the new host header cms.html5demo.local to the hosts file. Add the following line to the hosts file: 127.0.0.1        cms.html5demo.local Navigate to the site at http://cms.html5demo.local to see the out-of-the-box example Adventure Works publishing site. Download and add the DualLayout solution package designfactory.duallayout.sps2010.trial.1.2.0.0.wsp to the farm’s solution store: On the Start menu, click All Programs. Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products. Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command:Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath designfactory.duallayout.sps2010.trial.1.2.0.0.wsp In SharePoint 2010 Central Administration deploy the solution to the web application http://cms.html5demo.local. Navigate to the site at http://cms.html5demo.local, and in the Site Settings screen select Site Collection Administration > Site collection features and activate the following feature: Open the site http://cms.html5demo.local in SharePoint Designer 2010. Create a view-mode masterpage html5simple.master with the following code: html5simple.master <%@ Master language="C#" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePointWebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="sdl" Namespace="DesignFactory.DualLayout" Assembly="DesignFactory.DualLayout, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=077f92bbf864a536" %>   <!DOCTYPE html> <html class="no-js">       <head>         <meta charset="utf-8" />         <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge" />         <title><SharePointWebControls:FieldValue FieldName="Title" runat="server"/></title>           <script type="text/javascript">             document.createElement('header');             document.createElement('nav');             document.createElement('article');             document.createElement('hgroup');             document.createElement('aside');             document.createElement('section');             document.createElement('footer');             document.createElement('figure');             document.createElement('time');         </script>           <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server"/>     </head>          <body>                  <header>             <div class="logo">Logo</div>             <h1>SiteTitle</h1>             <nav>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 1</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 2</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 3</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 4</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 5</a>                 <sdl:SwitchToWcmModeLinkButton runat="server" Text="…"/>             </nav>             <div class="tagline">Tagline</div>             <form>                 <label>Zoek</label>                 <input type="text" placeholder="Voer een zoekterm in...">                 <button>Zoek</button>                             </form>           </header>                  <div class="content">             <div class="pageContent">                 <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server" />             </div>         </div>              <footer>             <nav>                 <ul>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 1</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 2</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 3</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 4</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 5</a></li>                 </ul>             </nav>             <small>Copyright &copy; 2011 Macaw</small>         </footer>     </body> </html> Note that if no specific WCM-mode master page is specified (html5simple-wcm.master), the default v4.master master page will be used in WCM-mode. Create a WCM-mode page layout html5simplePage-wcm.aspx with the following code: html5simplePage-wcm.aspx <%@ Page language="C#"     Inherits="DesignFactory.DualLayout.WcmModeLayoutPage, DesignFactory.DualLayout, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=077f92bbf864a536" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePointWebControls"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="WebPartPages"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingWebControls"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingNavigation" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitle" runat="server">     <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue id="PageTitle" FieldName="Title" runat="server"/> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server"> </asp:Content> Notice the Inherits at line two. Instead of inheriting from Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingLayoutPage we need to inherit from DesignFactory.DualLayout.WcmModeLayoutPage. Create a view-mode page layout html5simplePage.aspx with the following code: html5simplePage.aspx html5simplePage.aspx <%@ Page language="C#"          Inherits="DesignFactory.DualLayout.ViewModeLayoutPage, DesignFactory.DualLayout,                     Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=077f92bbf864a536" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePointWebControls"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="WebPartPages"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingWebControls"              Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingNavigation" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation"              Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server" /> <asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server">     The title of the page is: <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue id="PageTitleInContent" FieldName="Title" runat="server"/> </asp:Content> Notice the Inherits at line two. Instead of inheriting from Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingLayoutPage we need to inherit from DesignFactory.DualLayout.ViewModeLayoutPage. Set the html5simple.master master page as the Site Master Page Set the allowed page layouts to the Html5 Simple Page page layout and set the New Page Default Settings also to Html5 Simple Page so new created pages are also of this page layout. Note that the Html5 Simple Page page layout is initially not selectable for New Page Default Settings. Save this configuration page first after selecting the allowed page layouts, then open again and select the default new page. Under Site Actions select the New Page action. Create a page Home.aspx of the default page layout type Html5 Simple Page. Set the new created Home.aspx page as Welcome Page. Navigate to the site http://csm.html5demo.local and see the home page in the WCM display and edit mode. Select Switch to View Mode under Site Actions to see the resulting page in view-mode. Select the three dots (…) at the right side of the menu to switch back to WCM-mode. Have a look at the source view of the resulting web page and admire the clean HTML. No SharePoint specific markup or CSS files! Clean HTML in page <!DOCTYPE html> <html class="no-js">     <head>         <meta charset="utf-8" />         <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge" />         <title>Home</title>         <script type="text/javascript">             document.createElement('header');             document.createElement('nav');             document.createElement('article');             document.createElement('hgroup');             document.createElement('aside');             document.createElement('section');             document.createElement('footer');             document.createElement('figure');             document.createElement('time');         </script>              </head>          <body>                  <header>             <div class="logo">Logo</div>             <h1>SiteTitle</h1>             <nav>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 1</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 2</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 3</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 4</a>                 <a href="#">SiteMenu 5</a>                 <a href="/Pages/Home.aspx?DualLayout_ShowInWcmMode=true">…</a>             </nav>             <div class="tagline">Tagline</div>             <form>                 <label>Zoek</label>                 <input type="text" placeholder="Voer een zoekterm in...">                 <button>Zoek</button>                             </form>         </header>                  <div class="content">             <div class="pageContent">                      The title of the page is: Home             </div>         </div>              <footer>             <nav>                 <ul>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 1</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 2</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 3</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 4</a></li>                     <li><a href="#">FooterMenu 5</a></li>                 </ul>             </nav>             <small>Copyright &copy; 2011 Macaw</small>         </footer>     </body> </html> <!-- Macaw DesignFactory DualLayout for SharePoint 2010 Trial version --> Note the link at line 37, this link will only be rendered for authenticated users and is our way to switch back to WCM-mode. This concludes our quick start to get DualLayout up an running in a matter of minutes. And what is the result: You can have the full SharePoint 2010 WCM publishing page editing experience to manage the content in your pages. You don’t have to delve into large SharePoint specific master pages and page layouts with a lot of knowledge of the does and don'ts with respect to SharePoint controls, scripts and stylesheets. The end-user gets a clean and light HTML page. Get your fully functional, non-timebombed trial copy of DualLayout and start creating!

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011Popular ReleasesWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.09.03: Whats NewAdded New Skin TagTastic http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-TagTastic-Skin.jpg Added New Skin RoundedButton http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-RoundedButton-Skin.jpg changes Tag Count fixed on Tag Source Referrals Fixed Tag Count when multiple Tag Sources are usedFolder Space Quota: com_folderspacequotaV1.1: Correct Language String settingWinXound: WinXound 3.4.x (Windows - OsX - Linux): Release Notes (3.4.x) for all platforms: New: Added an internal audio player (it is automatically called when rendering to an audio file or called by the user with Ctrl+P); New: Reimplemented the orc/sco file editor (and of course also the ability to convert them to the csd format) - The default open action can be changed in the settings; New: The new untitled or imported files are now automatically saved into a temporary directory (no more need to save them before to compile); New: Add...ExtremeML: ExtremeML v1.0 Beta 3: VS solution source code updated for compatibility with VS2010 (accommodates VS2010 breaking changes in T4 template support).People's Note: People's Note 0.23: Sorry for the long pause between updates — I had my hands full. Version 0.23 makes fairly significant improvements: A bug with local note deletion has been fixed. Synchronization has been improved. A single failed note no longer stops the whole process. Unsynchronized notes are now highlighted. Added an option to display notebook title; thanks to Vovansky for the idea. Text colour has been fixed for people whose default is not black; thanks to JZerr for pointing this out. Incorrect ...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.1: This release adds a few more performance and graphical enhancements to 1.0. Switching desktops is now about as fast as you can blink. Desktop switching optimizations New welcome wizard for Vista/7 Fixed a few minor bugs Added a few more options to the options dialog (including ability to disable the taskbar switching)youtubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.New Projects.NET Proxy (netProxy): ASP.NET and Javascript proxies for accessing external content. The ASPX file can be used for returning external content over the current channel (HTTP/SSL). Used with the ASPX, the JS file can provide remote server access (no "same origin policy") with XMLHttpRequest syntax.CalCheck: CalCheck is a Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook. It opens the default Calendar and checks the items in the calendar for known problems, and for certain logic problems, etc.CBM11: CBM11 makes use of the Cosmos C# operating system project, and 6502 CPU emulation code, to provide an bootable 6502 CPU environment, complete with simulated RAM, and a built-in ML monitor.Ela, functional language: Ela is a modern functional programming language that runs on CLR and Mono. It's developed in C#.Framework for Image Processing: This is small framework of image processing tools.fuv: fuv is a programmer's editor that is an excellent replacement for vim. *All* editing is done by searching and replacing over the existing text, using regular expressions.HD44780-compatible Character LCD class: LCD class for .NET Micro Framework provides everything needed to work with HD44780-compatible Character LCD.Home Budget Planner: Home Budget PlannerMath training program: The math training program. Great for kids who started to learn addition and multiplication tables. Easy interface, friendly design. Features timer. Number of equations and a math sign are set up by user. It's developed in C#.Mefisto.NET CMS: Mefisto.NET CMS is a project of CMS, developped in ASP.NET MVC3, coupled with MEF and ENTITY FRAMEWORK. This project is respectful of good practice: - accessible - based on jquery - using css - expandable with mef Now you're interested, contact me !MongoMapper: A .NET Object Mapper for MongoDB over MongoDB C# DriverMoshpit: A companion WP7 app for Microsoft Student Partners and students interested in everything Microsoft has to offer in the Academic space.myproject_0023: test firstNonHealthServicePageSample: NonHealthServicePageSample shows how to create a HealthVault Online application without deriving from HealthServicePage. This is developed in C#.Pokemon Battle System: A battle system for a roleplaying forums. Putting Data in Cold Storage with Windows Azure Table: Historical records and blobs are two examples of data that aren't necessarily kept in relational storage forever. Use Windows Azure Table to put "completed" records into cold storage. See a detailed explanation of this C# project at: http://tinyurl.com/4ocy2aj.Python library to read/write ooxml document files: Python library to read/write ooxml document filesRemoteLogMonitor: A tool which can monitor logs in remote computer realtimeRetete: Aplicatia gestioneaza stocul unui restaurant pe baza de retete. Materia prima este introdusa in sistem prin receptii si inventar, iar la vanzare este consumata in functie de retetele configurate. Vanzarile pot fi inregistrate pe o casa de marcat folosind driver-ul DocPrint. SilverDiagram Extensions: Tutorials, utilities and samples for Silver Diagram, a fast and extendable client framework for diagrams.SoPrism: SoPrism is a Solution Visual Studio Template using best practices to build a Silverlight composite application. This template generate a full Silverlight application based on a solid architecture including the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and PRISM framework.TempProject: Temp project hostingWCF Data Services Toolkit: The WCF Data Services Toolkit is a set of extensions to WCF Data Services (the .NET implementation of OData) that attempt to make it easier to create OData services on top of arbitrary data stores without having deep knowledge of LINQ.Web Browser BOT.NET: To automate to manipulate form using .NET codeZombie Blogger: Zombie Blog Engine

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 21, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 21, 2010Popular ReleasesMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.24.6966: Fixed Updater; Fixed minor bugs;Smith Html Editor: Smith Html Editor V0.75: The first public release.MiniTwitter: 1.59: MiniTwitter 1.59 ???? ?? User Streams ????????????????? ?? ?????????????? ???????? ?????????????.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.01: Added new extensions for - object.CountLoopsToNull Added new extensions for DateTime: - DateTime.IsWeekend - DateTime.AddWeeks Added new extensions for string: - string.Repeat - string.IsNumeric - string.ExtractDigits - string.ConcatWith - string.ToGuid - string.ToGuidSave Added new extensions for Exception: - Exception.GetOriginalException Added new extensions for Stream: - Stream.Write (overload) And other new methods ... Release as of dotnetpro 01/2011Code Sample from Microsoft: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-19: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Prism Training Kit: Prism Training Kit 4.0: Release NotesThis is an updated version of the Prism training Kit that targets Prism 4.0 and added labs for some of the new features of Prism 4.0. This release consists of a Training Kit with Labs on the following topics Modularity Dependency Injection Bootstrapper UI Composition Communication MEF Navigation Note: Take into account that this is a Beta version. If you find any bugs please report them in the Issue Tracker PrerequisitesVisual Studio 2010 Microsoft Word 2...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 2.2: Starting with version 2.0, the translator encountered a major redesign that uses MEF based plugins and .net 4.0. I've also fixed some bugs and added support for translating subtitles that can show up in video media players. Version 2.1 shows the context menu 'Translate' in Windows Explorer on right click. Version 2.2 has links to start the media file with its associated subtitle. Download the zip file and expand it in a temporary location on your local disk. At a minimum , you should uninstal...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.4 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.4 with few bug fixes: * Multi-line Labels were getting clipped while exploding last DataPoint in Funnel and Pyramid chart. * ClosestPlotDistance property in Axis was not behaving as expected. * In DateTime Axis, Chart threw exception on mouse click over PlotArea if there were no DataPoints present in Chart. * ToolTip was not disappearing while changing the DataSource property of the DataSeries at real-time. * Chart threw exception ...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008R2 SR1: Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 (SR1)This release is dedicated to the sample databases that ship for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2. See Database Prerequisites for SQL Server 2008R2 for feature configurations required for installing the sample databases. See Installing SQL Server 2008R2 Databases for step by step installation instructions. The SR1 release contains minor bug fixes to the installer used to create the sample databases. There are no changes to the databases them...VidCoder: 0.7.2: Fixed duplicated subtitles when running multiple encodes off of the same title.Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library Code 2.0: This update contains a number of changes, added functionality, and bug fixes: Added transaction support to SQLHelper. Added linked/embedded resource ability to EmailSender. Updated List to take into account new functions. Added better support for MAC address in WMI classes. Fixed Parsing in Reflection class when dealing with sub classes. Fixed bug in SQLHelper when replacing the Command that is a select after doing a select. Fixed issue in SQL Server helper with regard to generati...MFCMAPI: November 2010 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1023 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.00: Major HighlightsAdded automatic portal alias creation for single portal installs Updated the file manager upload page to allow user to upload multiple files without returning to the file manager page. Fixed issue with Event Log Email Notifications. Fixed issue where Telerik HTML Editor was unable to upload files to secure or database folder. Fixed issue where registration page is not set correctly during an upgrade. Fixed issue where Sendmail stripped HTML and Links from emails...mVu Mobile Viewer: mVu Mobile Viewer 0.7.10.0: Tube8 fix.EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server: EPPlus 2.8.0.1: EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the serverNew Features Improved chart support Different chart-types series on the same chart Support for secondary axis and a lot of new properties Better styling Encryption and Workbook protection Table support Import csv files Array formulas ...and a lot of bugfixesAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.2: Added support for more clients (French and Russian) Settings are now stored sepperatly for each user on a computer Auto Login is much faster now Auto Login detects and handles caps lock state properly nowTailspinSpyworks - WebForms Sample Application: TailspinSpyworks-v0.9: Contains a number of bug fixes and additional tutorial steps as well as complete database implementation details.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.3 and demos: It contains a rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form and Pager tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6 new stuff in 1.3 Autocomplete helper Autocomplete and AjaxDropdown can have parentId and be filled with data depending on the value of the parent PopupForm besides Content("ok") on success can also return J...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v4.1: Version 4.1 of the ASP.NET MVC forum engine, with great improvements: TinyMCE added as visual editor for messages (removed CKEditor). Integrated AntiSamy for cleaner html user post and add more prevention to potential injections. Admin status page: a page for the site admin to check the current status of the configuration / db / etc. View Roadmap for more details.UltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.01 PL3 KakaRoto + PSNYes by EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version PSNYes pour pouvoir jouer sur le PSN avec une PS3 Jailbreaker. - Pour l'instant le PSNYes n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et prépare a l'intégration du Firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB PSNYes => Valide l'utilisation du PSN : Uniquement compatible avec les 3.41 - ultimateJB DEFAULT => Pas de PSN mais disponible pour les PS3 sui...New Projects1600hours: 1600hours project made in C++.aoleDownload: Aole Series DownloadBills and Cash Flow: Bills and Cash Flow is a simple multi-tenant application to track bills and view cash flowCUDAagrep: CUDAagrep, a fast CUDA implementation of agrep algorithm for approximate DNA/RNA sequence matching.DNN5 Simple Ticketing Module: This is a simple DNN module that accepts trouble tickets and creates a knowledge base for a company.EntityOH: Dynamic Entities ORMFxcop ASP.NET Security Rules: Fxcop ASP.NET security rules This is a set of code analysis rules aiming at analyzing ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC security against best practices. The rules can be used by Visual Studio 10 Ultimate or FxCop v10 standalone.Head First Design Patterns - Code Examples in C#: This project consists of ported code examples from the book Head First Design Patterns by Eric and Elizabeth Freeman into C#.HTML5 Media Player (Video / Audio): A .NET implementation of the VideoJS and AudioJS open source projects with video and audio support for HTML5. Excellent for use with iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc.Keyword Auction Simulator: This is the project for simulating the keyword auction like Adwords.mAdcOW Office Add-Ins: A collection of handy Office 2010 add-ins.Manga to Epub: Manga to Epub allow you to convert a bunch of images to a single "epub" file, readable on your reader. It handles most of the image types as well as several archives. You have multiple customization options, such as trimming the images in order to remove white borders.Mapua Career Ramp Up: A joint endeavor with the Philippine IT industry leaders and with Mapua School of Information Technology to build an online collaborative database system to Ramp-Up graduating students on their career as future IT Professionals. minami: Minami is a Project what focuse the work on Stability and Features. Is Development in C++minami-dev: Comes later the Description.Mobile RPG: Mobile RPG is five ATtiny85 microcontrollers playing their own RPG characters with a primary MCU acting as GM. Its a fun exercise in autonomous role playing.NetSnoop: Netsnoop allows everyone to get a quick overview over alle the current connections on their workstation.nGso: GSO algorithm implementation based on http://www.springerlink.com/content/y065470472612847/fulltext.pdf Glowworm swarm optimization for simultaneous capture of multiple local optima of multimodal functions K.N. Krishnanand · D. GhoseOpenID Starter Kit for ASP.NET MVC: OpenID Starter Kit for ASP.NET MVC is used to jump start building your web application with ASP.NET MVC with OpenID login system. It is also a good education resource if you want to learn how to implement OpenID into a ASP.NET MVC.Orchard Contact Us Module: Add a contact us page to your Orchard site using this module.Persian Scheduler and Calendar Control: This is a Jalali (Persian or shamsi) calendar and scheduler control in silverlight. Choosing the name 'Jalali' is in honor of 'Hakim omar khayyam' the founder of Jalali calendar. This is under the lisence of 'Barid New Systems' company.Popfly Metadata Generator: Creates Metadata for New project.PurpleStoat: A modular, extensible Silverlight application shell using Prism, Unity and the Enterprise Library, and written in C#. It includes a WCF service which provides AuthZ and logging services to the shell, which are also available to the modules.QL Config Compare Tool: The QL Config Compare Tool enables you to compare two QuakeLive configs. It creates a detailed overview of the differences and is able to save statistics.SQL PHI Identifier: SQL PHI Identifier is an auditing tool for DBA's in a healthcare environment to be able to help identify which databases/tables might hold protected health information (PHI). Using this information a DBA can then take the necessary steps to secure that data adequately.Sqlite ORM: Sqlite ORM is at present a simple Class to Table mapper for Sqlite databases. Tables are created on demand, and designed to future proof for Sharding. Code has 100% unit test coverage.Test shop: Test shopVarMerger - ??????? ????????? ??? ???????? ????????????.: VarMerger - ?????????? (Add-In) ??? MS Word 2007, ??????? ????????? ??????????? ???????? ???????? ??????? ?? ??????, ?????????? ????????? ?????? ? ??????. Visual Studio Add-In For creating Vista Gadget: The absence of tools in Visual Studio that can help developers to create Vista gadgets is strange and disappointing, in my opinion., I want to show you some tools that can help you to develop Vista gadgets using only Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 IDE.Vocal Remover - VST Plugin: VST Plugin Removes vocal form songs using M/S system trick with EQ on mid signal. source in C++ IDE: Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition LIB: Steinberg VST SDK 2.4Windows Phone 7 To Go: A project with demos for Windows Phone 7 FeaturesWinware: Winware is not only an Entity Framework, but beyond.XTengine: Xtengine makes it easier for XNA developers to develop in a compositional manner. You'll no longer have to write specific game classes with deep hierarchies or hardcode to load levels. It's developed in C# with XNA 4.0, with WP7 in mind.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 05, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 05, 2011Popular ReleasesNuclex Framework: R1323: This release is a pure XNA 4.0 release that no longer includes any XNA 3.1 binaries or projects. All x86 assemblies have been compiled targeting the .NET 4.0 Client Profile. Requires either Visual C# 2010 Express or Visual Studio 2010, both with XNA Game Studio 4.0. 3rd party libraries needed to compile and run the source code are included, so everything will compile out of the box. Changes: - Thanks to a generous contribution by Adrian Tsai, the TrueType importer now accepts standard Windo...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V43: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Now supporting multi-line headers in all headers ;) / Thanks to Kai Schätzl for reporting this! Debug output optimized / Added a "Copy to clipboard" button in the debug windowFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.18 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap 1.1 beta3: This is the beta3 release for the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 1.1. Bug fixes in beta3: make the user interface for editing attributes keyboard friendly make the geoprocessing tools available for Python scripting (incl. sample scripts in the tool documentation) change in the logic for sending updates to the OpenStreetMap server updates to point symbology for the feature templates Changes from version 1.0: Multi-part geometries are now supported. Homogeneous relations (consi...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.11: Improvements to Beta Release The following changes have been made in version 0.1.11.11: BlackBerry Version 6 devices (such as the 9800 Torch) are now correctly identified with a dedicated handler. Android powered devices are now correctly identified. Minor change to Provider.cs to improve performance and optimise data sent to 51Degrees.mobi if the option is enabled. GC.collect is no longer called at any point. All garbage collection now happens automatically IMPORTANT CHANGES This rele...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.7: Version 0.7 updates (2 Feb 2011)new Facebook Graph objects: Link, Note, StatusMessage new publish features: status update, post with link attachment new Graph Api connections in User object: statuses, links, notes internal code path improvement on Api object bug fixed: extra "r" character appears for strings with "\r" symbols in Json Objects bug fixed: error when performing Postback to the same page Tutorial and documentation available at http://fbgraph.computerbeacon.netHammock for REST: Hammock v1.1.7: v1.1.7 ChangesAdded support for cookies Added support for custom Content-Disposition types Fixes based on user feedback Supported Platforms.NET 2.0 .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 3.5 Client Profile .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.0 Client Profile Windows Phone 7 Silverlight 3 and 4 Mono 2.6 (See Mono and HTTPS)Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (February 2011): Next release of Phalanger; again faster, more stable and ready for daily use. Based on many user experiences this release is one more step closer to be perfect compiler and runtime of your old PHP applications; or perfect platform for migrating to .NET. February 2011 release of Phalanger introduces several changes, enhancements and fixes. See complete changelist for all the changes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger....Chemistry Add-in for Word: Chemistry Add-in for Word - Version 1.0: On February 1, 2011, we announced the availability of version 1 of the Chemistry Add-in for Word, as well as the assignment of the open source project to the Outercurve Foundation by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge. System RequirementsHardware RequirementsAny computer that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010. Software RequirementsYour computer must have the following software: Any version of Windows that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010, which includes Windows XP SP3 and...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.4: Updated mcmap, now supports new block types. Added a Worlds->'View Cache Folder' menu item.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.15005.000: Applied patch from rodpl for merging of stylecop setting files with settings in parent folder. Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new Objec...Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.4: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds MCRegion support and fixes bugs that caused rendering to fail for some users. New in this version of MTS: Support for rendering worlds compressed with MCRegion Fixed rendering failure when encountering non-NBT files with the .dat extension Fixed rendering failure when encountering corrupt NBT files Minor GUI updates Note that the command...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 0.8: Fixed the following bugs: *Variable name error in the jvascript file that prevented the use of the deleted item template of the Datagrid *Now after the changes applied to an item of the DataGrid are cancelled all input fields are reset to the very initial value they had. *Other minor bugs. Added: *This version is available both for MVC2, and MVC 3. The MVC 3 version has a release number of 0.85. This way one can install both version. *Client Validation support has been added to all control...Office Web.UI: Beta preview (Source): This is the first Beta. it includes full source code and all available controls. Some designers are not ready, and some features are not finalized allready (missing properties, draft styles) ThanksASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.2: This release brings some new controls (part of Office Web.UI). A few bugs are fixed and it includes the "auto resize" feature as you resize the window. (It can cause an infinite loop when the window is too reduced, it's why this release is not marked as "stable"). I will release more versions 2.3, 2.4... until V3 which will be the official launch of Office Web.UI. Both products will evolve at the same speed. Thanks.xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7: xUnit.net release 1.7Build #1540 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision) Ad...New Projects.NET Micro Framework PTP library: .NET Micro Framework PTP library is implementation of Picture Transfer Protocol for .NET Micro Framework. It's developed in C# language. This library allows microcontroller with .NET Micro Framework to communicate with digital cameras. Asp.net learning: asp.net learningbrainydexter demos: Demos I have developed over time to showcase different techniques, ranging from graphics/opengl to crazy language specific (C++/C#) techniquesBrickFramework: BrickFrameworkCodecoFW-SL: CodecoFW-SL é um Framework desenvolvido em C# para trabalhar com Silverlight. Contem alguns controles e extensões para ajudar o desenvolvimento com Silverlight.Csharp Learning: My C # Learning examplejigsby: personal code dumpJuego de la Vida: Crearas vida con el mouseLogon Screen Launcher: Allows you to run applications at the Windows (XP/Vista/7) logon screen (Ctrl+Alt+Del) on system events, including logon/logoff, screen lock/unlock and startup/shutdown.MEF Silverlight Control Extensions: The Mef Silverlight Control Extensions gives you a declarative way of implement control importing using MEF.Membership, Roles and Profile Library (MRPLibrary): This project provides a simple abstraction for the Membership, Roles and ProfileManager ASP.NET providers as well as ASP.NET FormsAuthentication. The library creates required database objects automatically and uses web.config Membership, Roles and ProfileManager sections.Netpad: Basic .Net based text document editorOrchard Jumpstart: A jumpstart Orchard module, implementing basic module functionality. Created to make Orchard module creation a bit quicker:)Orchard Rewrite Rules: Orchard module to add rewrite rules to your website using Apache .htaccess file format.Outlook Social Connectors: The Outlook Social Connectors project was started as a 24 Hour Challenge Project. The project has several Outlook Social Connectors (Twitter, Fogbugz, ...) and aims to provide a framework for developing new connectors.Rail.Net: Small rail net application For rail analysisregistrudecasa: registrudecasaRelDB: A true relational database management system compatible with Tutorial D.RTP Tooltip: This DNN module instantiates an instance of DNNToolTipManager and allows you to enter a list of ClientIDs to TooltipifySSIS Report Generator Task (Custom Control Flow Component): SSIS Report Generator Task (Custom Control Flow Component)The Ministry of Technology Framework Extensions: The aim of the MOT Framework extensions project is to offer a variety of solutions for common 'boilerplate' development requirements and speed up the development process. Ongoing discussions and information on the library is posted up to http://www.theministryoftechnology.co.ukWindowsPhone 7 Live Soccer Scores: An Windows Phone 7 app which displays the live soccer scores from the Dutch eredivisie, English premier league, Champions league and Europa league.Wolfram Alpha Api 2.0: 20 january 2011 open new version of wolfram alpha api, version 2.0. This project will help you to work with the new api. Knowledge is power!Wurfl 51degrees Mobile Capabilities Viewer: A Web App to display all the Mobile Capabilities for a given user Agent, uses 51degrees.Codeplex.com .Net dll and Wurfl device files. The current sample in the downloads section of [http://51degrees.codeplex.com] doesnt display all Browser and Wurfl Capabilities for a UserAgent.XNA Command Console (XNACC): XNACC is a component that adds an interactive command console to your XNA project. It supports many built-in commands, as well as custom commands, key bindings, simple functions (macros), console variables and can use functions in external assemblies. Implemented in C#/VS2010.Xteq5: Xteq5 is an (hopefully) easy to use open source Windows computer management solution to get the job done.ZipArchiveReader: ZipLib is a ZIP file reader. It provides a simple way to read and write .zip files. The purpose of ZipLib is give ZIP file capabilities to ASP.Net applications which were granted minimum permissions. It can be a partial trust DLL that can run in Internet Zone and probably ...

  Read the article

• MSCC: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp

  Mauritius participated and contributed to the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 (GWAB). Again! And this time stronger than ever, and together with 137 other locations in 56 countries world-wide. We had 62 named registrations, 7 guest additions and approximately 10 offline participants prior to the event day. Most interestingly the organisation of the GWAB through the MSCC helped to increased the number of craftsmen. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community has currently 138 registered members - in less than one year! Only with those numbers we can proudly say that all the preparations and hard work towards this event already paid off. Personally, I'm really grateful that we had this kind of response and the feedback from some attendees confirmed that the MSCC is on the right track here on Cyber Island Mauritius. Inspired and motivated by the success of this event, rest assured that there will be more public events like the GWAB. This time it took some time to reflect on our meetup, following my first impression right on spot: "Wow, what an experience to organise and participate in this global event. Overall, I've been very pleased with the preparations and the event itself. Surely, there have been some nicks that we have to address and to improve for future activities like this. Quite frankly, we are not professional event organisers (not yet) but we learned a lot over the past couple of days. A big Thank You to our event sponsors, namely Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific, Ceridian Mauritius and Emtel. Without them this event wouldn't have happened - Thank You! And to the cool team members of Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs). You geeks did a great job! Thanks!" So, how many attendees did we actually have? 61! - Awesome - 61 cloud computing instances to help on the research of diabetes. During Saturday afternoon there was even an online publication on L'Express: Les développeurs mauriciens se joignent au combat contre le diabète Reactions of other attendees Don't take my word for granted... Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Awesome event, really appreciated the presentations :-)" -- Kevin on event comments "very interesting and enriching." -- Diana on event comments "#gwab #gwabmru 2014 great success. Looking forward for gwab 2015" -- Wasiim on Twitter "Was there till the end. Awesome Event. I'll surely join upcoming meetup sessions :)" -- Luchmun on event comments "#gwabmru was not that cool. left early" -- Mohammad on Twitter The overall feedback is positive but we are absolutely aware that there quite a number of problems we had to face. We are already looking into that and ideas / action plans on how we will be able to improve it for future events. The sessions We started the day with welcoming speeches by Thierry Coret, Sr. Marketing Manager of Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific and Vidia Mooneegan, Managing Director and Sr. Vice President of Ceridian Mauritius. The clear emphasis was on the endless possibilities of cloud computing and how it can enable any kind of sectors here in the country. Then it was about time to set up the cloud computing services in order to contribute each attendees cloud computing resources to the global research of diabetes, a step by step guide presented by Arnaud Meslier, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Given a rendering package and a configuration file it was very interesting to follow the single steps in Windows Azure. Also, during the day we were not sure whether the set up had been correctly, as Mauritius didn't show up on the results board - which should have been the case after approximately 20 to 30 minutes. Anyways, let the minions work... Next, Arnaud gave a brief overview of the variety of services Windows Azure has to offer. Whether you need a development environment for your websites or mobiles app, running a virtual machine with your existing applications or simply putting a SQL database online. No worries, Windows Azure has the right packages available and the online management portal is really easy t handle. After this, we got a little bit more business oriented while Wasiim Hosenbocus, employee at Ceridian, took the attendees through the inerts of a real-life application, and demoed a couple of the existing features. He did a great job by showing how the different services of Windows Azure can be created and pulled together. After the lunch break it is always tough to keep the audience awake... And it was my turn. I gave a brief overview on operating and managing a SQL database on Windows Azure. Well, there are actually two options available and depending on your individual requirements you should be aware of both. The simpler version is called SQL Database and while provisioning only takes a couple of seconds, you should take into consideration that SQL Database has a number of constraints, like limitations on the actual database size - up to 5 GB as web edition and up to 150 GB maximum as business edition -, among others. Next, it was Chervine Bhiwoo's session on Windows Azure Mobile Services. It was absolutely amazing to see that the mobiles services directly offers you various project templates, like Windows 8 Store App, Android app, iOS app, and even Xamarin cross-platform app development. So, within a couple of minutes you can have your first mobile app active and running on Windows Azure. Furthermore, Chervine showed the attendees that adding another user interface, like Web Sites running on ASP.NET MVC 4 only takes a couple of minutes, too. And last but not least, we rounded up the day with Windows Azure Websites and hosting of Virtual Machines presented by some members of the local Microsoft Students Partners programme. Surely, one of the big advantages using Windows Azure is the availability of pre-defined installation packages of known web applications, like WordPress, Joomla!, or Ghost. Compared to running your own web site with a traditional web hoster it is surely en par, and depending on your personal level of expertise, Windows Azure provides you more liberty in terms of configuration than maybe a shared hosting environment. Running a pre-defined web application is one thing but in case that you would like to have more control over your hosting environment it is highly advised to opt for a virtual machine. Provisioning of an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system was very simple to do but it takes some more minutes than you might expect. So, please be patient and take your time while Windows Azure gets everything in place for you. Afterwards, you can use a SecureShell (ssh) client like Putty in case of a Linux-based machine, or Remote Desktop Services when operating a Windows Server system to log in into your virtual machine. At the end of the day we had a great Q&A session and we finalised the event with our raffle of goodies. Participation in the raffle was bound to submission of the session survey and most gratefully we had a give-away for everyone. What a nice coincidence to finish of the day. Note: All session slides (and demo codes) will be made available on the MSCC event page. Please, check the Files section over there. (Some) Visual impressions from the event Just to give you an idea about what has happened during the GWAB 2014 at Ebene... Speakers and Microsoft Student Partners are getting ready for the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 GWAB 2014 attendees are fully integrated into the hands-on-labs and setting up their individuals cloud computing services 60 attendees at the GWAB 2014. Despite some technical difficulties we had a great time running the event GWAB 2014: Using the lunch break for networking and exchange of ideas - Great conversations and topics amongst attendees There are more pictures on the original event page: Questions & Answers Following are a couple of questions which have been asked and didn't get an answer during the event: Q: Is it possible to upload static pages via FTP? A: Yes, you can. Have a look at the right side column on the dashboard of your website. There you'll find information about the FTP and SFTP host names. You can use any FTP client, like ie. FileZilla to log in. FTP also gives you access to your log files. Q: What are the size limitations on SQL Database? A: 5 GB on the Web Edition, and 150 GB on the business edition. A maximum 150 databases (inclusing 'master') per SQL Database server. More details here: General Guidelines and Limitations (Azure SQL Database) Q: What's the maximum size of a SQL Server running in a Virtual Machine? A: The maximum Windows Azure VM has currently 8 CPU cores, 14 or 56 GB of RAM and 16x 1 TB hard drives. More details here: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure Q: How can we register for Windows Azure? A: Mauritius is currently not listed for phone verification. Please get in touch with Arnaud Meslier at Microsoft IOI & FP Q: Can I use my own domain name for Windows Azure websites? A: Yes, you can. But this might require to upscale your account to Standard. In case that I missed a question and answer, please use the comment section at the end of the article. Thanks! Final results Every participant was instructed during the hands-on-lab session on how to set up a cloud computing service in their account. Of course, I won't keep the results from you... Global Azure Lab GWAB 2014: Our cloud computing contribution to the research of diabetes And I would say Mauritius did a good job! Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (15.4.2014) Corsair Hackers Reboot (19.4.2014) WebCup (TBA ~ June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! Networking and job/project opportunities Despite having technical presentations on Windows Azure an event like this always offers a great bunch of possibilities and opportunities to get in touch with new people in IT, have an exchange of experience with other like-minded people. As I already wrote about Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion - I had a great conversation with representatives of the University des Mascareignes which are currently embracing cloud infrastructure and cloud computing for their various campuses in the Indian Ocean. As for the MSCC it would be a great experience to stay in touch with them, and to work on upcoming, common activities. Furthermore, I had a very good conversation with Thierry and Ludovic of Microsoft IOI & FP on the necessity of user groups and IT communities here on the island. It's great to see that the MSCC is currently on a run and that local companies are sharing our thoughts on promoting IT careers and exchange of IT knowledge in such an open way. I'm also looking forward to be able to participate and to contribute on more events in the near future. My resume of the day We learned a lot today and there is always room for improvement! It was an awesome event and quite frankly it was a pleasure to spend the day with so many enthuastic IT people in the same room. It was a great experience to organise such event locally and participate on a global scale to support the GlyQ-IQ Technology in their research on diabetes. I was so pleased to see the involvement of new MSCC members in taking the opportunity to share and learn about the power of cloud computing. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is on the right way and this year's bootcamp on Windows Azure only marked the beginning of our journey. Thank you to our sponsors and my kudos to the MSPs! Update: Media coverage The event has been reported in local media, too. Following are some resources: Orange - Local - Business: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Maurice Info.mu: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Le Quotidien Pg 2: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 - Le cloud pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète The Observer Pg 12: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète

  Read the article

• JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue .c21_2{vertical-align:top;width:487.3pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c15_2{vertical-align:top;width:487.3pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#ffffff;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c0_2{padding-left:0pt;direction:ltr;margin-left:36pt} .c20_2{list-style-type:circle;margin:0;padding:0} .c10_2{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c6_2{background-color:#ffffff} .c17_2{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:72pt} .c3_2{line-height:1.0;direction:ltr} .c1_2{font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c16_2{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c13_2{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c7_2{background-color:#ffff00} .c9_2{border-collapse:collapse} .c2_2{font-family:"Courier New"} .c18_2{font-size:18pt} .c5_2{font-weight:bold} .c19_2{color:#ff0000} .c12_2{background-color:#f3f3f3;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;} .c14_2{font-size:24pt} .c8_2{direction:ltr;background-color:#ffffff} .c11_2{font-style:italic} .c4_2{height:11pt} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt}.subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} This post is the second in a series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. In the previous post JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g I showed you how to create a JMS queue and its dependent objects in WebLogic Server. In this article, we will use a sample program to write a message to that queue. Please review the previous post if you have not created those objects yet, as they will be required later in this example. The previous post also includes useful background information and links to the Oracle documentation for addional research. The following post in this series will show how to read the message from the queue again. 1. Source code The following java code will be used to write a message to the JMS queue. It is based on a sample program provided with the WebLogic Server installation. The sample is not installed by default, but needs to be installed manually using the WebLogic Server Custom Installation option, together with many, other useful samples. You can either copy-paste the following code into your editor, or install all the samples. The knowledge base article in My Oracle Support: How To Install WebLogic Server and JMS Samples in WLS 10.3.x (Doc ID 1499719.1) describes how to install the samples. QueueSend.java package examples.jms.queue; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.Hashtable; import javax.jms.*; import javax.naming.Context; import javax.naming.InitialContext; import javax.naming.NamingException; /** This example shows how to establish a connection * and send messages to the JMS queue. The classes in this * package operate on the same JMS queue. Run the classes together to * witness messages being sent and received, and to browse the queue * for messages. The class is used to send messages to the queue. * * @author Copyright (c) 1999-2005 by BEA Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. */ public class QueueSend { // Defines the JNDI context factory. public final static String JNDI_FACTORY="weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory"; // Defines the JMS context factory. public final static String JMS_FACTORY="jms/TestConnectionFactory"; // Defines the queue. public final static String QUEUE="jms/TestJMSQueue"; private QueueConnectionFactory qconFactory; private QueueConnection qcon; private QueueSession qsession; private QueueSender qsender; private Queue queue; private TextMessage msg; /** * Creates all the necessary objects for sending * messages to a JMS queue. * * @param ctx JNDI initial context * @param queueName name of queue * @exception NamingException if operation cannot be performed * @exception JMSException if JMS fails to initialize due to internal error */ public void init(Context ctx, String queueName) throws NamingException, JMSException { qconFactory = (QueueConnectionFactory) ctx.lookup(JMS_FACTORY); qcon = qconFactory.createQueueConnection(); qsession = qcon.createQueueSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE); queue = (Queue) ctx.lookup(queueName); qsender = qsession.createSender(queue); msg = qsession.createTextMessage(); qcon.start(); } /** * Sends a message to a JMS queue. * * @param message message to be sent * @exception JMSException if JMS fails to send message due to internal error */ public void send(String message) throws JMSException { msg.setText(message); qsender.send(msg); } /** * Closes JMS objects. * @exception JMSException if JMS fails to close objects due to internal error */ public void close() throws JMSException { qsender.close(); qsession.close(); qcon.close(); } /** main() method. * * @param args WebLogic Server URL * @exception Exception if operation fails */ public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { if (args.length != 1) { System.out.println("Usage: java examples.jms.queue.QueueSend WebLogicURL"); return; } InitialContext ic = getInitialContext(args[0]); QueueSend qs = new QueueSend(); qs.init(ic, QUEUE); readAndSend(qs); qs.close(); } private static void readAndSend(QueueSend qs) throws IOException, JMSException { BufferedReader msgStream = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); String line=null; boolean quitNow = false; do { System.out.print("Enter message (\"quit\" to quit): \n"); line = msgStream.readLine(); if (line != null && line.trim().length() != 0) { qs.send(line); System.out.println("JMS Message Sent: "+line+"\n"); quitNow = line.equalsIgnoreCase("quit"); } } while (! quitNow); } private static InitialContext getInitialContext(String url) throws NamingException { Hashtable env = new Hashtable(); env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, JNDI_FACTORY); env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, url); return new InitialContext(env); } } 2. How to Use This Class 2.1 From the file system on UNIX/Linux Log in to a machine with a WebLogic installation and create a directory to contain the source and code matching the package name, e.g. $HOME/examples/jms/queue. Copy the above QueueSend.java file to this directory. Set the CLASSPATH and environment to match the WebLogic server environment. Go to $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin  and execute . ./setDomainEnv.sh Collect the following information required to run the script: The JNDI name of a JMS queue to use In the Weblogic server console > Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > (Module name, e.g. TestJMSModule) > (JMS queue name, e.g. TestJMSQueue)Select the queue and note its JNDI name, e.g. jms/TestJMSQueue The JNDI name of a connection factory to connect to the queue Follow the same path as above to get the connection factory for the above queue, e.g. TestConnectionFactory and its JNDI namee.g. jms/TestConnectionFactory The URL and port of the WebLogic server running the above queue Check the JMS server for the above queue and the managed server it is targeted to, for example soa_server1. Now find the port this managed server is listening on, by looking at its entry under Environment > Servers in the WLS console, e.g. 8001 The URL for the server to be given to the QueueSend program in this example will therefore be t3://host.domain:8001 e.g. t3://jbevans-lx.de.oracle.com:8001 Edit QueueSend.java and enter the above queue name and connection factory respectively under ...public final static String  JMS_FACTORY=" jms/TestConnectionFactory "; ... public final static String QUEUE=" jms/TestJMSQueue "; ... Compile QueueSend.java using javac QueueSend.java Go to the source’s top-level directory and execute it using java examples.jms.queue.QueueSend t3://jbevans-lx.de.oracle.com:8001 This will prompt for a text input or “quit” to end. In the WLS console, go to the queue and select Monitoring to confirm that a new message was written to the queue. 2.2 From JDeveloper Create a new application in JDeveloper, called, for example JMSTests. When prompted for a project name, enter QueueSend and select Java as the technology Default Package = examples.jms.queue (but you can enter anything here as you will overwrite it in the code later). Leave the other values at their defaults. Press Finish Create a new Java class called QueueSend and use the default values This will create a file called QueueSend.java. Open QueueSend.java, if it is not already open and replace all its contents with the QueueSend java code listed above Some lines might have warnings due to unfound objects. These are due to missing libraries in the JDeveloper project. Add the following libraries to the JDeveloper project: right-click the QueueSend  project in the navigation menu and select Libraries and Classpath , then Add JAR/Directory  Go to the folder containing the JDeveloper installation and find/choose the file javax.jms_1.1.1.jar , e.g. at D:\oracle\jdev11116\modules\javax.jms_1.1.1.jar Do the same for the weblogic.jar file located, for example in D:\oracle\jdev11116\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\weblogic.jar Now you should be able to compile the project, for example by selecting the Make or Rebuild icons   If you try to execute the project, you will get a usage message, as it requires a parameter pointing to the WLS installation containing the JMS queue, for example t3://jbevans-lx.de.oracle.com:8001 . You can automatically pass this parameter to the program from JDeveloper by editing the project’s Run/Debug/Profile. Select the project properties, select Run/Debug/Profile and edit the Default run configuration and add the connection parameter to the Program Arguments field If you execute it again, you will see that it has passed the parameter to the start command If you get a ClassNotFoundException for the class weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory , then check that the weblogic.jar file was correctly added to the project in one of the earlier steps above. Set the values of JMS_FACTORY and QUEUE the same way as described above in the description of how to use this from a Linux file system, i.e. ...public final static String  JMS_FACTORY=" jms/TestConnectionFactory "; ... public final static String QUEUE=" jms/TestJMSQueue "; ... You need to make one more change to the project. If you execute it now, it will prompt for the payload for the JMS message, but you won’t be able to enter it by default in JDeveloper. You need to enable program input for the project first. Select the project’s properties, then Tool Settings, then check the Allow Program Input checkbox at the bottom and Save. Now when you execute the project, you will get a text entry field at the bottom into which you can enter the payload. You can enter multiple messages until you enter “quit”, which will cause the program to stop. The following screen shot shows the TestJMSQueue’s Monitoring page, after a message was sent to the queue: This concludes the sample. In the following post I will show you how to read the message from the queue again.

  Read the article

• More Animation - Self Dismissing Dialogs

  - by Duncan Mills

  In my earlier articles on animation, I discussed various slide, grow and  flip transitions for items and containers.  In this article I want to discuss a fade animation and specifically the use of fades and auto-dismissal for informational dialogs.  If you use a Mac, you may be familiar with Growl as a notification system, and the nice way that messages that are informational just fade out after a few seconds. So in this blog entry I wanted to discuss how we could make an ADF popup behave in the same way. This can be an effective way of communicating information to the user without "getting in the way" with modal alerts. This of course, has been done before, but everything I've seen previously requires something like JQuery to be in the mix when we don't really need it to be.  The solution I've put together is nice and generic and will work with either <af:panelWindow> or <af:dialog> as a the child of the popup. In terms of usage it's pretty simple to use we  just need to ensure that the popup itself has clientComponent is set to true and includes the animation JavaScript (animateFadingPopup) on a popupOpened event: <af:popup id="pop1" clientComponent="true">   <af:panelWindow title="A Fading Message...">    ...  </af:panelWindow>   <af:clientListener method="animateFadingPopup" type="popupOpened"/> </af:popup>   The popup can be invoked in the normal way using showPopupBehavior or JavaScript, no special code is required there. As a further twist you can include an additional clientAttribute called preFadeDelay to define a delay before the fade itself starts (the default is 5 seconds) . To set the delay to just 2 seconds for example: <af:popup ...>   ...   <af:clientAttribute name="preFadeDelay" value="2"/>   <af:clientListener method="animateFadingPopup" type="popupOpened"/>  </af:popup> The Animation Styles  As before, we have a couple of CSS Styles which define the animation, I've put these into the skin in my case, and, as in the other articles, I've only defined the transitions for WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari) at the moment. In this case, the fade is timed at 5 seconds in duration. .popupFadeReset {   opacity: 1; } .popupFadeAnimate {   opacity: 0;   -webkit-transition: opacity 5s ease-in-out; } As you can see here, we are achieving the fade by simply setting the CSS opacity property. The JavaScript The final part of the puzzle is, of course, the JavaScript, there are four functions, these are generic (apart from the Style names which, if you've changed above, you'll need to reflect here): The initial function invoked from the popupOpened event,  animateFadingPopup which starts a timer and provides the initial delay before we start to fade the popup. The function that applies the fade animation to the popup - initiatePopupFade. The callback function - closeFadedPopup used to reset the style class and correctly hide the popup so that it can be invoked again and again.   A utility function - findFadeContainer, which is responsible for locating the correct child component of the popup to actually apply the style to. Function - animateFadingPopup This function, as stated is the one hooked up to the popupOpened event via a clientListener. Because of when the code is called it does not actually matter how you launch the popup, or if the popup is re-used from multiple places. All usages will get the fade behavior. /**  * Client listener which will kick off the animation to fade the dialog and register  * a callback to correctly reset the popup once the animation is complete  * @param event  */ function animateFadingPopup(event) { var fadePopup = event.getSource();   var fadeCandidate = false;   //Ensure that the popup is initially Opaque   //This handles the situation where the user has dismissed   //the popup whilst it was in the process of fading   var fadeContainer = findFadeContainer(fadePopup);   if (fadeContainer != null) {     fadeCandidate = true;     fadeContainer.setStyleClass("popupFadeReset");   }   //Only continue if we can actually fade this popup   if (fadeCandidate) {   //See if a delay has been specified     var waitTimeSeconds = event.getSource().getProperty('preFadeDelay');     //Default to 5 seconds if not supplied     if (waitTimeSeconds == undefined) {     waitTimeSeconds = 5;     }     // Now call the fade after the specified time     var fadeFunction = function () {     initiatePopupFade(fadePopup);     };     var fadeDelayTimer = setTimeout(fadeFunction, (waitTimeSeconds * 1000));   } } The things to note about this function is the initial check that we have to do to ensure that the container is currently visible and reset it's style to ensure that it is.  This is to handle the situation where the popup has begun the fade, and yet the user has still explicitly dismissed the popup before it's complete and in doing so has prevented the callback function (described later) from executing. In this particular situation the initial display of the dialog will be (apparently) missing it's normal animation but at least it becomes visible to the user (and most users will probably not notice this difference in any case). You'll notice that the style that we apply to reset the  opacity - popupFadeReset, is not applied to the popup component itself but rather the dialog or panelWindow within it. More about that in the description of the next function findFadeContainer(). Finally, assuming that we have a suitable candidate for fading, a JavaScript  timer is started using the specified preFadeDelay wait time (or 5 seconds if that was not supplied). When this timer expires then the main animation styleclass will be applied using the initiatePopupFade() function Function - findFadeContainer As a component, the <af:popup> does not support styleClass attribute, so we can't apply the animation style directly.  Instead we have to look for the container within the popup which defines the window object that can have a style attached.  This is achieved by the following code: /**  * The thing we actually fade will be the only child  * of the popup assuming that this is a dialog or window  * @param popup  * @return the component, or null if this is not valid for fading  */ function findFadeContainer(popup) { var children = popup.getDescendantComponents();   var fadeContainer = children[0];   if (fadeContainer != undefined) {   var compType = fadeContainer.getComponentType();     if (compType == "oracle.adf.RichPanelWindow" || compType == "oracle.adf.RichDialog") {     return fadeContainer;     }   }   return null; }  So what we do here is to grab the first child component of the popup and check its type. Here I decided to limit the fade behaviour to only <af:dialog> and <af:panelWindow>. This was deliberate.  If  we apply the fade to say an <af:noteWindow> you would see the text inside the balloon fade, but the balloon itself would hang around until the fade animation was over and then hide.  It would of course be possible to make the code smarter to walk up the DOM tree to find the correct <div> to apply the style to in order to hide the whole balloon, however, that means that this JavaScript would then need to have knowledge of the generated DOM structure, something which may change from release to release, and certainly something to avoid. So, all in all, I think that this is an OK restriction and frankly it's windows and dialogs that I wanted to fade anyway, not balloons and menus. You could of course extend this technique and handle the other types should you really want to. One thing to note here is the selection of the first (children[0]) child of the popup. It does not matter if there are non-visible children such as clientListener before the <af:dialog> or <af:panelWindow> within the popup, they are not included in this array, so picking the first element in this way seems to be fine, no matter what the underlying ordering is within the JSF source.  If you wanted a super-robust version of the code you might want to iterate through the children array of the popup to check for the right type, again it's up to you.  Function -  initiatePopupFade  On to the actual fading. This is actually very simple and at it's heart, just the application of the popupFadeAnimate style to the correct component and then registering a callback to execute once the fade is done. /**  * Function which will kick off the animation to fade the dialog and register  * a callback to correctly reset the popup once the animation is complete  * @param popup the popup we are animating  */ function initiatePopupFade(popup) { //Only continue if the popup has not already been dismissed    if (popup.isPopupVisible()) {   //The skin styles that define the animation      var fadeoutAnimationStyle = "popupFadeAnimate";     var fadeAnimationResetStyle = "popupFadeReset";     var fadeContainer = findFadeContainer(popup);     if (fadeContainer != null) {     var fadeContainerReal = AdfAgent.AGENT.getElementById(fadeContainer.getClientId());       //Define the callback this will correctly reset the popup once it's disappeared       var fadeCallbackFunction = function (event) {       closeFadedPopup(popup, fadeContainer, fadeAnimationResetStyle);         event.target.removeEventListener("webkitTransitionEnd", fadeCallbackFunction);       };       //Initiate the fade       fadeContainer.setStyleClass(fadeoutAnimationStyle);       //Register the callback to execute once fade is done       fadeContainerReal.addEventListener("webkitTransitionEnd", fadeCallbackFunction, false);     }   } } I've added some extra checks here though. First of all we only start the whole process if the popup is still visible. It may be that the user has closed the popup before the delay timer has finished so there is no need to start animating in that case. Again we use the findFadeContainer() function to locate the correct component to apply the style to, and additionally we grab the DOM id that represents that container.  This physical ID is required for the registration of the callback function. The closeFadedPopup() call is then registered on the callback so as to correctly close the now transparent (but still there) popup. Function -  closeFadedPopup The final function just cleans things up: /**  * Callback function to correctly cancel and reset the style in the popup  * @param popup id of the popup so we can close it properly  * @param contatiner the window / dialog within the popup to actually style  * @param resetStyle the syle that sets the opacity back to solid  */ function closeFadedPopup(popup, container, resetStyle) { container.setStyleClass(resetStyle);   popup.cancel(); }  First of all we reset the style to make the popup contents opaque again and then we cancel the popup.  This will ensure that any of your user code that is waiting for a popup cancelled event will actually get the event, additionally if you have done this as a modal window / dialog it will ensure that the glasspane is dismissed and you can interact with the UI again.  What's Next? There are several ways in which this technique could be used, I've been working on a popup here, but you could apply the same approach to in-line messages. As this code (in the popup case) is generic it will make s pretty nice declarative component and maybe, if I get time, I'll look at constructing a formal Growl component using a combination of this technique, and active data push. Also, I'm sure the above code can be improved a little too.  Specifically things like registering a popup cancelled listener to handle the style reset so that we don't loose the subtle animation that takes place when the popup is opened in that situation where the user has closed the in-fade dialog.

  Read the article

• Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.5 Complex Files as Sources and Targets

  - by Alex Kotopoulis

  Overview ODI 11.1.1.5 adds the new Complex File technology for use with file sources and targets. The goal is to read or write file structures that are too complex to be parsed using the existing ODI File technology. This includes: Different record types in one list that use different parsing rules Hierarchical lists, for example customers with nested orders Parsing instructions in the file data, such as delimiter types, field lengths, type identifiers Complex headers such as multiple header lines or parseable information in header Skipping of lines  Conditional or choice fields Similar to the ODI File and XML File technologies, the complex file parsing is done through a JDBC driver that exposes the flat file as relational table structures. Complex files are mapped to one or more table structures, as opposed to the (simple) file technology, which always has a one-to-one relationship between file and table. The resulting set of tables follows the same concept as the ODI XML driver, table rows have additional PK-FK relationships to express hierarchy as well as order values to maintain the file order in the resulting table.   The parsing instruction format used for complex files is the nXSD (native XSD) format that is already in use with Oracle BPEL. This format extends the XML Schema standard by adding additional parsing instructions to each element. Using nXSD parsing technology, the native file is converted into an internal XML format. It is important to understand that the XML is streamed to improve performance; there is no size limitation of the native file based on memory size, the XML data is never fully materialized.  The internal XML is then converted to relational schema using the same mapping rules as the ODI XML driver. How to Create an nXSD file Complex file models depend on the nXSD schema for the given file. This nXSD file has to be created using a text editor or the Native Format Builder Wizard that is part of Oracle BPEL. BPEL is included in the ODI Suite, but not in standalone ODI Enterprise Edition. The nXSD format extends the standard XSD format through nxsd attributes. NXSD is a valid XML Schema, since the XSD standard allows extra attributes with their own namespaces. The following is a sample NXSD schema: <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:nxsd="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/nxsd" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" targetNamespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" nxsd:encoding="US-ASCII" nxsd:stream="chars" nxsd:version="NXSD"> <xsd:element name="Root">         <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>       <xsd:element name="Header">                 <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>                         <xsd:element name="Branch" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/>                         <xsd:element name="ListDate" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}"/>                         </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>                         </xsd:element>                 </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>         <xsd:element name="Customer" maxOccurs="unbounded">                 <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>                 <xsd:element name="Name" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/>                         <xsd:element name="Street" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="," />                         <xsd:element name="City" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}" />                         </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>                         </xsd:element>                 </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The nXSD schema annotates elements to describe their position and delimiters within the flat text file. The schema above uses almost exclusively the nxsd:terminatedBy instruction to look for the next terminator chars. There are various constructs in nXSD to parse fixed length fields, look ahead in the document for string occurences, perform conditional logic, use variables to remember state, and many more. nXSD files can either be written manually using an XML Schema Editor or created using the Native Format Builder Wizard. Both Native Format Builder Wizard as well as the nXSD language are described in the Application Server Adapter Users Guide. The way to start the Native Format Builder in BPEL is to create a new File Adapter; in step 8 of the Adapter Configuration Wizard a new Schema for Native Format can be created:   The Native Format Builder guides through a number of steps to generate the nXSD based on a sample native file. If the format is complex, it is often a good idea to “approximate” it with a similar simple format and then add the complex components manually.  The resulting *.xsd file can be copied and used as the format for ODI, other BPEL constructs such as the file adapter definition are not relevant for ODI. Using this technique it is also possible to parse the same file format in SOA Suite and ODI, for example using SOA for small real-time messages, and ODI for large batches. This nXSD schema in this example describes a file with a header row containing data and 3 string fields per row delimited by commas, for example: Redwood City Downtown Branch, 06/01/2011 Ebeneezer Scrooge, Sandy Lane, Atherton Tiny Tim, Winton Terrace, Menlo Park The ODI Complex File JDBC driver exposes the file structure through a set of relational tables with PK-FK relationships. The tables for this example are: Table ROOT (1 row): ROOTPK Primary Key for root element SNPSFILENAME Name of the file SNPSFILEPATH Path of the file SNPSLOADDATE Date of load Table HEADER (1 row): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document BRANCH Data BRANCHORDER Order of Branch within row LISTDATE Data LISTDATEORDER Order of ListDate within row Table ADDRESS (2 rows): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document NAME Data NAMEORDER Oder of Name within row STREET Data STREETORDER Order of Street within row CITY Data CITYORDER Order of City within row Every table has PK and/or FK fields to reflect the document hierarchy through relationships. In this example this is trivial since the HEADER and all CUSTOMER records point back to the PK of ROOT. Deeper nested documents require this to identify parent elements. All tables also have a ROWORDER field to define the order of rows, as well as order fields for each column, in case the order of columns varies in the original document and needs to be maintained. If order is not relevant, these fields can be ignored. How to Create an Complex File Data Server in ODI After creating the nXSD file and a test data file, and storing it on the local file system accessible to ODI, you can go to the ODI Topology Navigator to create a Data Server and Physical Schema under the Complex File technology. This technology follows the conventions of other ODI technologies and is very similar to the XML technology. The parsing settings such as the source native file, the nXSD schema file, the root element, as well as the external database can be set in the JDBC URL: The use of an external database defined by dbprops is optional, but is strongly recommended for production use. Ideally, the staging database should be used for this. Also, when using a complex file exclusively for read purposes, it is recommended to use the ro=true property to ensure the file is not unnecessarily synchronized back from the database when the connection is closed. A data file is always required to be present  at the filename path during design-time. Without this file, operations like testing the connection, reading the model data, or reverse engineering the model will fail.  All properties of the Complex File JDBC Driver are documented in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Connectivity and Knowledge Modules Guide for Oracle Data Integrator in Appendix C: Oracle Data Integrator Driver for Complex Files Reference. David Allan has created a great viewlet Complex File Processing - 0 to 60 which shows the creation of a Complex File data server as well as a model based on this server. How to Create Models based on an Complex File Schema Once physical schema and logical schema have been created, the Complex File can be used to create a Model as if it were based on a database. When reverse-engineering the Model, data stores(tables) for each XSD element of complex type will be created. Use of complex files as sources is straightforward; when using them as targets it has to be made sure that all dependent tables have matching PK-FK pairs; the same applies to the XML driver as well. Debugging and Error Handling There are different ways to test an nXSD file. The Native Format Builder Wizard can be used even if the nXSD wasn’t created in it; it will show issues related to the schema and/or test data. In ODI, the nXSD  will be parsed and run against the existing test XML file when testing a connection in the Dataserver. If either the nXSD has an error or the data is non-compliant to the schema, an error will be displayed. Sample error message: Error while reading native data. [Line=1, Col=5] Not enough data available in the input, when trying to read data of length "19" for "element with name D1" from the specified position, using "style" as "fixedLength" and "length" as "". Ensure that there is enough data from the specified position in the input. Complex File FAQ Is the size of the native file limited by available memory? No, since the native data is streamed through the driver, only the available space in the staging database limits the size of the data. There are limits on individual field sizes, though; a single large object field needs to fit in memory. Should I always use the complex file driver instead of the file driver in ODI now? No, use the file technology for all simple file parsing tasks, for example any fixed-length or delimited files that just have one row format and can be mapped into a simple table. Because of its narrow assumptions the ODI file driver is easy to configure within ODI and can stream file data without writing it into a database. The complex file driver should be used whenever the use case cannot be handled through the file driver. Are we generating XML out of flat files before we write it into a database? We don’t materialize any XML as part of parsing a flat file, either in memory or on disk. The data produced by the XML parser is streamed in Java objects that just use XSD-derived nXSD schema as its type system. We use the nXSD schema because is the standard for describing complex flat file metadata in Oracle Fusion Middleware, and enables users to share schemas across products. Is the nXSD file interchangeable with SOA Suite? Yes, ODI can use the same nXSD files as SOA Suite, allowing mixed use cases with the same data format. Can I start the Native Format Builder from the ODI Studio? No, the Native Format Builder has to be started from a JDeveloper with BPEL instance. You can get BPEL as part of the SOA Suite bundle. Users without SOA Suite can manually develop nXSD files using XSD editors. When is the database data written back to the native file? Data is synchronized using the SYNCHRONIZE and CREATE FILE commands, and when the JDBC connection is closed. It is recommended to set the ro or read_only property to true when a file is exclusively used for reading so that no unnecessary write-backs occur. Is the nXSD metadata part of the ODI Master or Work Repository? No, the data server definition in the master repository only contains the JDBC URL with file paths; the nXSD files have to be accessible on the file systems where the JDBC driver is executed during production, either by copying or by using a network file system. Where can I find sample nXSD files? The Application Server Adapter Users Guide contains nXSD samples for various different use cases.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 05, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 05, 2011Popular ReleasesXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 02.00.66: Using XsltDb As User Controladding XsltDb configurations to skin, to your controls, ... Page level output cachingAlso takes into account current user current language see mdo:setup-putput-cache. Performance optimizations......for large configurations or large outputAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...youtubeFisher: YouTubeFisher v3.0 Beta: Adding support for more video formats including the Super HD (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrrHs2bnHPA) Minor change related to the video title due to change in YouTube pageSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...Document.Editor: 2011.9: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.9: New Templates System New Plug-in System New Replace dialog New reset settings Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 2.0: TortoiseHg 2.0 is a complete rewrite of TortoiseHg 1.1, switching from PyGtk to PyQtSandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.2.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. NOTE: The included help file and the online help have not been completely updated to reflect all changes in this release. A refresh will be issue...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 1.1: updated GetAllJsonObjects() method and GetAllProperties() methods to JsonObject and Properties propertiesFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.0: Refer to http://computerbeacon.net for Documentation and Tutorial New features:added FQL support added Expires property to Api object added support for publishing to a user's friend / Facebook Page added support for posting and removing comments on posts added support for adding and removing likes on posts and comments added static methods for Page class added support for Iframe Application Tab of Facebook Page added support for obtaining the user's country, locale and age in If...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager small improvements for some helpers and AjaxDropdown has Data like the Lookup except it's value gets reset and list refilled if any element from data gets changedManaged Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 3: This release aims .net 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. Accordingly, there are two solutions files. The assemblies are named System.ComponentModel.Composition.Codeplex.dll as a way to avoid clashing with the version shipped with the 4th version of the framework. Introduced CompositionOptions to container instantiation CompositionOptions.DisableSilentRejection makes MEF throw an exception on composition errors. Useful for diagnostics Support for open generics Support for attribute-less registr...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.6 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.4: Version: 2.0.0.4 (Milestone 4): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...VidCoder: 0.8.2: Updated auto-naming to handle seconds and frames ranges as well. Deprecated the {chapters} token for auto-naming in favor of {range}. Allowing file drag to preview window and enabling main window shortcut keys to work no matter what window is focused. Added option in config to enable giving custom names to audio tracks. (Note that these names will only show up certain players like iTunes or on the iPod. Players that support custom track names normally may not show them.) Added tooltips ...SQL Server Compact Toolbox: Standalone version 2.0 for SQL Server Compact 4.0: Download the Visual Studio add-in for SQL Server Compact 4.0 and 3.5 from here Standalone version of (most of) the same functionality as the add-in, for SQL Server Compact 4.0. Useful for anyone not having Visual Studio Professional or higher installed. Requires .NET 4.0. Any feedback much appreciated.New Projects.Deploy - Enterprise .NET Application Deployment Solution: .Deploy is a .NET based enterprise application deployment solution focused around .NET applications. .Deploy automates the repetitive task of pushing/deploying applications in a controlled, auditable, and verifiable way.AAEngine: A 2D game engine for XNA.ANKASTS: ankastsAutomator: Automator is a GUI tool that is intended to manage and run hierarchical structure of actions (Tasks). Something similar to NAnt but targeted for a far wider audience. Automator is developed in C# and WPF.BANews: ???????????????????，??SQL+Server2008，C#，asp.net????，??????Jquery?CSS+DIV??。??????，?????????????，????????，??????，??。Cloud BookShelf: Cloud BookShelf ?OData Client for Objective-C（http://odataobjc.codeplex.com/）????、Azure??????????????iOS??????????。CodingBlog: codingblogDNN Module Samples: There are some sample DNN modules in this projectEITEST: It is the Test Projecteuler 11: euler 11euler 52 problem: euler 52 problemfastspweb - Access SPWeb through cache: This an engine for caching SPSite and SPWeb objects on SharePoint. Because SharePoint dont alllow multithreaded access to these objects, the access is done through a threadpoolGSP420 2011 Spring Course Project: Course project game engine for DeVry Spring 2011 GSP420 class.IE Library for Small Basic: This library extend Small Basic to allows you to access web site using by Internet Explorer from Small Basic program. ???????? Small Basic ????、Small Basic ??? Internet Explorer ???? Web ???????????????????。InfoStrat Motion Framework: InfoStrat Motion Framework enables you to easily use motion tracking in your WPF applications with depth sensors such as Kinect and PrimeSensor.JSC.Mobile: Mobile(IPhone) WebApp with offline capabilities to administrate your car milagesMSSQL Db Generation From and To .NET Assemblies(Dlls): MSSQL DbGenerator works with an existing MSSQL Db and codes all structers of it into a .NET Assembly(DbAssembly) --of course with the exception of data within. More than that it has the ability to read any previously created DbAssembly and generates MSSQL db from scratchMVP Summit Events WP7: An application to learn of the best gatherings and events at the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2011. We are open sourcing the application to give some knowledge around how to develop a Windows Phone 7 application consuming OData with the MVVM pattern.NAntMenu: NAntMenu Shell Extension is a Windows Shell Extension allowing you to run NAnt build scripts directly from within Windows Explorer.NGem: another attempt to create package management in .net/c++ environmentNOrder: A basic sorting algorithm library developed in C#, providing users the flexibility to choose how to sort data.Orchard CulturePicker Module: Module for Orchard, that allows users to pick a preferred culture, instead of using a default site culture.Orchard Html Field Module: Html Field for the Orchard ProjectP9876: p9876 is not p1234SharePoint 2010 File Migrating tool (console program): Copy files and sub folders from file system to SharePoint 2010 document librarySilverlightTube: Silverlight Media End Work Project to recreate a You Tube looking websiteSITEYONETIM: Site ve Apartman YönetimiSITEYONETIMWEB: siteyonetimwebSteel: Steel is a puzzle game for Windows Phone 7 made with the XNA framework.WikiVB: A Wikipedia API wrapper library written in VB.NET. Can be used with languages like C#, F# and other .NET programming languages.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 13, 2012Popular ReleasesSymphony Framework: Symphony Framework v2.0.0.6: Symphony Framework version 2.0.0.6. has just been released General note: If you install Symphony Framework 2.0.0.6 you must re-generate all your code-generated source files, resource files, controls and windows. Failure to regenerate will cause your applications to fail. Symphony Framework requires at least version 4.2.3 of CodeGen due to some new functionality that has been added. Please ensure that you download and install the latest version of CodeGen. You can review the full release ...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.2.1: Version 1.2.1 Changes: Improved collage image distribution to overlap older images first. Set default collage background blur distance to 4 (provides a more gradual effect). Fixed issue where wallpaper not displayed on Windows Vista when Cross-Fade transitions enabled. Fixed issue with duplicated themes not updating history view correctly.????: ???? 1.0: ????ALinq Dynamic (Entity SQL for Linq to SQL): ALinq Dynamic v1.1: 1. Fix a few bugs about aggregate function. 2. Supports more functions. 3. Append more samples.Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office ??? ?????、Unicode IVS?????????????????Unicode IVS???????????????。??、??????????????、?????????????????????????????。Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.74: fix for issue #18836 - sometimes throws null-reference errors in ActivationObject.AnalyzeScope method. add back the Context object's 8-parameter constructor, since someone has code that's using it. throw a low-pri warning if an expression statement is == or ===; warn that the developer may have meant an assignment (=). if window.XXXX or window"XXXX" is encountered, add XXXX (as long as it's a valid JavaScript identifier) to the known globals so subsequent references to XXXX won't throw ...Home Access Plus+: v8.3: Changes: Fixed: A odd scroll bar showing up for no reason Changed: Added some code to hopefully sort out the details view when there is a small number of files Fixed: Where the details toolbar shows in the wrong place until you scroll Fixed: Where the Help Desk live tile shows all open tiles, instead of user specific tiles (admins still see all) Added: Powerpoint Files Filter Added: Print style for Booking System Added: Silent check for the logon tracker Updated: Logon Tracker I...???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releaseVidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...SQL Server Partitioned Table Framework: Partitioned Table Framework Release 1.0: SQL Server 2012 ReleaseSharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...New Projects3jidi IPTV App: 3jidi IPTV application on microsoft mediaroomAX 2012 Custom Operating Units: With this tool, non technical users can create custom operating units, link them with existing org model, model custom units as financial dimensions etc.BASE32 Encoder: This awesome app let you convert all your music, pictures and video to brand new BASE32 encoding! BilgeAdam.ChannelShow: BilgeAdam.ChannelShowBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Bubble Trouble: This is a game where you are trapped in a room with lethal bubbles bouncing around the rooms. You must use your special vine gun to shoot and pop the bubbles!ClomibepASP (Suspended): PL: Zaawansowany system zarzadzania trescia ClomibepASP. EN: Advenced content managment system ClomibepASP.CoBaS - Contract Based Serializer: The serialization framework that cares for bits and speed :)DelegateDuck: New stub library for C#. You can build with it any object using delegates and such an object can be casted to any compatible interface.Demir Yayincilik: Ulusal arastirmacilarin ana dilleri ile yaptiklari yayinlarin kolay dagitilmasi ve izlenmesi gereksiniminden hareketle kurulan Demir yayincilik...DNN LiveEvents: DotNetNuke Live Events ModuleFamFamFam Silk Icons Atlas (CSS Sprites): A CSS/Image generator for CSS Sprites (Atlas) for FamFamFam Silk iconsGuid Finder Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Guid Finder Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. This Solution helps to find any record "GUID" across all entities in Dynamics CRM. hyd: a game demoJogo do Galo: JOGO DO GALO REGRAS •O tabuleiro é a matriz de três linhas em três colunas. •Dois jogadores escolhem três peças cada um. •Os jogadores jogam alternadamente, uma peça de cada vez, num espaço que esteja vazio. •O objectivo é conseguir três peças iguais em linha, quer horizontal, vjQCalendarPart: jQCalendarPart is a JS application which when added to a CEWP in SP 2010 will display a jQuery Calendar control with the upcoming events from the Calendar list.Kinect Table Tennis: A 2D Top-down Kinect table tennis game! Booyeah!MathNullable: The example of the Nullable Mathematics.Metro Launch: Metro Launch is a new Start menu inspired by Windows 8's.Monoxide.Diagnostics: This is Systems.Diagnostics source code extracted from Mono so that people on any platform (Windows, too!) can extend more of the tracing framework.new1325: hellonew1327: helloPizza-Service: School Project of a Pizza-Service application.ProjectOnElance: SomeProjectOnElanceRemote Controller for Trackmania: Evzrecon is a remote controller for Trackmania Forever dedicated servers, much like XASECO but written in Java.SoftRenderer: a software rendererStripeOne ShortenUrl: Projeto de estudo para encurtar urls, com cms para o usuário (caso seja registrado ou por sessão) e cms administrativo com estatisticas de urls mais usadas.testtom11122012git01: htesttom11122012hg01: fdstesttom11122012tfs01: fdstesttom11122012tfs03: rewThe new Basecamp API C# Wrapper: This project aims to be a complete C# wrapper around the new Basecamp API. Direct API call support in addition to convenience methods are provided.TVendas: Este projeto surgiu com a necessidade de se ter um software de gerenciamento de vendas web e gratuito. Então surgiu o TVendas.WDTVHUBLIVE Companion: Intitial summary : This is a project to learn C# and to create an application to manage media on a WDTVLiveHub. WordTrending: ECE 275 Assignment #4Yet another SharePoint 2010 Deployment Script: The following PowerShell script is intended to help operations staff as well as developers to automate the base installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. Zytonic Hotkeys: Zytonic Hotkeys Is a User Library That Aims to defeat The hassle of creating User Hotkeys for your .NET Applications.????: ????

  Read the article

• Looking into Enum Support in Entity Framework 5.0 Code First

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will show you with a hands-on demo the enum support that is available in Visual Studio 2012, .Net Framework 4.5 and Entity Framework 5.0. You can have a look at this post to learn about the support of multilple diagrams per model that exists in Entity Framework 5.0. We will demonstrate this with a step by step example. I will use Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. You can also use Visual Studio 2012 Express Edition. Before I move on to the actual demo I must say that in EF 5.0 an enumeration can have the following types. Byte Int16 Int32 Int64 Sbyte Obviously I cannot go into much detail on what EF is and what it does. I will give again a short introduction.The .Net framework provides support for Object Relational Mapping through EF. So EF is a an ORM tool and it is now the main data access technology that microsoft works on. I use it quite extensively in my projects. Through EF we have many things out of the box provided for us. We have the automatic generation of SQL code.It maps relational data to strongly types objects.All the changes made to the objects in the memory are persisted in a transactional way back to the data store. You can find in this post an example on how to use the Entity Framework to retrieve data from an SQL Server Database using the "Database/Schema First" approach. In this approach we make all the changes at the database level and then we update the model with those changes. In this post you can see an example on how to use the "Model First" approach when working with ASP.Net and the Entity Framework. This model was firstly introduced in EF version 4.0 and we could start with a blank model and then create a database from that model.When we made changes to the model , we could recreate the database from the new model. You can search in my blog, because I have posted many posts regarding ASP.Net and EF. I assume you have a working knowledge of C# and know a few things about EF. The Code First approach is the more code-centric than the other two. Basically we write POCO classes and then we persist to a database using something called DBContext. Code First relies on DbContext. We create 2,3 classes (e.g Person,Product) with properties and then these classes interact with the DbContext class. We can create a new database based upon our POCOS classes and have tables generated from those classes.We do not have an .edmx file in this approach.By using this approach we can write much easier unit tests. DbContext is a new context class and is smaller,lightweight wrapper for the main context class which is ObjectContext (Schema First and Model First). Let's begin building our sample application. 1) Launch Visual Studio. Create an ASP.Net Empty Web application. Choose an appropriate name for your application. 2) Add a web form, default.aspx page to the application. 3) Now we need to make sure the Entity Framework is included in our project. Go to Solution Explorer, right-click on the project name.Then select Manage NuGet Packages...In the Manage NuGet Packages dialog, select the Online tab and choose the EntityFramework package.Finally click Install. Have a look at the picture below   4) Create a new folder. Name it CodeFirst . 5) Add a new item in your application, a class file. Name it Footballer.cs. This is going to be a simple POCO class.Place it in the CodeFirst folder. The code follows public class Footballer { public int FootballerID { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public double Weight { get; set; } public double Height { get; set; } public DateTime JoinedTheClub { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } public List<Training> Trainings { get; set; } public FootballPositions Positions { get; set; } }    Now I am going to define my enum values in the same class file, Footballer.cs    public enum FootballPositions    {        Defender,        Midfielder,        Striker    } 6) Now we need to create the Training class. Add a new class to your application and place it in the CodeFirst folder.The code for the class follows.     public class Training     {         public int TrainingID { get; set; }         public int TrainingDuration { get; set; }         public string TrainingLocation { get; set; }     }   7) Then we need to create a context class that inherits from DbContext.Add a new class to the CodeFirst folder.Name it FootballerDBContext.Now that we have the entity classes created, we must let the model know.I will have to use the DbSet<T> property.The code for this class follows       public class FootballerDBContext:DbContext     {         public DbSet<Footballer> Footballers { get; set; }         public DbSet<Training> Trainings { get; set; }     } Do not forget to add  (using System.Data.Entity;) in the beginning of the class file 8) We must take care of the connection string. It is very easy to create one in the web.config.It does not matter that we do not have a database yet.When we run the DbContext and query against it,it will use a connection string in the web.config and will create the database based on the classes. In my case the connection string inside the web.config, looks like this      <connectionStrings>    <add name="CodeFirstDBContext"  connectionString="server=.\SqlExpress;integrated security=true;"  providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>                       </connectionStrings>   9) Now it is time to create Linq to Entities queries to retrieve data from the database . Add a new class to your application in the CodeFirst folder.Name the file DALfootballer.cs We will create a simple public method to retrieve the footballers. The code for the class follows public class DALfootballer     {         FootballerDBContext ctx = new FootballerDBContext();         public List<Footballer> GetFootballers()         {             var query = from player in ctx.Footballers where player.FirstName=="Jamie" select player;             return query.ToList();         }     }   10) Place a GridView control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name.Add an ObjectDataSource control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name. Set the DatasourceID property of the GridView control to the ID of the ObjectDataSource control.(DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" ). Let's configure the ObjectDataSource control. Click on the smart tag item of the ObjectDataSource control and select Configure Data Source. In the Wizzard that pops up select the DALFootballer class and then in the next step choose the GetFootballers() method.Click Finish to complete the steps of the wizzard. Build your application.  11)  Let's create an Insert method in order to insert data into the tables. I will create an Insert() method and for simplicity reasons I will place it in the Default.aspx.cs file. private void Insert()        {            var footballers = new List<Footballer>            {                new Footballer {                                 FirstName = "Steven",LastName="Gerrard", Height=1.85, Weight=85,Age=32, JoinedTheClub=DateTime.Parse("12/12/1999"),Positions=FootballPositions.Midfielder,                Trainings = new List<Training>                             {                                     new Training {TrainingDuration = 3, TrainingLocation="MelWood"},                    new Training {TrainingDuration = 2, TrainingLocation="Anfield"},                    new Training {TrainingDuration = 2, TrainingLocation="MelWood"},                }                            },                            new Footballer {                                  FirstName = "Jamie",LastName="Garragher", Height=1.89, Weight=89,Age=34, JoinedTheClub=DateTime.Parse("12/02/2000"),Positions=FootballPositions.Defender,                Trainings = new List<Training>                                             {                                 new Training {TrainingDuration = 3, TrainingLocation="MelWood"},                new Training {TrainingDuration = 5, TrainingLocation="Anfield"},                new Training {TrainingDuration = 6, TrainingLocation="Anfield"},                }                           }                    };            footballers.ForEach(foot => ctx.Footballers.Add(foot));            ctx.SaveChanges();        }   12) In the Page_Load() event handling routine I called the Insert() method.        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)        {                   Insert();                }  13) Run your application and you will see that the following result,hopefully. You can see clearly that the data is returned along with the enum value.  14) You must have also a look at the database.Launch SSMS and see the database and its objects (data) created from EF Code First.Have a look at the picture below. Hopefully now you have seen the support that exists in EF 5.0 for enums.Hope it helps !!!

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 03, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 03, 2010Popular ReleasesChronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Winware: Winware 3.0 (.Net 4.0): Winware 3.0 is base on .Net 4.0 with C#. Please open it with Visual Studio 2010. This release contains a lab web application.UltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.02 PL3 KAKAROTO + CE-X-3.41 EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version CEX341 pour pouvoir jouer avec des jeux demandant le firmware 3.50 ( certain ne fonctionne tous simplement pas ). - Pour l'instant le CEX341 n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB CEX341 => Spoof le Firmware 3.41 en 3.50 ( facilite l'utilisation de certain jeux avec openManage...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...Virtu: Virtu 0.9.0: Source Requirements.NET Framework 4 Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Express Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools (which includes XNA Game Studio 4) Binaries RequirementsSilverlight 4 .NET Framework 4 XNA Framework 4SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60438): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket. The source code include a LiveChat demo.Cropper: 1.9.4: Mostly fixes for issues with a few feature requests. Fixed Issues 2730 & 3638 & 14467 11044 11447 11448 11449 14665 Implemented Features 6123 11581PFC: PFC for PB 11.5: This is just a migration from the 11.0 code. No changes have been made yet (and they are needed) for it to work properly with 11.5.PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5: This release does not add any new feature for pdf manipulation, but enables automatic updates checking, so it is reccomended to install it in order to stay updated with next releases. Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0...New Projects.Net MVC Dialog Authentication Starter: .Net MVC Dialog Authentication Starter is the basic .Net MVC application starter template that has been modified to render the Register and Logon functionality via a modal dialog. It is developed using .Net MVC 2, Jquery 1.4.1, and Jquery UI 1.8.6..Net SQL Generator: Generation tool for random queries in SQL in the Windows environment. Can produce random queries, tables, deletes, and updates as well as generate random data for a table. Structured to allow easy adaptation for other SQL implementations as well.10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkja: 10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkjaBanshee: MOSS 2007 utility to detect authored links and headings in navigation structure of a site collection which point to the subweb's root instead of the subweb's welcome page. It's developed in C# and requires MOSS 2007 SP2 or later.Counter Strike Live Level editor: What is CSLIVE? A web browser based online 2d Shooter. It is clone of Counter Strike. Game supports the multiplayer game over internet or lan. And its Free to play! open souce! This project is still in development. Official open beta tests will be ran every day 20:00 - 21:00 +2GTCRM 2011 Style Templates: CRM 2011 Style Templates.DarkTimes: Having many projects at the sames time ? need an easy way to count those times ? here is a windows phone 7 app for this ^^ --------------------- Vous avez plusieurs projets en même temps ? besoin d'un moyen simple de compter ces temps ? voici une appli windows phone 7 pour ca ^^DSN Export-o-Matic 3000: DSN Export-o-Matic 3000 is a Windows application which allows you to export ODBC DSN Registry settings to a .reg file which can then be imported on another computer. It is written in C#.NET using Visual C# 2010 Express Edition.DYSS Game and AGE Game Engine for XNA: Did You Slay Something? (Working title) and AGE Game Engine for XNA Developed by Lucas LoreggiaExeCryptorNetWrapper: .NET Wrapper for ExeCryptor product (serial number checking functionalities only)ffmpegYAG: ffmpegYAG is a GUI for the popular ffmpeg audio/video processing toolFluentScheduler: A task scheduler that uses fluent interface to configure schedules. Useful for running cron jobs/automated tasks from your application. General Purpose Hash Function Algorithms: The General Purpose Hash Functions Library has the following mix of additive and rotative general purpose string hashing algorithms. HD Web FileManager: Incercam sa facem un singur fisier asp.net care sa faca managementul fisierelor pe un server web.iConverter: iConverter ?????????????。 iConverter is a character transcoding encoding conversion tool.LHA Social Work: Source control host for http://lhasocialwork.org.Mega Puzzle WP7: Mega Puzzle its a Puzzle game in Silverlight that run in Windows Phone 7.It's developed in C#MTConnect Managed Agent SDK: The MTConnect Managed SDK provides an Agent object model to facilitate exposing MTConnect data from your machine tools.Nebula - Image Lock / Unlock Software: Nebula - Image ( Jpg / bmp ) file lock / unlock software designed for simply changing file extension, so that files will be visible on HDD but not unless you change the extension. Written in Perl + Compiled into exe.Pushing - A Sokoban like Puzzle game: Pushing is a C# port of a little hobby project I created some years ago in C++. It's a Sokoban like Puzzle game. The old C++ version was just a 2D/Pseudo 3D Game, the new C# version will be a real 3D Game.RESTController: Provides a base class implementation for a RESTful controller model. Provides common functionality for the basic controller actions of List, Show, New, Edit, and Delete. It's meant to remove as much of the redundant code for MVC controllers as possible.Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000: HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery: Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000 is a lightweight web application (<40kb), utilizing latest HTML5/CSS3 features and client-side jQuery/Java scripting. Application does not include any graphic files. It is portable, capable of running in online/offline modes on PC/mobile devicesSCR-Airplane Autopilot System: Automatyczny pilot samolotu - projekt na zaliczenie przedmiotu Systemy Czasu RzeczywistegoScriptonite: A lightweight system for scripting gameplay events for games such as RPGs. After integrating Scriptonite into your project, you create scripted events using an incredibly simple scripting language. Intended for XNA, but should work anywhere.Shelf: Shelf is a .NET library of common extension methods.SQLite ADO.NET for Windows Phone: Windows Phone is missing SQLite. This project fixes that :) And does so by giving the community the interfaces we've grown to know and love; IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDbTransaction and, IDbReader. Thanks so much to the pioneers before me who ported the c++ to c#!Tailf: Tailf is a C# implementation of the tail -f command available on unix/linux systems. Differently form other ports it does not lock the file in any way so it works even if other rename the file: this is expecially designed to works well with log4net rolling file appender.TeamBrain: TeamBrain helps project teams to centralise all knowledge about a project into a repository that is clean and a pleasure to use.TeamDev JQuery c# wrapper: C# jQuery Wrapper. Helps you to write correct jQuery functions in c# language. The code you write will be traduced into correct jQuery methods calls. VirtualEye: Virtual Eye...Win32 Registry Activity Monitor: A simple program written in Delphi that monitors registry activity on win32 systems. In short a registry key and class are statically added to the code, the program is then run and as changes are made by other applications to the key and all its sub keys the changes are logged anXamlCode: XamlCode provides support for embedding inline C# code directly in the xaml files to create simple value converters, value providers and validation rules. It's targeted mainly as a rapid WPF application development tool.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 12, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 12, 2011Popular ReleasesDynamic PagedCollection (Silverlight / WPF Pagination): PagedCollection: All classes which facilitate your dynamic pagination in Silverlight or WPF !Media Companion: MC 3.422b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) TV Show Resolutions... Made the TV Shows folder list sorted. Re-visibled 'Manually Add Path' in Root Folders. Sorted list to process during new tv episode search Rebuild Movies now processes thru folders alphabetically Fix for issue #208 - Display Missing Episodes is not popu...DotSpatial: DotSpatial Release Candidate 1 (1.0.823): Supports loading extensions using System.ComponentModel.Composition. DemoMap compiled as x86 so that GDAL runs on x64 machines. How to: Use an Assembly from the WebBe aware that your browser may add an identifier to downloaded files which results in "blocked" dll files. You can follow the following link to learn how to "Unblock" files. Right click on the zip file before unzipping, choose properties, go to the general tab and click the unblock button. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...XPath Visualizer: XPathVisualizer v1.3 Latest: This is v1.3.0.6 of XpathVisualizer. This is an update release for v1.3. These workitems have been fixed since v1.3.0.5: 7429 7432 7427MSBuild Extension Pack: November 2011: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack November 2011 release provides a collection of over 415 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.8.0: Now you can add multiple counters/instances at once! Yes, I know its overdue...CODE Framework: 4.0.11110.0: Various minor fixes and tweaks.Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.2: What's NewRelated Work Items Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many useful types such as ViewModel, CommandSubject, ListSubject, DictionarySubject, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T> and others. Various interactive labs that illustrate the runtime behavior of the extensio...Player Framework by Microsoft: HTML5 Player Framework 1.0: Additional DownloadsHTML5 Player Framework Examples - This is a set of examples showing how to setup and initialize the HTML5 Player Framework. This includes examples of how to use the Player Framework with both the HTML5 video tag and Silverlight player. Note: Be sure to unblock the zip file before using. Note: In order to test Silverlight fallback in the included sample app, you need to run the html and xap files over http (e.g. over localhost). Silverlight Players - Visit the Silverlig...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.6 - Final release - 64Bit: What’s New in 4.8.6 (Final release)A few minor issues have been fixed What’s New in 4.8.5 (Beta release)Assign projection tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projection dialects. (Sergei Leschinsky) Projections database converted to SQLite format. (Sergei Leschinsky) Basic code for database support - will be developed further (ShapefileDataClient class, IDataProvider interface). (Sergei Leschinsky) 'Export shapefile to database' tool. (Sergei Leschinsky) Made the GEOS library static. geos.dl...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.2.2011.1107、XCoder v4.5.2011.1108: v8.2.2011.1107 ?IEntityOperate.Create?Entity.CreateInstance??????forEdit，????????(FindByKeyForEdit)???，???false ??????Entity.CreateInstance，????forEdit，???????????????????? v8.2.2011.1103 ??MS????，??MaxMin??（????????）、NotIn??（????）、?Top??（??NotIn）、RowNumber??（?????） v8.2.2011.1101 SqlServer?????????DataPath，?????????????????????? Oracle?????????DllPath，????OCI??，???????????ORACLE_HOME?? Oracle?????XCode.Oracle.IsUseOwner，???????????Ow...Facebook C# SDK: v5.3.2: This is a RTW release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead of legacy rest api. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ (experimental) added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 (binaries not distributed in codeplex nor nuget.org, will need to manually build from Facebook-Net45.sln) added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added ne...Delete Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports: UPDATEAdded support for windows 2003 servers and removed some null reference errors when the registry key was not present List and delete the Inactive TS Ports - The InactiveTSPortList.EXE accepts command line arguments The InactiveTSPortList.Standalone.WithoutPrompt.exe runs as a standalone exe without the need for any command line arguments.Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Editor (0.1.2207.267): BUG FIXES: - Cannot add multiple JavaScript and Url under Actions - Cannot add <Or> node under <OrGroup> - Adding a rule under <Or> node put the new rule node at the wrong placeWF Designer Express: WF Designer Express v0.6: ?????（???????????） Multi Language（Now, Japanese and English）ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.60.0: Added almost full support for auto filters (missing custom date filters). See examples Filter Values, Custom Filters Fixed issues 7016, 7391, 7388, 7389, 7198, 7196, 7194, 7186, 7067, 7115, 7144Microsoft Research Boogie: Nightly builds: This download category contains automatically released nightly builds, reflecting the current state of Boogie's development. We try to make sure each nightly build passes the test suite. If you suspect that was not the case, please try the previous nightly build to see if that really is the problem. Also, please see the installation instructions.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.0: Major design changes to the control in order to achieve better scalability and extensibility for the new features comming with GoogleMaps API. GoogleMap control switched to GoogleMaps API v3 and .NET 4.0. GoogleMap control is 100% ScriptControl now, it requires ScriptManager to be registered on the pages where and before it is used. Markers, polylines, polygons and directions were implemented as ExtenderControl, instead of being inner properties of GoogleMap control. Better perfomance. Better...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: V2.1: Version 2.1 (click on the right) this uses V4.0 of .net Version 2.1 adds the following features: (apologize if I forget some, added a lot of little things) Manual Lookup with TV or Movie (finally huh!), you can look up a movie or TV episode directly, you can right click on anythign, and choose manual lookup, then will allow you to type anything you want to look up and it will assign it to the file you right clicked. No Rename: a very popular request, this is an option you can set so that t...SubExtractor: Release 1020: Feature: added "baseline double quotes" character to selector box Feature: added option to save SRT files as ANSI (instead of previous UTF-8 only) Feature: made "Save Sup files to Source directory" apply to both Sup and Idx source files. Fix: removed SDH text (...) or [...] that is split over 2 lines Fix: better decision-making in when to prefix a line with a '-' because SDH was removedNew Projects- Gemini - code branch: the branch for all Hzj_jie's code(MPLF) MediaPortal LoveFilm Plugin: MediaPortal LoveFilm (Love Film) Plugin. Browse films, add/remove from lists, streams etc._: _Batalha Naval em C#: Jogo de batalha naval para a disciplina de C#BusyHoliday - Making Outlook's Calendar Busy for Holidays: When users add holidays to their Outlook calendar these are added as an all day event. However, these are added as free time. With users in other countries, if they were to invite a user in a country with a public holiday, they won't be able to see that the user is on a public holiday or busy. BusyHoliday will update existing holidays as busy time. This may improve users ability to collaborate efficiently across geographical boundries. C# and MCU: C# and MCU and webCampo Minado C Sharp: C sharp source code of the game minefield.CP2011test: CP2011 TestDynamic PagedCollection (Silverlight / WPF Pagination): PagedCollection helps a developer to easily control the pagination of their collection. This collection doesnt need all datas in memory, it can be attached to RIA/SQL/XML data ... and load needed data one after the other. The PagedCollection can be used with Silverlight or WPF.Fast MVVM: The faster way to build your MVVM (Model, View, ViewModel) applications. It's a basic and educational way to learn and work with MVVM. We have more than just a pack of classes or templates. We have a new concept that turn it a little easier.Habitat: Core game services, frameworks and templates for desktop, mobile and web game developers.Historical Data Repository: Repository stores serializable timestamped data items in compressed files structured in a way that allows to quickly find data by time, quickly read and write data items in chronological order. Key features: - all data is stored under a single root folder; like file system, repository can contain a tree of folders each of which contains its own data stream; when reading, multiple streams can be combined into a single output stream maintaining chronological order; the tree structure can b...Immunity Buster: This game is for HIV. We will be making a virus which will help to spread the knowledge about the virus and have Fun among the peers.JoeCo Blog Application: JoeCo Blog Application for ECE 574jweis sso user center: jweis is a user center,distination is to use in a contry ,ssoKinect Shape Game Connect with Windows Phone: The classic Shape Game for Microsoft Kinect extended to allow players to join in the game and deploy shapes from their windows phone. Uses TCP sockets. For educational purposes. Free to download and distribute.Liekhus Behavior Driven DevExpress XAF: Using the BDD (Behavior Driven Development) techniques of SpecFlow and the EasyTest scriptability of DevExpress XAF (eXpress Application Framework), you can leverage test first style of application development in a speed never though imaginable.Linq to BBYOpen: C# Linq Provider to access the REST based BBYOpen services from BestBuy.Mi clima: This is the source code for the application "Mi clima" published in the Windows Phone Marketplace. MySqlQueryToolkit: This project bundles all of the common performance tests into a single handy user interface. Simply drop your query in and use the tools to make your query faster. Includes index suggestion, column data type and length suggestion and common profiling options.OData Validation Framework: Project to show how to validate data using client and server side OData/WCF Data ServicesOMR Table Data Syncronizer - Only Data: This tools compare and syncronize table data. No schema syncronizing included on this project. Data comparition is fastest! 1,000,000 data compare time is: ~200 ms.OrchardPo: This is the po file management module that is used on http://orchardproject.netResistance Calculator: A calculator for parallel and/or series resistanceSMS Team 5: h? th?ng g?i SMS t? d?ngSportsStore: Prueba en tfs de sports storeUDP Transport: This is an attempt at implementation of WCF UDP transport compliant with soa.udp OASIS Standard WebUtils: Biblioteca com funções genéricas úteis para uso com ASP NET MVC??a??e?a - Greek Government Open Data Program - Windows Mobile Client: ? efa?µ??? Open Government sa? d??e? ?µes? p??sßas? ap? t? ????t? sa? se ????? t??? ??µ???, ??e? t?? ap?f?se?? ?a? ??e? t?? dap??e? t?? ????????? ???t??? ?a? ???? t?? ?p??es??? t?? ????????? ??µ?s??? µ?s? t?? ??ße???t???? p?????µµat?? ??a??e?a.

  Read the article

• Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6

  - by ShawnBailey

  What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections. In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. RDA (Remote Diagnostic Agent) RDA is a standalone tool that is used to collect both static configuration and dynamic runtime information from the SOA environment. RDA is generally run manually from the command line against a domain or single server. When opening a new Service Request, including an RDA collection can dramatically decrease the back and forth required to collect logs and configuration information for Support. After installing RDA you configure it to use the SOA Suite module as decribed in the referenced resources. The SOA module includes the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) module by default in order to include all of the relevant information for the environment. In addition to this basic configuration there is also an advanced mode where you can set the number of thread dumps for the collections, log files, Incidents, etc. When would you use it? When creating a Service Request or otherwise working with Oracle resources on an issue, capturing environment snapshots to baseline your configuration or to diagnose an issue on your own. How is it related to the other tools? RDA is related to DFW in that it collects the last 10 Incidents from the server by default. In a similar manner, RDA is related to ODL through its collection of the diagnostic logs and these may contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Examples of what it currently collects: (for details please see the links in the Resources section) Diagnostic Logs (ODL) Diagnostic Framework Incidents (DFW) SOA MDS Deployment Descriptors SOA Repository Summary Statistics Thread Dumps Complete Domain Configuration RDA Resources: Webcast Recording: Using RDA with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Blog Post: Diagnose SOA Suite 11g Issues Using RDA Download RDA How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite 11g Products [ID 1350313.1] How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite and BPEL Process Manager 11g [ID 1352181.1] Getting Started With Remote Diagnostic Agent: Case Study - Oracle WebLogic Server (Video) [ID 1262157.1] top DFW (Diagnostic Framework) DFW provides the ability to collect specific information for a particular problem when that problem occurs. DFW is included with your SOA Suite installation and deployed to the domain. Let's define the components of DFW. Diagnostic Dumps: Specific diagnostic collections that are defined at either the 'system' or product level. Examples would be diagnostic logs or thread dumps. Incident: A collection of Diagnostic Dumps associated with a particular problem Log Conditions: An Oracle Diagnostic Logging event that DFW is configured to listen for. If the event is identified then an Incident will be created. WLDF Watch: The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework or 'WLDF' is not a component of DFW, however, it can be a source of DFW Incident creation through the use of a 'Watch'. WLDF Notification: A Notification is a component of WLDF and is the link between the Watch and DFW. You can configure multiple Notification types in WLDF and associate them with your Watches. 'FMWDFW-notification' is available to you out of the box to allow for DFW notification of Watch execution. Rule: Defines a WLDF Watch or Log Condition for which we want to associate a set of Diagnostic Dumps. When triggered the specified dumps will be collected and added to the Incident Rule Action: Defines the specific Diagnostic Dumps to collect for a particular rule ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository; Defined for every server in a domain. This is where Incidents are stored Now let's walk through a simple flow: Oracle Web Services error message OWS-04086 (SOAP Fault) is generated on managed server 1 DFW Log Condition for OWS-04086 evaluates to TRUE DFW creates a new Incident in the ADR for managed server 1 DFW executes the specified Diagnostic Dumps and adds the output to the Incident In this case we'll grab the diagnostic log and thread dump. We might also want to collect the WSDL binding information and SOA audit trail When would you use it? When you want to automatically collect Diagnostic Dumps at a particular time using a trigger or when you want to manually collect the information. In either case it can be readily uploaded to Oracle Support through the Service Request. How is it related to the other tools? DFW generates Incidents which are collections of Diagnostic Dumps. One of the system level Diagonstic Dumps collects the current server diagnostic log which is generated by ODL and can contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Incidents are included in RDA collections by default and ADRCI is a tool that is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support. In addition, both ODL and DMS can be used to trigger Incident creation through DFW. The conditions and rules for generating Incidents can become quite complicated and the below resources go into more detail. A simpler approach to leveraging at least the Diagnostic Dumps is through WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) where there are commands to do the following: Create an Incident Execute a single Diagnostic Dump Describe a Diagnostic Dump List the available Diagnostic Dumps The WLST option offers greater control in what is generated and when. It can be a great help when collecting information for Support. There are overlaps with RDA, however, DFW is geared towards collecting specific runtime information when an issue occurs while existing Incidents are collected by RDA. There are 3 WLDF Watches configured by default in a SOA Suite 11g domain: Stuck Threads, Unchecked Exception and Deadlock. These Watches are enabled by default and will generate Incidents in ADR. They are configured to reset automatically after 30 seconds so they have the potential to create multiple Incidents if these conditions are consistent. The Incidents generated by these Watches will only contain System level Diagnostic Dumps. These same System level Diagnostic Dumps will be included in any application scoped Incident as well. Starting in 11.1.1.6, SOA Suite is including its own set of application scoped Diagnostic Dumps that can be executed from WLST or through a WLDF Watch or Log Condition. These Diagnostic Dumps can be added to an Incident such as in the earlier example using the error code OWS-04086. soa.config: MDS configuration files and deployed-composites.xml soa.composite: All artifacts related to the deployed composite soa.wsdl: Summary of endpoints configured for the composite soa.edn: EDN configuration summary if applicable soa.db: Summary DB information for the SOA repository soa.env: Coherence cluster configuration summary soa.composite.trail: Partial audit trail information for the running composite The current release of RDA has the option to collect the soa.wsdl and soa.composite Diagnostic Dumps. More Diagnostic Dumps for SOA Suite products are planned for future releases along with enhancements to DFW itself. DFW Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Sessions: Diagnostic Framework Diagnostic Framework Documentation DFW WLST Command Reference Documentation for SOA Diagnostic Dumps in 11.1.1.6 top Selective Tracing Selective Tracing is a facility available starting in version 11.1.1.4 that allows you to increase the logging level for specific loggers and for a specific context. What this means is that you have greater capability to collect needed diagnostic log information in a production environment with reduced overhead. For example, a Selective Tracing session can be executed that only increases the log level for one composite, only one logger, limited to one server in the cluster and for a preset period of time. In an environment where dozens of composites are deployed this can dramatically reduce the volume and overhead of the logging without sacrificing relevance. Selective Tracing can be administered either from Enterprise Manager or through WLST. WLST provides a bit more flexibility in terms of exactly where the tracing is run. When would you use it? When there is an issue in production or another environment that lends itself to filtering by an available context criteria and increasing the log level globally results in too much overhead or irrelevant information. The information is written to the server diagnostic log and is exportable from Enterprise Manager How is it related to the other tools? Selective Tracing output is written to the server diagnostic log. This log can be collected by a system level Diagnostic Dump using DFW or through a default RDA collection. Selective Tracing also heavily leverages ODL fields to determine what to trace and to tag information that is part of a particular tracing session. Available Context Criteria: Application Name Client Address Client Host Composite Name User Name Web Service Name Web Service Port Selective Tracing Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Session: Using Selective Tracing to Diagnose SOA Suite Issues How to Use Selective Tracing for SOA [ID 1367174.1] Selective Tracing WLST Reference top DMS (Dynamic Monitoring Service) DMS exposes runtime information for monitoring. This information can be monitored in two ways: Through the DMS servlet As exposed MBeans The servlet is deployed by default and can be accessed through http://<host>:<port>/dms/Spy (use administrative credentials to access). The landing page of the servlet shows identical columns of what are known as Noun Types. If you select a Noun Type you will see a table in the right frame that shows the attributes (Sensors) for the Noun Type and the available instances. SOA Suite has several exposed Noun Types that are available for viewing through the Spy servlet. Screenshots of the Spy servlet are available in the Knowledge Base article How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS). Every Noun instance in the runtime is exposed as an MBean instance. As such they are generally available through an MBean browser and available for monitoring through WLDF. You can configure a WLDF Watch to monitor a particular attribute and fire a notification when the threshold is exceeded. A WLDF Watch can use the out of the box DFW notification type to notify DFW to create an Incident. When would you use it? When you want to monitor a metric or set of metrics either manually or through an automated system. When you want to trigger a WLDF Watch based on a metric exposed through DMS. How is it related to the other tools? DMS metrics can be monitored with WLDF Watches which can in turn notify DFW to create an Incident. DMS Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How to Reset a SOA 11g DMS Metric DMS Documentation top ODL (Oracle Diagnostic Logging) ODL is the primary facility for most Fusion Middleware applications to log what they are doing. Whenever you change a logging level through Enterprise Manager it is ultimately exposed through ODL and written to the server diagnostic log. A notable exception to this is WebLogic Server which uses its own log format / file. ODL logs entries in a consistent, structured way using predefined fields and name/value pairs. Here's an example of a SOA Suite entry: [2012-04-25T12:49:28.083-06:00] [AdminServer] [ERROR] [] [oracle.soa.bpel.engine] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: ] [ecid: 0963fdde7e77631c:-31a6431d:136eaa46cda:-8000-00000000000000b4,0] [errid: 41] [WEBSERVICE_PORT.name: BPELProcess2_pt] [APP: soa-infra] [composite_name: TestProject2] [J2EE_MODULE.name: fabric] [WEBSERVICE.name: bpelprocess1_client_ep] [J2EE_APP.name: soa-infra] Error occured while handling a post operation[[ When would you use it? You'll use ODL almost every time you want to identify and diagnose a problem in the environment. The entries are written to the server diagnostic log. How is it related to the other tools? The server diagnostic logs are collected by DFW and RDA. Selective Tracing writes its information to the diagnostic log as well. Additionally, DFW log conditions are triggered by ODL log events. ODL Resources: ODL Documentation top ADR (Automatic Diagnostics Repository) ADR is not a tool in and of itself but is where DFW stores the Incidents it creates. Every server in the domain has an ADR location which can be found under <SERVER_HOME>/adr. This is referred to the as the ADR 'Base' location. ADR also has what are known as 'Home' locations. Example: You have a domain called 'myDomain' and an associated managed server called 'myServer'. Your admin server is called 'AdminServer'. Your domain home directory is called 'myDomain' and it contains a 'servers' directory. The 'servers' directory contains a directory for the managed server called 'myServer' and here is where you'll find the 'adr' directory which is the ADR 'Base' location for myServer. To get to the ADR 'Home' locations we drill through a few levels: diag/ofm/myDomain/ In an 11.1.1.6 SOA Suite domain you will see 2 directories here, 'myServer' and 'soa-infra'. These are the ADR 'Home' locations. 'myServer' is the 'system' ADR home and contains system level Incidents. 'soa-infra' is the name that SOA Suite used to register with DFW and this ADR home contains SOA Suite related Incidents Each ADR home location contains a series of directories, one of which is called 'incident'. This is where your Incidents are stored. When would you use it? It's a good idea to check on these locations from time to time to see whether a lot of Incidents are being generated. They can be cleaned out by deleting the Incident directories or through the ADRCI tool. If you know that an Incident is of particular interest for an issue you're working with Oracle you can simply zip it up and provide it. How does it relate to the other tools? ADR is obviously very important for DFW since it's where the Incidents are stored. Incidents contain Diagnostic Dumps that may relate to diagnostic logs (ODL) and DMS metrics. The most recent 10 Incident directories are collected by RDA by default and ADRCI relies on the ADR locations to help manage the contents. top ADRCI (Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter) ADRCI is a command line tool for packaging and managing Incidents. When would you use it? When purging Incidents from an ADR Home location or when you want to package an Incident along with an offline RDA collection for upload to Oracle Support. How does it relate to the other tools? ADRCI contains a tool called the Incident Packaging System or IPS. This is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support through a Service Request. Starting in 11.1.1.6 IPS will attempt to collect an offline RDA collection and include it with the Incident package. This will only work if Perl is available on the path, otherwise it will give a warning and package only the Incident files. ADRCI Resources: How to Use the Incident Packaging System (IPS) in SOA 11g [ID 1381259.1] ADRCI Documentation top WLDF (WebLogic Diagnostic Framework) WLDF is functionality available in WebLogic Server since version 9. Starting with FMw 11g a link has been added between WLDF and the pre-existing DFW, the WLDF Watch Notification. Let's take a closer look at the flow: There is a need to monitor the performance of your SOA Suite message processing A WLDF Watch is created in the WLS console that will trigger if the average message processing time exceeds 2 seconds. This metric is monitored through a DMS MBean instance. The out of the box DFW Notification (the Notification is called FMWDFW-notification) is added to the Watch. Under the covers this notification is of type JMX. The Watch is triggered when the threshold is exceeded and fires the Notification. DFW has a listener that picks up the Notification and evaluates it according to its rules, etc When it comes to automatic Incident creation, WLDF is a key component with capabilities that will grow over time. When would you use it? When you want to monitor the WLS server log or an MBean metric for some condition and fire a notification when the Watch is triggered. How does it relate to the other tools? WLDF is used to automatically trigger Incident creation through DFW using the DFW Notification. WLDF Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How To Script the Creation of a SOA WLDF Watch in 11g [ID 1377986.1] WLDF Documentation top

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177  | Next Page >