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Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

- by Phil Factor

For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it. It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system. There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying. Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor. It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information. Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out. Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping DBAs is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible, and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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An open plea to Microsoft to fix the serializers in WCF.

- by Scott Wojan

I simply DO NOT understand how Microsoft can be this far along with a tool like WCF and it STILL tout it as being an "Enterprise" tool. For example... The following is a simple xsd schema with a VERY simple data contract that any enterprise would expect an "enterprise system" to be able to handle: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xs:schema id="Sample" targetNamespace="http://tempuri.org/Sample.xsd" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Sample.xsd" xmlns:mstns="http://tempuri.org/Sample.xsd" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xs:element name="SomeDataElement"> <xs:annotation> <xs:documentation>This documents the data element. This sure would be nice for consumers to see!</xs:documentation> </xs:annotation> <xs:complexType> <xs:all> <xs:element name="Description" minOccurs="0"> <xs:simpleType> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"> <xs:minLength value="0"/> <xs:maxLength value="255"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType> </xs:element> </xs:all> <xs:attribute name="IPAddress" use="required"> <xs:annotation> <xs:documentation>Another explanation! WOW!</xs:documentation> </xs:annotation> <xs:simpleType> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"> <xs:pattern value="(([1-9]?[0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\.){3}([1-9]?[0-9]|1[0-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType> </xs:attribute> </xs:complexType> </xs:element> </xs:schema> An minimal example xml document would be: <?xml version="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?> <SomeDataElementxmlns="http://tempuri.org/Sample.xsd" IPAddress="1.1.168.10"> </SomeDataElement> With the max example being: <?xml version="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?> <SomeDataElementxmlns="http://tempuri.org/Sample.xsd" IPAddress="1.1.168.10"> <Description>ddd</Description> </SomeDataElement> This schema simply CANNOT be exposed by WCF. Let's list why: svcutil.exe will not generate classes for you because it can't read an xsd with xs:annotation. Even if you remove the documentation, the DataContractSerializer DOES NOT support attributes so IPAddress would become an element this not meeting the contract xsd.exe could generate classes but it is a very legacy tool, generates legacy code, and you still suffer from the following issues: NONE of the serializers support emitting of the xs:annotation documentation. You'd think a consumer would really like to have as much documentation as possible! NONE of the serializers support the enforcement of xs:restriction so you can forget about the xs:minLength, xs:maxLength, or xs:pattern enforcement. Microsoft... please, please, please, please look at putting the work into your serializers so that they support the very basics of designing enterprise data contracts!!

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Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

- by Mike Stiles

As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

- by Rick Strahl

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form. If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via: PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate: This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET HTTP Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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NoSQL with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC - Part 1

- by shiju

A while back, I have blogged NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2 on how to use MongoDB with an ASP.NET MVC application. The NoSQL movement is getting big attention and RavenDB is the latest addition to the NoSQL and document database world. RavenDB is an Open Source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform developed by Ayende Rahien. Raven stores schema-less JSON documents, allow you to define indexes using Linq queries and focus on low latency and high performance. RavenDB is .NET focused document database which comes with a fully functional .NET client API and supports LINQ. RavenDB comes with two components, a server and a client API. RavenDB is a REST based system, so you can write your own HTTP cleint API. As a .NET developer, RavenDB is becoming my favorite document database. Unlike other document databases, RavenDB is supports transactions using System.Transactions. Also it's supports both embedded and server mode of database. You can access RavenDB site at http://ravendb.netA demo App with ASP.NET MVCLet's create a simple demo app with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC. To work with RavenDB, do the following steps. Go to http://ravendb.net/download and download the latest build.Unzip the downloaded file.Go to the /Server directory and run the RavenDB.exe. This will start the RavenDB server listening on localhost:8080You can change the port of RavenDB by modifying the "Raven/Port" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.When running the RavenDB, it will automatically create a database in the /Data directory. You can change the directory name data by modifying "Raven/DataDirt" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.RavenDB provides a browser based admin tool. When the Raven server is running, You can be access the browser based admin tool and view and edit documents and index using your browser admin tool. The web admin tool available at http://localhost:8080The below is the some screen shots of web admin tool Working with ASP.NET MVC To working with RavenDB in our demo ASP.NET MVC application, do the following steps Step 1 - Add reference to Raven Cleint API In our ASP.NET MVC application, Add a reference to the Raven.Client.Lightweight.dll from the Client directory. Step 2 - Create DocumentStoreThe document store would be created once per application. Let's create a DocumentStore on application start-up in the Global.asax.cs. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); The above code will create a Raven DB document store and will be listening the server locahost at port 8080 Step 3 - Create DocumentSession on BeginRequest Let's create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest event in the Global.asax.cs. We are using the document session for every unit of work. In our demo app, every HTTP request would be a single Unit of Work (UoW). BeginRequest += (sender, args) => HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); Step 4 - Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => { var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable; if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose(); }; At the end of HTTP request, we are destroying the DocumentSession object.The below code block shown all the code in the Global.asax.cs private const string RavenSessionKey = "RavenMVC.Session"; private static DocumentStore documentStore; protected void Application_Start() { //Create a DocumentStore in Application_Start //DocumentStore should be created once per application and stored as a singleton. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); //DI using Unity 2.0 ConfigureUnity(); } public MvcApplication() { //Create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest //create a document session for every unit of work BeginRequest += (sender, args) => HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); //Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => { var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable; if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose(); }; } //Getting the current DocumentSession public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession { get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } } We have setup all necessary code in the Global.asax.cs for working with RavenDB. For our demo app, Let’s write a domain class public class Category { public string Id { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")] [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")] public string Name { get; set;} public string Description { get; set; } } We have created simple domain entity Category. Let's create repository class for performing CRUD operations against our domain entity Category. public interface ICategoryRepository { Category Load(string id); IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories(); void Save(Category category); void Delete(string id); } public class CategoryRepository : ICategoryRepository { private IDocumentSession session; public CategoryRepository() { session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; } //Load category based on Id public Category Load(string id) { return session.Load<Category>(id); } //Get all categories public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories() { var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>() .WaitForNonStaleResults() .ToArray(); return categories; } //Insert/Update category public void Save(Category category) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id)) { //insert new record session.Store(category); } else { //edit record var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id); categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name; categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description; } //save the document session session.SaveChanges(); } //delete a category public void Delete(string id) { var category = Load(id); session.Delete<Category>(category); session.SaveChanges(); } } For every CRUD operations, we are taking the current document session object from HttpContext object. session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; We are calling the static method CurrentSession from the Global.asax.cs public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession { get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } } Retrieve Entities The Load method get the single Category object based on the Id. RavenDB is working based on the REST principles and the Id would be like categories/1. The Id would be created by automatically when a new object is inserted to the document store. The REST uri categories/1 represents a single category object with Id representation of 1. public Category Load(string id) { return session.Load<Category>(id); } The GetCategories method returns all the categories calling the session.LuceneQuery method. RavenDB is using a lucen query syntax for querying. I will explain more details about querying and indexing in my future posts. public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories() { var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>() .WaitForNonStaleResults() .ToArray(); return categories; } Insert/Update entityFor insert/Update a Category entity, we have created Save method in repository class. If the Id property of Category is null, we call Store method of Documentsession for insert a new record. For editing a existing record, we load the Category object and assign the values to the loaded Category object. The session.SaveChanges() will save the changes to document store. //Insert/Update category public void Save(Category category) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id)) { //insert new record session.Store(category); } else { //edit record var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id); categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name; categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description; } //save the document session session.SaveChanges(); } Delete Entity In the Delete method, we call the document session's delete method and call the SaveChanges method to reflect changes in the document store. public void Delete(string id) { var category = Load(id); session.Delete<Category>(category); session.SaveChanges(); } Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller and controller actions for handling CRUD operations for the domain class Category public class CategoryController : Controller { private ICategoryRepository categoyRepository; //DI enabled constructor public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoyRepository) { this.categoyRepository = categoyRepository; } public ActionResult Index() { var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories(); if (categories == null) return RedirectToAction("Create"); return View(categories); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(string id) { var category = categoyRepository.Load(id); return View("Save",category); } // GET: /Category/Create [HttpGet] public ActionResult Create() { var category = new Category(); return View("Save", category); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Save(Category category) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) { return View("Save", category); } categoyRepository.Save(category); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Delete(string id) { categoyRepository.Delete(id); var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories(); return PartialView("CategoryList", categories); } } RavenDB is an awesome document database and I hope that it will be the winner in .NET space of document database world. The source code of demo application available at http://ravenmvc.codeplex.com/

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Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

- by Rick Strahl

originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> <h1>Razor Test</h1>  @DateTime.Now <hr />  @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")  @{ List<string> names = new List<string>(); names.Add("Rick"); names.Add("Markus"); names.Add("Claudio"); names.Add("Kevin"); }  <ul> @foreach(string name in names){ <li>@name</li> } </ul>  @if(true) {  <text> true </text>; } else {  <text> false </text>; } </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{ var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf"); string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){ <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET IIS7

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Guidelines for using Merge task in SSIS

- by thursdaysgeek

I have a table with three fields, one an identity field, and I need to add some new records from a source that has the other two fields. I'm using SSIS, and I think I should use the merge tool, because one of the sources is not in the local database. But, I'm confused by the merge tool and the proper process. I have my one source (an Oracle table), and I get two fields, well_id and well_name, with a sort after, sorting by well_id. I have the destination table (sql server), and I'm also using that as a source. It has three fields: well_key (identity field), well_id, and well_name, and I then have a sort task, sorting on well_id. Both of those are input to my merge task. I was going to output to a temporary table, and then somehow get the new records back into the sql server table. Oracle Well SQL Well | | V V Sort Source Sort Well | | -------> Merge* <----------- | V Temp well table I suspect this isn't the best way to use this tool, however. What are the proper steps for a merge like this? One of my reasons for questioning this method is that my merge has an error, telling me that the "Merge Input 2" must be sorted, but its source is a sort task, so it IS sorted. Example data SQL Well (before merge) well_key well_id well_name 1 123 well k 2 292 well c 3 344 well t 5 439 well d Oracle Well well_id well_name 123 well k 292 well c 311 well y 344 well t 439 well d 532 well j SQL Well (after merge) well_key well_id well_name 1 123 well k 2 292 well c 3 344 well t 5 439 well d 6 311 well y 7 532 well j Would it be better to load my Oracle Well to a temporary local file, and then just use a sql insert statment on it?

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Informix, NHibernate, TransactionScope interaction difficulties

- by John Prideaux

I have a small program that is trying to wrap an NHibernate insert into an Informix database in a TransactionScope object using the Informix .NET Provider. I am getting the error specified below. The code without the TransactionScope object works -- including when the insert is wrapped in an NHibernate session transaction. Any ideas on what the problem is? BTW, without the EnterpriseServicesInterop, the Informix .NET Provider will not participate in a TransactionScope transaction (verified without NHibernate involved). Code Snippet: public static void TestTScope() { Employee johnp = new Employee { name = "John Prideaux" }; using (TransactionScope tscope = new TransactionScope( TransactionScopeOption.Required, new TransactionOptions() { Timeout = new TimeSpan(0, 1, 0), IsolationLevel = IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted }, EnterpriseServicesInteropOption.Full)) { using (ISession session = OpenSession()) { session.Save(johnp); Console.WriteLine("Saved John to the database"); } } Console.WriteLine("Transaction should be rolled back"); } static ISession OpenSession() { if (factory == null) { Configuration c = new Configuration(); c.AddAssembly(Assembly.GetCallingAssembly()); factory = c.BuildSessionFactory(); } return factory.OpenSession(); } static ISessionFactory factory; Stack Trace: NHibernate.ADOException was unhandled Message="Could not close IBM.Data.Informix.IfxConnection connection" Source="NHibernate" StackTrace: at NHibernate.Connection.ConnectionProvider.CloseConnection(IDbConnection conn) at NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider.CloseConnection(IDbConnection conn) at NHibernate.Tool.hbm2ddl.SuppliedConnectionProviderConnectionHelper.Release() at NHibernate.Tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaMetadataUpdater.GetReservedWords(Dialect dialect, IConnectionHelper connectionHelper) at NHibernate.Tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaMetadataUpdater.Update(ISessionFactory sessionFactory) at NHibernate.Impl.SessionFactoryImpl..ctor(Configuration cfg, IMapping mapping, Settings settings, EventListeners listeners) at NHibernate.Cfg.Configuration.BuildSessionFactory() at HelloNHibernate.Employee.OpenSession() in D:\Development\ScratchProject\HelloNHibernate\Employee.cs:line 73 at HelloNHibernate.Employee.TestTScope() in D:\Development\ScratchProject\HelloNHibernate\Employee.cs:line 53 at HelloNHibernate.Program.Main(String[] args) in D:\Development\ScratchProject\HelloNHibernate\Program.cs:line 19 at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(Assembly assembly, String[] args) at System.AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly(String assemblyFile, Evidence assemblySecurity, String[] args) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssembly() at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() InnerException: IBM.Data.Informix.IfxException Message="ERROR - no error information available" Source="IBM.Data.Informix" ErrorCode=-2147467259 StackTrace: at IBM.Data.Informix.IfxConnection.HandleError(IntPtr hHandle, SQL_HANDLE hType, RETCODE retcode) at IBM.Data.Informix.IfxConnection.DisposeClose() at IBM.Data.Informix.IfxConnection.Close() at NHibernate.Connection.ConnectionProvider.CloseConnection(IDbConnection conn) InnerException:

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How to prepopulate an Outlook MailItem and avoiding a com Exception from the object model guard

- by torrente

Hi, I work for a company that develops a CRM tool and offers integration with MS Office(2003 & 2007) from windows XP to 7. (I'm working using Win7) My task is to call an Outlook instance (using C#) from this CRM tool when the user wants to send an email and prepopulate with data of the CRM tool (email, recipient, etc..) All of this already works just fine. The problem I'm having is that Outlook's "object model guard" is throwing com Exception (Operation aborted (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004004 (E_ABORT))) the moment I try to read a protected value from the mailItem (such as mail.bodyHTML). Example Snippet: using MSOutlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook; //untrusted Instance _outlook = new MSOutlook.Application(); MSOutlook.MailItem mail = (MSOutlook.MailItem)_outlook.CreateItem(MSOutlook.OlItemType.olMailItem); //this where the Exception occurs string outlookStdHTMLBody = mail.HTMLBody; I've done quite a bit of reading and know that my Outlook Instance (derived by using new Application) is considered untrusted and therefore the "omg" kicks in. I do have a workaround for development: I'm running VS2010 as Administrator and if I run Outlook as Administrator as well - all is good. I suppose this is due to them having the same integrity levels(high) and the UAC(?) is not complaining. But that just ain't the way to go for deployment. Now the question is: Is there a way to obtain a trusted instance of Outlook so that I can avoid this exception? I've already read that when developing an Office Add-In using VSTO one can obtain a trusted Instance from the OnComplete event and/or using "ThisAddin" But I "merely" want to start an outlook instance and preopulate it, and do not want to develop an Add-In since this is not the requirement. And to make it clear - I have no problem with pop ups informing the user that outlook is being accessed - I just want to get rid of the exception! So how can I get around this problem using code? Any help is highly appreciated! Thomas

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What AOP tools exist for doing aspect-oriented programming at the assembly language level against x8

- by JohnnySoftware

Looking for a tool I can use to do aspect-oriented programming at the assembly language level. For experimentation purposes, I would like the code weaver to operate native application level executable and dynamic link libraries. I have already done object-oriented AOP. I know assembly language for x86 and so forth. I would like to be able to do logging and other sorts of things using the familiar before/after/around constructs. I would like to be able to specify certain instructions or sequences/patterns of consecutive instructions as what to do a pointcut on since assembly/machine language is not exactly the most semantically rich computer language on the planet. If debugger and linker symbols are available, naturally, I would like to be able to use them to identify subroutines' entry points , branch/call/jump target addresses, symbolic data addresses, etc. I would like the ability to send notifications out to other diagnostic tools. Thus, support for sending data through connection-oriented sockets and datagrams is highly desirable. So is normal logging to files, UI, etc. This can be done using the action part of an aspect to make a function call, but then there are portability issues so the tool needs to support a flexible, well-abstracted logging/notifying mechanism with a clean, simple yet flexible. The goal is rapid-QA. The idea is to be able to share aspect source code braodly within communties as well as publicly. So, there needs to be a declarative security policy file that users can share. This insures that nothing untoward that is hidden directly or indirectly in an aspect source file slips by the execution manager. The policy file format needs to be simple to read, write, modify, understand, type-in, edit, and generate. Sort of like Java .policy files. Think the exact opposite of anything resembling XML Schema files and you get the idea. Is there such a tool in existence already?

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Automate the signature of the update.rdf manifest for my firefox extension

- by streetpc

Hello, I'm developing a firefox extension and I'd like to provide automatic update to my beta-testers (who are not tech-savvy). Unfortunately, the update server doesn't provide HTTPS. According to the Extension Developer Guide on signing updates, I have to sign my update.rdf and provide an encoded public key in the install.rdf. There is the McCoy tool to do all of this, but it is an interactive GUI tool and I'd like to automate the extension packaging using an Ant script (as this is part of a much bigger process). I can't find a more precise description of what's happening to sign the update.rdf manifest than below, and McCoy source is an awful lot of javascript. The doc says: The add-on author creates a public/private RSA cryptographic key pair. The public part of the key is DER encoded and then base 64 encoded and added to the add-on's install.rdf as an updateKey entry. (...) Roughly speaking the update information is converted to a string, then hashed using a sha512 hashing algorithm and this hash is signed using the private key. The resultant data is DER encoded then base 64 encoded for inclusion in the update.rdf as an signature entry. I don't know well about DER encoding, but it seems like it needs some parameters. So would anyone know either the full algortihm to sign the update.rdf and install.rdf using a predefined keypair, or a scriptable alternative to McCoy whether a command-line tool like asn1coding will suffise a good/simple developer tutorial on DER encoding

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Comparing developer productivity tools

- by Jacob

I am getting ready to test developer productivity tools for our team (Coderush, Resharper, JustCode, etc). We're planning to roll the tool out the same time as we deploy Visual Studio 2010 and TFS. I've seen several posts discussing the merits of one tool versus another. However, I haven't been able to find any discussion of a methodology self evaluating. One approach I've seen is to use each tool for a month or so and decide which one you like best. This seems completely reasonable if I were evaluating it for myself, but since I'm evaluating for others as well, I'd like to do something more rigorous. I'm hoping to collect some ideas on how to do that. As a starting point, my thinking was to come up a list of 10-20 crucial features to compare, then prepare a matrix where I can compare the relative strengths of each product. Once the matrix is complete, we can make a well informed decision about which product aligns with out needs. Since I'm not a user of any product now, it's been difficult to figure out which features are critical and which are less so. Thank you!

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How to migrate project from RCS to git? (SOLVED)

- by Norman Ramsey

I have a 20-year-old project that I would like to migrate from RCS to git, without losing the history. All web pages suggest that the One True Path is through CVS. But after an hour of Googling and trying different scripts, I have yet to find anything that successfully converts my RCS project tree to CVS. I'm hoping the good people at Stackoverflow will know what actually works, as opposed to what is claimed to work and doesn't. (I searched Stackoverflow using both the native SO search and a Google search, but if there's a helpful answer in the database, I missed it.) UPDATE: The rcs-fast-export tool at http://git.oblomov.eu/rcs-fast-export was repaired on 14 April 2009, and this version seems to work for me. This tool converts straight to git with no intermediate CVS. Thanks Giuseppe and Jakub!!! Things that did not work that I still remember: The rcs-to-cvs script that ships in the contrib directory of the CVS sources The rcs-fast-export tool at http://git.oblomov.eu/rcs-fast-export in versions before 13 April 2010 The rcs2cvs script found in a document called "CVS-RCS- HOW-TO Document for Linux"

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Updating permissions on Amazon S3 files that were uploaded via JungleDisk

- by Simon_Weaver

I am starting to use Jungle Disk to upload files to an Amazon S3 bucket which corresponds to a Cloudfront distribution. i.e. I can access it via an http:// URL and I am using Amazon as a CDN. The problem I am facing is that Jungle Disk doesn't set 'read' permissions on the files so when I go to the corresponding URL in a browser I get an Amazon 'AccessDenied' error. If I use a tool like BucketExplorer to set the ACL then that URL now returns a 200. I really really like the simplicity of dragging files to a network drive. JungleDisk is the best program I've found to do this reliably without tripping over itself and getting confused. However it doesn't seem to have an option to make the files read-able. I really don't want to have to go to a different tool (especially if i have to buy it) to just change the permissions - and this seems really slow anyway because they generally seem to traverse the whole directory structure. JungleDisk provides some kind of 'web access' - but this is a paid feature and I'm not sure if it will work or not. S3 doesn't appear to propagate permissions down which is a real pain. I'm considering writing a manual tool to traverse my tree and set everything to 'read' but I'd rather not do this if this is a problem someone else has already solved.

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Generating a static website from a set of content data (possibly with webgen, webby or a similar too

- by Darel

My company (an engineering firm) is looking to redesign their website with some dynamic content. We have a nice portfolio of projects that we'd like to present on our site by category. To elaborate, I'd like to have a "Projects Category" menu, where you can choose a sub-project category (such as churches, schools, etc) which links to a page with images of all projects which have been tagged with that category attribute. Clicking on an image would then take you to a detailed page for that project. I have done a good bit of asp and jsp page development, but I've always worked on the front end in an enterprise environment - I've never built a production site from the back end. The advice I've gotten so far is that a full-blown CMS solution would be somewhat overkill, as we won't have a large hit count, and we'll be displaying a few hundred projects at most. One big-picture choice I appear to have - whether to dynamically generate the pages (with asp or jsp) or to use a tool to generate a set of static html pages. The tool would build the menus, project summary pages, and individual project pages based on a set of data I could provide (in the form of a database or text file.) I'm leaning towards trying to use a tool like webgen or webby to statically generate the site due to our current web hosting situation. Any thoughts on which approach is more appropriate? Is webgen or webby capable of doing what I am trying to do? Or can anyone recommend other web authoring tools better equipped to accomplish this? Thanks for any feedback!

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What is usefulness of W3C's "Semantic Data Extractor" in semantically correct XHTML CSS Development?

- by metal-gear-solid

What is the usefulness of W3C's Semantic Data Extractor? http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html This tool, geared by an XSLT stylesheet, tries to extract some information from a HTML semantic rich document. It only uses information available through a good usage of the semantics defined in HTML. The aim is to show that providing a semantically rich HTML gives much more value to your code: using a semantically rich HTML code allows a better use of CSS, makes your HTML intelligible to a wider range of user agents (especially search engines bots). As an aside, it can give clues to user agents developers on some hooks that could be interesting to add in their product. After checking validation for CSS and HTML. Should i go for Semantic Data Extractor tool. What it does. and how it can improved our coding.? Is anyone using it? And i check some site randomly with but with most of sites it gives error Using org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser Exception net.sf.saxon.trans.XPathException: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type "input" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "`</input>`". org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The element type "input" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "`</input>`". Is it possible to get pass every site with this tool? on one site i got this error No top-level heading (h1) found, no outline extracted. Is it necessary to have at least a H1 in any webpage?

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Sensible unit test possible?

- by nkr1pt

Could a sensible unit test be written for this code which extracts a rar archive by delegating it to a capable tool on the host system if one exists? I can write a test case based on the fact that my machine runs linux and the unrar tool is installed, but if another developer who runs windows would check out the code the test would fail, although there would be nothing wrong with the extractor code. I need to find a way to write a meaningful test which is not binded to the system and unrar tool installed. How would you tackle this? public class Extractor { private EventBus eventBus; private ExtractCommand[] linuxExtractCommands = new ExtractCommand[]{new LinuxUnrarCommand()}; private ExtractCommand[] windowsExtractCommands = new ExtractCommand[]{}; private ExtractCommand[] macExtractCommands = new ExtractCommand[]{}; @Inject public Extractor(EventBus eventBus) { this.eventBus = eventBus; } public boolean extract(DownloadCandidate downloadCandidate) { for (ExtractCommand command : getSystemSpecificExtractCommands()) { if (command.extract(downloadCandidate)) { eventBus.fireEvent(this, new ExtractCompletedEvent()); return true; } } eventBus.fireEvent(this, new ExtractFailedEvent()); return false; } private ExtractCommand[] getSystemSpecificExtractCommands() { String os = System.getProperty("os.name"); if (Pattern.compile("linux", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE).matcher(os).find()) { return linuxExtractCommands; } else if (Pattern.compile("windows", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE).matcher(os).find()) { return windowsExtractCommands; } else if (Pattern.compile("mac os x", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE).matcher(os).find()) { return macExtractCommands; } return null; } }

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C# TcpClient, getting back the entire response from a telnet device

- by Dan Bailiff

I'm writing a configuration tool for a device that can communicate via telnet. The tool sends a command via TcpClient.GetStream().Write(...), and then checks for the device response via TcpClient.GetStream().ReadByte(). This works fine in unit tests or when I'm stepping through code slowly. If I run the config tool such that it performs multiple commands consecutively, then the behavior of the read is inconsistent. By inconsistent I mean sometimes the data is missing, incomplete or partially garbled. So even though the device performed the operation and responded, my code to check for the response was unreliable. I "fixed" this problem by adding a Thread.Sleep to make sure the read method waits long enough for the device to complete its job and send back the whole response (in this case 1.5 seconds was a safe amount). I feel like this is wrong, blocking everything for a fixed time, and I wonder if there is a better way to get the read method to wait only long enough to get the whole response from the device. private string Read() { if (!tcpClient.Connected) throw (new Exception("Read() failed: Telnet connection not available.")); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); do { ParseTelnet(ref sb); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1500); } while (tcpClient.Available > 0); return sb.ToString(); } private void ParseTelnet(ref StringBuilder sb) { while (tcpClient.Available > 0) { int input = tcpClient.GetStream().ReadByte(); switch (input) { // parse the input // ... do other things in special cases default: sb.Append((char)input); break; } } }

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Git as mercurial client? Why no git-hg?

- by aapeli

This is a question that's been bothering me for a while. I've done my homework and checked stackoverflow and found at least these two topics about my question: Git for Mercurial like git-svn and Git interoperability with a Mercurial repository I've done some serious googling to solve this issue, but so far with no luck. I've also read the Git Internals book, and the Mercurial Definitive Behind the Scenes to try to figure this out. I'm still a bit puzzled why I haven't been able to find any suitable git-hg type of a tool. From my perspective hg-svn is one of the main features, why I've chosen to use git over mercurial also at work. It allows me to use a workflow I like, and nobody else needs to bother, if they don't care. I just don't see the point in using the intermediate hg repo to convert back and forth, as suggested in one of the chains. So anyway, from what I've read hg and git seem very similar in conceptual design. There are differences under the hood, but none of those should prevent creating a git client for hg. As it seems to me, remote tracking branches and octopus merges make git even more powerful than hg is. So, the real question, is there any real reason why git-hg does not exist (or at least is very hard to find)? Is there some animosity from git users (and developers) towards their hg counterparts that has caused the lack of the git-hg tool? Do any of you have any plans to develop something like this, and go public with it? I could volunteer (although with very feeble C-skills) to participate to get this done. I just don't possess the full knowledge to start this up myself. Could this be the tool to end all DVCS wars for good?

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Easily (as in WYSIWYG) customize the docbook output

- by Sukima

I've used DocBook in the past and I love the idea behind the separation of content from presentation. I am very comfortable editing XML directly. In my extensive search to find the best documenting solution for my needs I am always coming back to this one solution: DocBook - Build system (ant, make, etc.) - Output I have seen lots of information concerning the best WYSIWYG, XML, Text editors for writing DocBook including alternative markup languages like asciidoc. All these solutions focus on the creation of DocBook or the nightmare of the DocBook tool chain. No one ever addresses the Output side other then to say "Just use XSL" or "Custom scripts" When tasked to make a document or manual I don't want to worry about spending countless hours attempting to reprogram, customize, and modify the XSL, CSS, and shell scripts (i.e. O'Riely books). That is a very arduous task. My query: is there a tool that makes the customizing easier? And is there anything that could be similar to say Pages or Word in that the user creates a template and the tool chain does the rest? Attempting to do a visual task like pretty logos and fixing all the broken layouts that the default XSL comes up with (pagination is a mess) is very difficult from a text editor. Content is easy. Editing DocBook XSL was truly a nightmare when I did it in the past. I've searched and I find lots of info on XML editors but nothing on XSL editors. Or am I lacking a key understanding of the process. Thanks.

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Compiling Objective-C project on Linux (Ubuntu)

- by Alex

How to make an Objective-C project work on Ubuntu? My files are: Fraction.h #import <Foundation/NSObject.h> @interface Fraction: NSObject { int numerator; int denominator; } -(void) print; -(void) setNumerator: (int) n; -(void) setDenominator: (int) d; -(int) numerator; -(int) denominator; @end Fraction.m #import "Fraction.h" #import <stdio.h> @implementation Fraction -(void) print { printf( "%i/%i", numerator, denominator ); } -(void) setNumerator: (int) n { numerator = n; } -(void) setDenominator: (int) d { denominator = d; } -(int) denominator { return denominator; } -(int) numerator { return numerator; } @end main.m #import <stdio.h> #import "Fraction.h" int main( int argc, const char *argv[] ) { // create a new instance Fraction *frac = [[Fraction alloc] init]; // set the values [frac setNumerator: 1]; [frac setDenominator: 3]; // print it printf( "The fraction is: " ); [frac print]; printf( "\n" ); // free memory [frac release]; return 0; } I've tried two approaches to compile it: Pure gcc: $ sudo apt-get install gobjc gnustep gnustep-devel $ gcc `gnustep-config --objc-flags` -o main main.m -lobjc -lgnustep-base /tmp/ccIQKhfH.o:(.data.rel+0x0): undefined reference to `__objc_class_name_Fraction' I created a GNUmakefile Makefile: include ${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES}/common.make TOOL_NAME = main main_OBJC_FILES = main.m include ${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES}/tool.make ... and ran: $ source /usr/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh $ make Making all for tool main... Linking tool main ... ./obj/main.o:(.data.rel+0x0): undefined reference to `__objc_class_name_Fraction' So in both cases compiler gets stuck at undefined reference to `__objc_class_name_Fraction' Do you have and idea how to resolve this issue?

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Tools to document/visualize call graph?

- by Dave Griffiths

Hi, having recently joined a project with a vast amount of code to get to grips with, I would like to start documenting and visualizing some of the flows through the call graph to give me a better understanding of how everything fits together. This is what I would like to see in my ideal tool: every node is a function/method nodes are connected if one function can call another optional square box in between detailing conditions under which call is made (or a label icon you can hover over like a tooltip) also icon on edge describing parameters hover over node and description is displayed optional icons for node to display pseudo code scenario/domain view - display subset of complete diagram for particular use-case slide view mode - for each frame, the currently executing function is highlighted plenty of options over what to display to reduce on-screen clutter the interactive use of such a tool is key, I'm not looking for a Graphviz type solution because there would be too much clutter. The ability to form a view of a subset of the entire graph would be very handy (maybe with the unimportant clutter greyed out). Don't need automatic generation from source code, happy to enter it manually. Almost like a mind-map. Does that make sense? If you are not aware of such a tool, do you also think it would be useful? (Just in case I decide to go and scratch that itch one day!)

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Is there an application that can help someone create an XML document based on the Relax NG schema?

- by meowsqueak

I've spent a bit of time creating a Relax NG schema for use within our team to validate XML documents we use for exchanging information. The schema is not complicated, but it is reasonably large. I am wondering if there exists a tool that can read in such a Relax NG schema and assist a user in creating a corresponding instance document, using the schema as a template. Perhaps an application with a GUI that creates fields and drop-down selections for each part of the document? For example, the tool might create an outline XML document and prompt the user to select multiples of certain elements, fill in each field, perhaps with permitted values read directly from the schema. It might also show the user via visual feedback when their document is 'complete', or highlight validation problems as they come up. I could anticipate writing a custom GUI tool to create such an XML document, but I'd really like changes to the schema to be automatically reflected by the GUI - and I really wonder if this hasn't already been done. I know some editors can automatically validate an XML document against a schema as it's being written, but I would really like to get my users one step away from the XML so they don't have to worry about the details of the XML syntax.

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What good open source programs exist for fuzzing popular image file types?

- by JohnnySoftware

I am looking for a free, open source, portable fuzzing tool for popular image file types that is written in either Java, Python, or Jython. Ideally, it would accept specifications for the fuzzable fields using some kind of declarative constraints. Non-procedural grammar for specifying constraints are greatly preferred. Otherwise, might as well write them all in Python or whatever. Just specifying ranges of valid values or expressions for them. Ideally, it would support some kind of generative programming to export the fuzzer into various programming languages to suit cases where more customization was required. If it supported a direct-manipulation GUI for controlling parameter values and ranges, that would be nice too. The file formats that should be supported are: GIF JPEG PNG So basically, it should be sort of a toolkit consisting of ready-to-run utility, a framework or library, and be capable of generating the fuzzed files directly as well as from programs it generates. It needs to be simple so that test images can be created quickly. It should have a batch capability for creating a series of images. Creating just one at a time would be too painful. I do not want a hacking tool, just a QA tool. Basically, I just want to address concerns that it is taking too long to get commonplace image rendering/parsing libraries stable and trustworthy.

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What are the differences between mapping,binding and parsing?

- by sfrj

I am starting to learn web-services in java EE6. I did web development before, but never nothing related to web services. All is new to me and the books and the tutorials i find in the web are to technical. I started learning about .xsd schemas and also .xml. In that topic i feel confident, i understand what are the schemas used for and what validation means. Now my next step is learning about JAX-B(Java Api for XML Binding). I rode some about it and i did also some practice in my IDE. But i have lots of basic doubts, that make me stuck and cannot feel confident to continue to the next topic. Ill appreciate a lot if someone could explain me well my doubts: What does it mean mapping and what is a mapping tool? What does it mean binding and what is a binding tool? What does it mean parsing and what is a parsing tool? How is JAX-B related to mapping,binding and parsing? I am seeking for a good answer built by you, not just a copy paste from google(Ive already been online a few hours and only got confused).

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