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• Auto-Configuring SSIS Packages

  - by Davide Mauri

  SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its own configuration needs. This means that each time you have to run the package you have to pass the correct Package Configuration. I usually use XML configuration files and I also force everyone that works with me to make sure that an object that is used in several packages has the same name in all package where it is used, in order to simplify configurations usage. Connection Managers are a good example of one of those objects. For example, all the packages that needs to access to the Data Warehouse database must have a Connection Manager named DWH. Basically we define a set of “global” objects so that we can have a configuration file for them, so that it can be used by all packages. If a package as some specific configuration needs, we create a specific – or “local” – XML configuration file or we set the value that needs to be configured at runtime using DTLoggedExec’s Package Parameters: http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/Package%20Parameters.ashx Now, how we can improve this even more? I’d like to have a package that, when it’s run, automatically goes “somewhere” and search for global or local configuration, loads it and applies it to itself. That’s the basic idea of Auto-Configuring Packages. The “somewhere” is a SQL Server table, defined in this way In this table you’ll put the values that you want to be used at runtime by your package: The ConfigurationFilter column specify to which package that configuration line has to be applied. A package will use that line only if the value specified in the ConfigurationFilter column is equal to its name. In the above sample. only the package named “simple-package” will use the line number two. There is an exception here: the $$Global value indicate a configuration row that has to be applied to any package. With this simple behavior it’s possible to replicate the “global” and the “local” configuration approach I’ve described before. The ConfigurationValue contains the value you want to be applied at runtime and the PackagePath contains the object to which that value will be applied. The ConfiguredValueType column defined the data type of the value and the Checksum column is contains a calculated value that is simply the hash value of ConfigurationFilter plus PackagePath so that it can be used as a Primary Key to guarantee uniqueness of configuration rows. As you may have noticed the table is very similar to the table originally used by SSIS in order to put DTS Configuration into SQL Server tables: SQL Server SSIS Configuration Type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141682.aspx Now, how it works? It’s very easy: you just have to call DTLoggedExec with the /AC option: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /AC:"localhost;ssis_auto_configuration;ssiscfg.configuration" the AC option expects a string with the following format: <database_server>;<database_name>;<table_name>; only Windows Authentication is supported. When DTLoggedExec finds an Auto-Configuration request, it injects a new connection manager in the loaded package. The injected connection manager is named $$DTLoggedExec_AutoConfigure and is used by the two SQL Server DTS Configuration ($$DTLoggedExec_Global and $$DTLoggedExec_Local) also injected by DTLoggedExec, used to load “local” and “global” configuration. Now, you may start to wonder why this approach cannot be used without having all this stuff going around, but just passing to a package always two XML DTS Configuration files, (to have to “local” and the “global” configurations) doing something like this: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /CONF:”global.dtsConfig” /CONF:”mypackage.dtsConfig” The problem is that this approach doesn’t work if you have, in one of the two configuration file, a value that has to be applied to an object that doesn’t exists in the loaded package. This situation will raise an error that will halt package execution. To solve this problem, you may want to create a configuration file for each package. Unfortunately this will make deployment and management harder, since you’ll have to deal with a great number of configuration files. The Auto-Configuration approach solve all these problems at once! We’re using it in a project where we have hundreds of packages and I can tell you that deployment of packages and their configuration for the pre-production and production environment has never been so easy! To use the Auto-Configuration option you have to download the latest DTLoggedExec release: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218 Feedback, as usual, are very welcome!

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• IRM Item Codes &ndash; what are they for?

  - by martin.abrahams

  A number of colleagues have been asking about IRM item codes recently – what are they for, when are they useful, how can you control them to meet some customer requirements? This is quite a big topic, but this article provides a few answers. An item code is part of the metadata of every sealed document – unless you define a custom metadata model. The item code is defined when a file is sealed, and usually defaults to a timestamp/filename combination. This time/name combo tends to make item codes unique for each new document, but actually item codes are not necessarily unique, as will become clear shortly. In most scenarios, item codes are not relevant to the evaluation of a user’s rights - the context name is the critical piece of metadata, as a user typically has a role that grants access to an entire classification of information regardless of item code. This is key to the simplicity and manageability of the Oracle IRM solution. Item codes are occasionally exposed to users in the UI, but most users probably never notice and never care. Nevertheless, here is one example of where you can see an item code – when you hover the mouse pointer over a sealed file. As you see, the item code for this freshly created file combines a timestamp with the file name. But what are item codes for? The first benefit of item codes is that they enable you to manage exceptions to the policy defined for a context. Thus, I might have access to all oracle – internal files - except for 2011_03_11 13:33:29 Board Minutes.sdocx. This simple mechanism enables Oracle IRM to provide file-by-file control where appropriate, whilst offering the scalability and manageability of classification-based control for the majority of users and content. You really don’t want to be managing each file individually, but never say never. Item codes can also be used for the opposite effect – to include a file in a user’s rights when their role would ordinarily deny access. So, you can assign a role that allows access only to specified item codes. For example, my role might say that I have access to precisely one file – the one shown above. So how are item codes set? In the vast majority of scenarios, item codes are set automatically as part of the sealing process. The sealing API uses the timestamp and filename as shown, and the user need not even realise that this has happened. This automatically creates item codes that are for all practical purposes unique - and that are also intelligible to users who might want to refer to them when viewing or assigning rights in the management UI. It is also possible for suitably authorised users and applications to set the item code manually or programmatically if required. Setting the item code manually using the IRM Desktop The manual process is a simple extension of the sealing task. An authorised user can select the Advanced… sealing option, and will see a dialog that offers the option to specify the item code. To see this option, the user’s role needs the Set Item Code right – you don’t want most users to give any thought at all to item codes, so by default the option is hidden. Setting the item code programmatically A more common scenario is that an application controls the item code programmatically. For example, a document management system that seals documents as part of a workflow might set the item code to match the document’s unique identifier in its repository. This offers the option to tie IRM rights evaluation directly to the security model defined in the document management system. Again, the sealing application needs to be authorised to Set Item Code. The Payslip Scenario To give a concrete example of how item codes might be used in a real world scenario, consider a Human Resources workflow such as a payslips. The goal might be to allow the HR team to have access to all payslips, but each employee to have access only to their own payslips. To enable this, you might have an IRM classification called Payslips. The HR team have a role in the normal way that allows access to all payslips. However, each employee would have an Item Reader role that only allows them to access files that have a particular item code – and that item code might match the employee’s payroll number. So, employee number 123123123 would have access to items with that code. This shows why item codes are not necessarily unique – you can deliberately set the same code on many files for ease of administration. The employees might have the right to unseal or print their payslip, so the solution acts as a secure delivery mechanism that allows payslips to be distributed via corporate email without any fear that they might be accessed by IT administrators, or forwarded accidentally to anyone other than the intended recipient. All that remains is to ensure that as each user’s payslip is sealed, it is assigned the correct item code – something that is easily managed by a simple IRM sealing application. Each month, an employee’s payslip is sealed with the same item code, so you do not need to keep amending the list of items that the user has access to – they have access to all documents that carry their employee code.

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• A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables in SSIS

  Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be locked before they can be accessed, and then of course unlocked once you have finished with them. This is baked into SSIS, presumably to reduce the risk of race conditions, but with that comes some additional overhead in that you need to be careful to avoid lock conflicts in some scenarios. The most obvious place you will come across any hint of locking (no pun intended) is the Script Task or Script Component with their ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. These two properties allow you to enter lists of variables to be used within the task, or to put it another way, these lists of variables to be locked, so that they are available within the task. During the task pre-execute phase the variables and locked, you then use them during the execute phase when you code is run, and then unlocked for you during the post-execute phase. So by entering the variable names in one of the two list, the locking is taken care of for you, and you just read and write to the Dts.Variables collection that is exposed in the task for the purpose. As you can see in the image above, the variable PackageInt is specified, which means when I write the code inside that task I don’t have to worry about locking at all, as shown below. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new Dts.Variables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } As you can see as well as accessing the variable, hassle free, I also raise an event. Now consider a scenario where I have an event hander as well as shown below. Now what if my event handler uses tries to use the same variable as well? Well obviously for the point of this post, it fails with the error quoted previously. The reason why is clearly illustrated if you consider the following sequence of events. Package execution starts Script Task in Control Flow starts Script Task in Control Flow locks the PackageInt variable as specified in the ReadWriteVariables property Script Task in Control Flow executes script, and the On Information event is raised The On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler attempts to lock the PackageInt variable (for either read or write it doesn’t matter), but will fail because the variable is already locked. The problem is caused by the event handler task trying to use a variable that is already locked by the task in Control Flow. Events are always raised synchronously, therefore the task in Control Flow that is raising the event will not regain control until the event handler has completed, so we really do have un-resolvable locking conflict, better known as a deadlock. In this scenario we can easily resolve the problem by managing the variable locking explicitly in code, so no need to specify anything for the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new, with explicit lock control Variables lockedVariables = null; Dts.VariableDispenser.LockOneForWrite("PackageInt", ref lockedVariables); lockedVariables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; lockedVariables.Unlock(); // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } Now the package will execute successfully because the variable lock has already been released by the time the event is raised, so no conflict occurs. For those of you with a SQL Engine background this should all sound strangely familiar, and boils down to getting in and out as fast as you can to reduce the risk of lock contention, be that SQL pages or SSIS variables. Unfortunately we cannot always manage the locking ourselves. The Execute SQL Task is very often used in conjunction with variables, either to pass in parameter values or get results out. Either way the task will manage the locking for you, and will fail when it cannot lock the variables it requires. The scenario outlined above is clear cut deadlock scenario, both parties are waiting on each other, so it is un-resolvable. The mechanism used within SSIS isn’t actually that clever, and whilst the message says it is a deadlock, it really just means it tried a few times, and then gave up. The last part of the error message is actually the most accurate in terms of the failure, A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out.  Now this may come across as a recommendation to always manage locking manually in the Script Task or Script Component yourself, but I think that would be an overreaction. It is more of a reminder to be aware that in high concurrency scenarios, especially when sharing variables across multiple objects, locking is important design consideration. Update – Make sure you don’t try and use explicit locking as well as leaving the variable names in the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables lock lists otherwise you’ll get the deadlock error, you cannot lock a variable twice!

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• Telerik Releases a new Visual Entity Designer

  Love LINQ to SQL but are concerned that it is a second class citizen? Need to connect to more databases other than SQL Server? Think that the Entity Framework is too complex? Want a domain model designer for data access that is easy, yet powerful? Then the Telerik Visual Entity Designer is for you. Built on top of Telerik OpenAccess ORM, a very mature and robust product, Teleriks Visual Entity Designer is a new way to build your domain model that is very powerful and also real easy to use. How easy? Ill show you here. First Look: Using the Telerik Visual Entity Designer To get started, you need to install the Telerik OpenAccess ORM Q1 release for Visual Studio 2008 or 2010. You dont need to use any of the Telerik OpenAccess wizards, designers, or using statements. Just right click on your project and select Add|New Item from the context menu. Choose Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model from the Visual Studio project templates. (Note to existing OpenAccess users, dont run the Enable ORM wizard or any other OpenAccess menu unless you are building OpenAccess Entities.) You will then have to specify the database backend (SQL Server, SQL Azure, Oracle, MySQL, etc) and connection. After you establish your connection, select the database objects you want to add to your domain model. You can also name your model, by default it will be NameofyourdatabaseEntityDiagrams. You can click finish here if you are comfortable, or tweak some advanced settings. Many users of domain models like to add prefixes and suffixes to classes, fields, and properties as well as handle pluralization. I personally accept the defaults, however, I hate how DBAs force underscores on me, so I click on the option to remove them. You can also tweak your namespace, mapping options, and define your own code generation template to gain further control over the outputted code. This is a very powerful feature, but for now, I will just accept the defaults.   When we click finish, you can see your domain model as a file with the .rlinq extension in the Solution Explorer. You can also bring up the visual designer to view or further tweak your model by double clicking on the model in the Solution Explorer.  Time to use the model! Writing a LINQ Query Programming against the domain model is very simple using LINQ. Just set a reference to the model (line 12 of the code below) and write a standard LINQ statement (lines 14-16).  (OpenAccess users: notice the you dont need any using statements for OpenAccess or an IObjectScope, just raw LINQ against your model.) 1: using System; 2: using System.Linq; 3: //no need for anOpenAccess using statement 4:   5: namespace ConsoleApplication3 6: { 7: class Program 8: { 9: static void Main(string[] args) 10: { 11: //a reference tothe data context 12: NorthwindEntityDiagrams dat = new NorthwindEntityDiagrams(); 13: //LINQ Statement 14: var result = from c in dat.Customers 15: where c.Country == "Germany" 16: select c; 17:   18: //Print out the company name 19: foreach (var cust in result) 20: { 21: Console.WriteLine("CompanyName: " + cust.CompanyName); 22: } 23: //keep the consolewindow open 24: Console.Read(); 25: } 26: } 27: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Lines 19-24 loop through the result of our LINQ query and displays the results. Thats it! All of the super powerful features of OpenAccess are available to you to further enhance your experience, however, in most cases this is all you need. In future posts I will show how to use the Visual Designer with some other scenarios. Stay tuned. Enjoy! Technorati Tags: Telerik,OpenAccess,LINQ Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Reading train stop display names from a resource bundle

  - by Frank Nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} In Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1, you set the display name of a train stop of an ADF bounded task flow train model by using the Oracle JDeveloper Structure Window. To do so Double-click onto the bounded task flow configuration file (XML) located in the Application Navigator so the task flow diagram open In the task flow diagram, select the view activity node for which you want to define the display name. In the Structure Window., expand the view activity node and then the train-stop node therein Add the display name element by using the right-click context menu on the train-stop node, selecting Insert inside train-stop > Display Name Edit the Display Name value with the Property Inspector Following the steps outlined above, you can define static display names – like "PF1" for page fragment 1 shown in the image below - for train stops to show at runtime. In the following, I explain how you can change the static display string to a dynamic string that reads the display label from a resource bundle so train stop labels can be internationalized. There are different strategies available for managing message bundles within an Oracle JDeveloper project. In this blog entry, I decided to build and configure the default properties file as indicated by the projects properties. To learn about the suggested file name and location, open the JDeveloper project properties (use a right mouse click on the project node in the Application Navigator and choose Project Properties. Select the Resource Bundle node to see the suggested name and location for the default message bundle. Note that this is the resource bundle that Oracle JDeveloper would automatically create when you assign a text resource to an ADF Faces component in a page. For the train stop display name, we need to create the message bundle manually as there is no context menu help available in Oracle JDeveloper. For this, use a right mouse click on the JDeveloper project and choose New | General | File from the menu and in the opened dialog. Specify the message bundle file name as the name looked up before in the project properties Resource Bundle option. Also, ensure that the file is saved in a directory structure that matches the package structure shown in the Resource Bundle dialog. For example, you would save the properties file in the View Project's src > adf > sample directory if the package structure was "adf.sample" (adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle). Edit the properties file and define key – values pairs for the train stop component. In the sample, such key value pairs are TrainStop1=Train Stop 1 TrainStop2=Train Stop 2 TrainStop3=Train Stop 3 Next, double click the faces-config.xml file and switch the opened editor to the Overview tab. Select the Application category and press the green plus icon next to the Resource Bundle section. Define the resource bundle Base Name as the package and properties file name, for example adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle Finally, define a variable name for the message bundle so the bundle can be accessed from Expression Language. For this blog example, the name is chosen as "messageBundle". <resource-bundle>   <base-name>adf.sample.ViewControllerBundle</base-name>   <var>messageBundle</var> </resource-bundle> Next, select the display-name element in the train stop node (similar to when creating the display name) and use the Property Inspector to change the static display string to an EL expression referencing the message bundle. For example: #{messageBundle.TrainStop1} At runtime, the train stops now show display names read from a message bundle (the properties file).

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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• Some New .NET Downloads and Resources

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit.  It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft.  The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of.  The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today.  Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)?  Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox).   With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target.  Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks.  Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment.  This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight.  You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model.   Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here.  You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/.   This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform.  If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs.  You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others.  Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies.  By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done.  Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need.  I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities.  Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results.  First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from.  For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings.  All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sam Drake

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• How to Apply a Business Card Template to a Contact and Customize it in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you want to add a business card template to an existing contact in Outlook, you can do so without having to enter all of the information again. We will also show you how to customize the layout and format of the text on the card. Microsoft provides a couple of business card templates you can use. We will use their Blue Sky template as an example. To open the archive file for the template you downloaded, double-click on the .cab file. NOTE: You can also use a tool like 7-Zip to open the archive. A new Extract tab becomes available under Compressed Folder Tools and the files in the archive are listed. Select the .vcf file in the list of files. This automatically activates the Extract tab. Click Extract To and select a location or select Choose location if the desired location is not on the drop-down menu. Select a folder in which you want to save the .vcf file on the Copy Items dialog box and click Copy. NOTE: Use the Make New Folder button to create a new folder for the location, if desired. Double-click on the .vcf file that you copied out of the .cab archive file. By default, .vcf files are associated with Outlook so, when you double-click on a .vcf file, it automatically opens in a Contact window in Outlook. Change the Full Name to match the existing contact to which you want to apply this template. Delete the other contact info from the template. If you want to add any additional information not in the existing contact, enter it. Click Save & Close to save the contact with the new template. The Duplicate Contact Detected dialog box displays. To update the existing contact, select the Update information of selected Contact option. Click Update. NOTE: If you want to create a new contact from this template, select the Add new contact option. With the Contacts folder open (the People link on the Navigation Bar), click Business Card in the Current View section of the Home tab. You may notice that not all the fields from your contact display on the business card you just updated. Double-click on the contact to update the contact and the business card. On the Contact window, right-click on the image of the business card and select Edit Business Card from the popup menu. The Edit Business Card dialog box displays. You can change the design of the card, including changing he background color or image. The Fields box allows you to specify which fields display on the business card and in what order. Notice, in our example, that Company is listed below the Full Name, but no text displays on the business card below the name. That’s because we did not enter any information for Company in the Contact. We have information in Job Title. So, we select Company and click Remove to remove that field. Now, we want to add Job Title. First, select the field below which you want to add the new field. We select Full Name to add the Job Title below that. Then, we click Add and select Organization | Job Title from the popup menu to insert the Job Title. To make the Job Title white like the name, we select Job Title in the list of Fields and click the Font Color button in the Edit section. On the Color dialog box, select the color you want to use for the text in the selected field. Click OK. You can also make text bold, italic, or underlined. We chose to make the Job Title bold and the Full Name bold and italic. We also need to remove the Business Phone because this contact only has a mobile phone number. So, we add a Mobile Phone from the Phone submenu. Then, we need to remove enough blank lines so the Mobile Phone is visible on the card. We also added a website and email address and removed more blank lines so they are visible. You can also move text to the right side of the card or make it centered on the card. We also changed the color of the bottom three lines to blue. Click OK to accept your changes and close the dialog box. Your new business card design displays on the Contact window. Click Save & Close to save the changes you made to the business card for this contact and close the Contact window. The final design of the business card displays in the Business Card view on the People screen. If you have a signature that contains the business card for the contact you just updated, you will also need to update the signature by removing the business card and adding it again using the Business Card button in the Signature editor. You can also add the updated Business Card to a signature without the image or without the vCard (.vcf) file.     

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• Five development tools I can't live without

  - by bconlon

  When applying to join Geeks with Blogs I had to specify the development tools I use every day. That got me thinking, it's taken a long time to whittle my tools of choice down to the selection I use, so it might be worth sharing. Before I begin, I appreciate we all have our preferred development tools, but these are the ones that work for me. Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio has been my development tool of choice for more years than I care to remember. I first used this when it was Visual C++ 1.5 (hats off to those who started on 1.0) and by 2.2 it had everything I needed from a C++ IDE. Versions 4 and 5 followed and if I had to guess I would expect more Windows applications are written in VC++ 6 and VB6 than any other language. Then came the not so great versions Visual Studio .Net 2002 (7.0) and 2003 (7.1). If I'm honest I was still using v6. 2005 was better and 2008 was simply brilliant. Everything worked, the compiler was super fast and I was happy again...then came 2010...oh dear. 2010 is a big step backwards for me. It's not encouraging for my upcoming WPF exploits that 2010 is fronted in WPF technology, with the forever growing Find/Replace dialog, the issues with C++ intellisense, and the buggy debugger. That said it is still my tool of choice but I hope they sort the issue in SP1. I've tried other IDEs like Visual Age and Eclipse, but for me Visual Studio is the best. A really great tool. Liquid XML Studio XML development is a tricky business. The W3C standards are often difficult to get to the bottom of so it's great to have a graphical tool to help. I first used Liquid Technologies 5 or 6 years back when I needed to process XML data in C++. Their excellent XML Data Binding tool has an easy to use Wizard UI (as compared to Castor or JAXB command line tools) and allows you to generate code from an XML Schema. So instead of having to deal with untyped nodes like with a DOM parser, instead you get an Object Model providing a custom API in C++, C#, VB etc. More recently they developed a graphical XML IDE with XML Editor, XSLT, XQuery debugger and other XML tools. So now I can develop an XML Schema graphically, click a button to generate a Sample XML document, and click another button to run the Wizard to generate code including a Sample Application that will then load my Sample XML document into the generated object model. This is a very cool toolset. Note: XML Data Binding is nothing to do with WPF Data Binding, but I hope to cover both in more detail another time. .Net Reflector Note: I've just noticed that starting form the end of February 2011 this will no longer be a free tool !! .Net Reflector turns .Net byte code back into C# source code. But how can it work this magic? Well the clue is in the name, it uses reflection to inspect a compiled .Net assembly. The assembly is compiled to byte code, it doesn't get compiled to native machine code until its needed using a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The byte code still has all of the information needed to see classes, variables. methods and properties, so reflector gathers this information and puts it in a handy tree. I have used .Net Reflector for years in order to understand what the .Net Framework is doing as it sometimes has undocumented, quirky features. This really has been invaluable in certain instances and I cannot praise enough kudos on the original developer Lutz Roeder. Smart Assembly In order to stop nosy geeks looking at our code using a tool like .Net Reflector, we need to obfuscate (mess up) the byte code. Smart Assembly is a tool that does this. Again I have used this for a long time. It is very quick and easy to use. Another excellent tool. Coincidentally, .Net Reflector and Smart Assembly are now both owned by Red Gate. Again kudos goes to the original developer Jean-Sebastien Lange. TortoiseSVN SVN (Apache Subversion) is a Source Control System developed as an open source project. TortoiseSVN is a graphical UI wrapper over SVN that hooks into Windows Explorer to enable files to be Updated, Committed, Merged etc. from the right click menu. This is an essential tool for keeping my hard work safe! Many years ago I used Microsoft Source Safe and I disliked CVS type systems. But TortoiseSVN is simply the best source control tool I have ever used. --- So there you have it, my top 5 development tools that I use (nearly) every day and have helped to make my working life a little easier. I'm sure there are other great tools that I wish I used but have never heard of, but if you have not used any of the above, I would suggest you check them out as they are all very, very cool products. #

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• Bulk inserting best way to about it? + Helping me understand fully what I found so far

  - by chobo2

  Hi So I saw this post here and read it and it seems like bulk copy might be the way to go. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/682015/whats-the-best-way-to-bulk-database-inserts-from-c I still have some questions and want to know how things actually work. So I found 2 tutorials. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx First way uses 2 ado.net 2.0 features. BulkInsert and BulkCopy. the second one uses linq to sql and OpenXML. This sort of appeals to me as I am using linq to sql already and prefer it over ado.net. However as one person pointed out in the posts what he just going around the issue at the cost of performance( nothing wrong with that in my opinion) First I will talk about the 2 ways in the first tutorial I am using VS2010 Express, .net 4.0, MVC 2.0, SQl Server 2005 Is ado.net 2.0 the most current version? Based on the technology I am using, is there some updates to what I am going to show that would improve it somehow? Is there any thing that these tutorial left out that I should know about? BulkInsert I am using this table for all the examples. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TBL_TEST_TEST] ( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, [NAME] [varchar](50) ) SP Code USE [Test] GO /****** Object: StoredProcedure [dbo].[sp_BatchInsert] Script Date: 05/19/2010 15:12:47 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_BatchInsert] (@Name VARCHAR(50) ) AS BEGIN INSERT INTO TBL_TEST_TEST VALUES (@Name); END C# Code /// <summary> /// Another ado.net 2.0 way that uses a stored procedure to do a bulk insert. /// Seems slower then "BatchBulkCopy" way and it crashes when you try to insert 500,000 records in one go. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchInsert() { // Get the DataTable with Rows State as RowState.Added DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString); SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("sp_BatchInsert", connection); command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; command.UpdatedRowSource = UpdateRowSource.None; // Set the Parameter with appropriate Source Column Name command.Parameters.Add("@Name", SqlDbType.VarChar, 50, dtInsertRows.Columns[0].ColumnName); SqlDataAdapter adpt = new SqlDataAdapter(); adpt.InsertCommand = command; // Specify the number of records to be Inserted/Updated in one go. Default is 1. adpt.UpdateBatchSize = 1000; connection.Open(); int recordsInserted = adpt.Update(dtInsertRows); connection.Close(); } So first thing is the batch size. Why would you set a batch size to anything but the number of records you are sending? Like I am sending 500,000 records so I did a Batch size of 500,000. Next why does it crash when I do this? If I set it to 1000 for batch size it works just fine. System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was unhandled Message="A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.)" Source=".Net SqlClient Data Provider" ErrorCode=-2146232060 Class=20 LineNumber=0 Number=233 Server="" State=0 StackTrace: at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatusErrors(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatus(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataRow[] dataRows, DataTableMapping tableMapping) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdateFromDataTable(DataTable dataTable, DataTableMapping tableMapping) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataTable dataTable) at TestIQueryable.Program.BatchInsert() in C:\Users\a\Downloads\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\Program.cs:line 124 at TestIQueryable.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Users\a\Downloads\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\Program.cs:line 16 InnerException: Time it took to insert 500,000 records with insert batch size of 1000 took "2 mins and 54 seconds" Of course this is no official time I sat there with a stop watch( I am sure there are better ways but was too lazy to look what they where) So I find that kinda slow compared to all my other ones(expect the linq to sql insert one) and I am not really sure why. Next I looked at bulkcopy /// <summary> /// An ado.net 2.0 way to mass insert records. This seems to be the fastest. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchBulkCopy() { // Get the DataTable DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); using (SqlBulkCopy sbc = new SqlBulkCopy(connectionString, SqlBulkCopyOptions.KeepIdentity)) { sbc.DestinationTableName = "TBL_TEST_TEST"; // Number of records to be processed in one go sbc.BatchSize = 500000; // Map the Source Column from DataTabel to the Destination Columns in SQL Server 2005 Person Table // sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("ID", "ID"); sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("NAME", "NAME"); // Number of records after which client has to be notified about its status sbc.NotifyAfter = dtInsertRows.Rows.Count; // Event that gets fired when NotifyAfter number of records are processed. sbc.SqlRowsCopied += new SqlRowsCopiedEventHandler(sbc_SqlRowsCopied); // Finally write to server sbc.WriteToServer(dtInsertRows); sbc.Close(); } } This one seemed to go really fast and did not even need a SP( can you use SP with bulk copy? If you can would it be better?) BatchCopy had no problem with a 500,000 batch size.So again why make it smaller then the number of records you want to send? I found that with BatchCopy and 500,000 batch size it took only 5 seconds to complete. I then tried with a batch size of 1,000 and it only took 8 seconds. So much faster then the bulkinsert one above. Now I tried the other tutorial. USE [Test] GO /****** Object: StoredProcedure [dbo].[spTEST_InsertXMLTEST_TEST] Script Date: 05/19/2010 15:39:03 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[spTEST_InsertXMLTEST_TEST](@UpdatedProdData nText) AS DECLARE @hDoc int exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT,@UpdatedProdData INSERT INTO TBL_TEST_TEST(NAME) SELECT XMLProdTable.NAME FROM OPENXML(@hDoc, 'ArrayOfTBL_TEST_TEST/TBL_TEST_TEST', 2) WITH ( ID Int, NAME varchar(100) ) XMLProdTable EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc C# code. /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to make the table objects. /// It is then serailzed to to an xml document and sent to a stored proedure /// that then does a bulk insert(I think with OpenXML) /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertXMLBatch() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { TBL_TEST_TEST[] testRecords = new TBL_TEST_TEST[500000]; for (int count = 0; count < 500000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; testRecords[count] = testRecord; } StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder(); System.IO.StringWriter sWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sBuilder); XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TBL_TEST_TEST[])); serializer.Serialize(sWriter, testRecords); db.insertTestData(sBuilder.ToString()); } } So I like this because I get to use objects even though it is kinda redundant. I don't get how the SP works. Like I don't get the whole thing. I don't know if OPENXML has some batch insert under the hood but I do not even know how to take this example SP and change it to fit my tables since like I said I don't know what is going on. I also don't know what would happen if the object you have more tables in it. Like say I have a ProductName table what has a relationship to a Product table or something like that. In linq to sql you could get the product name object and make changes to the Product table in that same object. So I am not sure how to take that into account. I am not sure if I would have to do separate inserts or what. The time was pretty good for 500,000 records it took 52 seconds The last way of course was just using linq to do it all and it was pretty bad. /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to to insert lots of records. /// This way is slow as it uses no mass insert. /// Only tried to insert 50,000 records as I did not want to sit around till it did 500,000 records. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertAll() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { db.CommandTimeout = 600; for (int count = 0; count < 50000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; db.TBL_TEST_TESTs.InsertOnSubmit(testRecord); } db.SubmitChanges(); } } I did only 50,000 records and that took over a minute to do. So I really narrowed it done to the linq to sql bulk insert way or bulk copy. I am just not sure how to do it when you have relationship for either way. I am not sure how they both stand up when doing updates instead of inserts as I have not gotten around to try it yet. I don't think I will ever need to insert/update more than 50,000 records at one type but at the same time I know I will have to do validation on records before inserting so that will slow it down and that sort of makes linq to sql nicer as your got objects especially if your first parsing data from a xml file before you insert into the database. Full C# code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Xml.Serialization; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; namespace TestIQueryable { class Program { private static string connectionString = ""; static void Main(string[] args) { BatchInsert(); Console.WriteLine("done"); } /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to to insert lots of records. /// This way is slow as it uses no mass insert. /// Only tried to insert 50,000 records as I did not want to sit around till it did 500,000 records. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertAll() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { db.CommandTimeout = 600; for (int count = 0; count < 50000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; db.TBL_TEST_TESTs.InsertOnSubmit(testRecord); } db.SubmitChanges(); } } /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to make the table objects. /// It is then serailzed to to an xml document and sent to a stored proedure /// that then does a bulk insert(I think with OpenXML) /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertXMLBatch() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { TBL_TEST_TEST[] testRecords = new TBL_TEST_TEST[500000]; for (int count = 0; count < 500000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; testRecords[count] = testRecord; } StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder(); System.IO.StringWriter sWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sBuilder); XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TBL_TEST_TEST[])); serializer.Serialize(sWriter, testRecords); db.insertTestData(sBuilder.ToString()); } } /// <summary> /// An ado.net 2.0 way to mass insert records. This seems to be the fastest. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchBulkCopy() { // Get the DataTable DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); using (SqlBulkCopy sbc = new SqlBulkCopy(connectionString, SqlBulkCopyOptions.KeepIdentity)) { sbc.DestinationTableName = "TBL_TEST_TEST"; // Number of records to be processed in one go sbc.BatchSize = 500000; // Map the Source Column from DataTabel to the Destination Columns in SQL Server 2005 Person Table // sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("ID", "ID"); sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("NAME", "NAME"); // Number of records after which client has to be notified about its status sbc.NotifyAfter = dtInsertRows.Rows.Count; // Event that gets fired when NotifyAfter number of records are processed. sbc.SqlRowsCopied += new SqlRowsCopiedEventHandler(sbc_SqlRowsCopied); // Finally write to server sbc.WriteToServer(dtInsertRows); sbc.Close(); } } /// <summary> /// Another ado.net 2.0 way that uses a stored procedure to do a bulk insert. /// Seems slower then "BatchBulkCopy" way and it crashes when you try to insert 500,000 records in one go. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchInsert() { // Get the DataTable with Rows State as RowState.Added DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString); SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("sp_BatchInsert", connection); command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; command.UpdatedRowSource = UpdateRowSource.None; // Set the Parameter with appropriate Source Column Name command.Parameters.Add("@Name", SqlDbType.VarChar, 50, dtInsertRows.Columns[0].ColumnName); SqlDataAdapter adpt = new SqlDataAdapter(); adpt.InsertCommand = command; // Specify the number of records to be Inserted/Updated in one go. Default is 1. adpt.UpdateBatchSize = 500000; connection.Open(); int recordsInserted = adpt.Update(dtInsertRows); connection.Close(); } private static DataTable GetDataTable() { // You First need a DataTable and have all the insert values in it DataTable dtInsertRows = new DataTable(); dtInsertRows.Columns.Add("NAME"); for (int i = 0; i < 500000; i++) { DataRow drInsertRow = dtInsertRows.NewRow(); string name = "Name : " + i; drInsertRow["NAME"] = name; dtInsertRows.Rows.Add(drInsertRow); } return dtInsertRows; } static void sbc_SqlRowsCopied(object sender, SqlRowsCopiedEventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine("Number of records affected : " + e.RowsCopied.ToString()); } } }

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• A Basic Thread

  - by Joe Mayo

  Most of the programs written are single-threaded, meaning that they run on the main execution thread. For various reasons such as performance, scalability, and/or responsiveness additional threads can be useful. .NET has extensive threading support, from the basic threads introduced in v1.0 to the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in v4.0. To get started with threads, it's helpful to begin with the basics; starting a Thread. Why Do I Care? The scenario I'll use for needing to use a thread is writing to a file.  Sometimes, writing to a file takes a while and you don't want your user interface to lock up until the file write is done. In other words, you want the application to be responsive to the user. How Would I Go About It? The solution is to launch a new thread that performs the file write, allowing the main thread to return to the user right away.  Whenever the file writing thread completes, it will let the user know.  In the meantime, the user is free to interact with the program for other tasks. The following examples demonstrate how to do this. Show Me the Code? The code we'll use to work with threads is in the System.Threading namespace, so you'll need the following using directive at the top of the file: using System.Threading; When you run code on a thread, the code is specified via a method.  Here's the code that will execute on the thread: private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written."); } The call to Thread.Sleep(1000) delays thread execution. The parameter is specified in milliseconds, and 1000 means that this will cause the program to sleep for approximately 1 second.  This method happens to be static, but that's just part of this example, which you'll see is launched from the static Main method.  A thread could be instance or static.  Notice that the method does not have parameters and does not have a return type. As you know, the way to refer to a method is via a delegate.  There is a delegate named ThreadStart in System.Threading that refers to a method without parameters or return type, shown below: ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); I'll show you the whole program below, but the ThreadStart instance above goes in the Main method. The thread uses the ThreadStart instance, fileWriterHandlerDelegate, to specify the method to execute on the thread: Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); As shown above, the argument type for the Thread constructor is the ThreadStart delegate type. The fileWriterHandlerDelegate argument is an instance of the ThreadStart delegate type. This creates an instance of a thread and what code will execute, but the new thread instance, fileWriter, isn't running yet. You have to explicitly start it, like this: fileWriter.Start(); Now, the code in the WriteFile method is executing on a separate thread. Meanwhile, the main thread that started the fileWriter thread continues on it's own.  You have two threads running at the same time. Okay, I'm Starting to Get Glassy Eyed. How Does it All Fit Together? The example below is the whole program, pulling all the previous bits together. It's followed by its output and an explanation. using System; using System.Threading; namespace BasicThread { class Program { static void Main() { ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); Console.WriteLine("Starting FileWriter"); fileWriter.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Called FileWriter"); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written"); } } } And here's the output: Starting FileWriter Called FileWriter File Written So, Why are the Printouts Backwards? The output above corresponds to Console.Writeline statements in the program, with the second and third seemingly reversed. In a single-threaded program, "File Written" would print before "Called FileWriter". However, this is a multi-threaded (2 or more threads) program.  In multi-threading, you can't make any assumptions about when a given thread will run.  In this case, I added the Sleep statement to the WriteFile method to greatly increase the chances that the message from the main thread will print first. Without the Thread.Sleep, you could run this on a system with multiple cores and/or multiple processors and potentially get different results each time. Interesting Tangent but What Should I Get Out of All This? Going back to the main point, launching the WriteFile method on a separate thread made the program more responsive.  The file writing logic ran for a while, but the main thread returned to the user, as demonstrated by the print out of "Called FileWriter".  When the file write finished, it let the user know via another print statement. This was a very efficient use of CPU resources that made for a more pleasant user experience. Joe

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Getting Caller Information

  - by James Michael Hare

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2013/07/25/c.net-little-wonders-getting-caller-information.aspx Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. There are times when it is desirable to know who called the method or property you are currently executing.  Some applications of this could include logging libraries, or possibly even something more advanced that may server up different objects depending on who called the method. In the past, we mostly relied on the System.Diagnostics namespace and its classes such as StackTrace and StackFrame to see who our caller was, but now in C# 5, we can also get much of this data at compile-time. Determining the caller using the stack One of the ways of doing this is to examine the call stack.  The classes that allow you to examine the call stack have been around for a long time and can give you a very deep view of the calling chain all the way back to the beginning for the thread that has called you. You can get caller information by either instantiating the StackTrace class (which will give you the complete stack trace, much like you see when an exception is generated), or by using StackFrame which gets a single frame of the stack trace.  Both involve examining the call stack, which is a non-trivial task, so care should be done not to do this in a performance-intensive situation. For our simple example let's say we are going to recreate the wheel and construct our own logging framework.  Perhaps we wish to create a simple method Log which will log the string-ified form of an object and some information about the caller.  We could easily do this as follows: 1: static void Log(object message) 2: { 3: // frame 1, true for source info 4: StackFrame frame = new StackFrame(1, true); 5: var method = frame.GetMethod(); 6: var fileName = frame.GetFileName(); 7: var lineNumber = frame.GetFileLineNumber(); 8: 9: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 10: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 11: fileName, lineNumber, method.Name, message); 12: } So, what we are doing here is grabbing the 2nd stack frame (the 1st is our current method) using a 2nd argument of true to specify we want source information (if available) and then taking the information from the frame.  This works fine, and if we tested it out by calling from a file such as this: 1: // File c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs 2:  3: public class CallerInfo 4: { 5: Log("Hello Logger!"); 6: } We'd see this: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! This works well, and in fact CallStack and StackFrame are still the best ways to examine deeper into the call stack.  But if you only want to get information on the caller of your method, there is another option… Determining the caller at compile-time In C# 5 (.NET 4.5) they added some attributes that can be supplied to optional parameters on a method to receive caller information.  These attributes can only be applied to methods with optional parameters with explicit defaults.  Then, as the compiler determines who is calling your method with these attributes, it will fill in the values at compile-time. These are the currently supported attributes available in the  System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace": CallerFilePathAttribute – The path and name of the file that is calling your method. CallerLineNumberAttribute – The line number in the file where your method is being called. CallerMemberName – The member that is calling your method. So let’s take a look at how our Log method would look using these attributes instead: 1: static int Log(object message, 2: [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", 3: [CallerFilePath] string fileName = "", 4: [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0) 5: { 6: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 7: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 8: fileName, lineNumber, memberName, message); 9: } Again, calling this from our sample Main would give us the same result: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! However, though this seems the same, there are a few key differences. First of all, there are only 3 supported attributes (at this time) that give you the file path, line number, and calling member.  Thus, it does not give you as rich of detail as a StackFrame (which can give you the calling type as well and deeper frames, for example).  Also, these are supported through optional parameters, which means we could call our new Log method like this: 1: // They're defaults, why not fill 'em in 2: Log("My message.", "Some member", "Some file", -13); In addition, since these attributes require optional parameters, they cannot be used in properties, only in methods. These caveats aside, they do let you get similar information inside of methods at a much greater speed!  How much greater?  Well lets crank through 1,000,000 iterations of each.  instead of logging to console, I’ll return the formatted string length of each.  Doing this, we get: 1: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with StackTrace: 5096 ms 2: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with Attributes: 196 ms So you see, using the attributes is much, much faster!  Nearly 25x faster in fact.  Summary There are a few ways to get caller information for a method.  The StackFrame allows you to get a comprehensive set of information spanning the whole call stack, but at a heavier cost.  On the other hand, the attributes allow you to quickly get at caller information baked in at compile-time, but to do so you need to create optional parameters in your methods to support it. Technorati Tags: Little Wonders,CSharp,C#,.NET,StackFrame,CallStack,CallerFilePathAttribute,CallerLineNumberAttribute,CallerMemberName

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• Part 8: How to name EBS Customizations

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  You might wonder why I am discussing this here. The reason is simple: nearly every project has a bit different naming conventions, which makes a the life always a bit complicated (for developers, but also setup responsible, and also for consultants).  Although we always create a document to describe the technical object naming conventions, I have rarely seen a dedicated document  with functional naming conventions. To be precisely, from my stand point, there should always be one global naming definition for an implementation! Let me discuss some related questions: What is the best convention for the customization reference? How to name database objects (tables, packages etc.)? How to name functional objects like Value Sets, Concurrent Programs, etc. How to separate customizations from standard objects best? What is the best convention for the customization reference? The customization reference is the key you use to reference your customization from other lists, from the project plan etc. Usually it is something like XXHU_CONV_22 (HU=customer abbreviation, CONV=Conversion object #22) or XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02 (FA=Fixed Assets, DEPRN=Short object group, here depreciation, RPT=Report, 02=2nd report in this area) As this is just a reference (not an object name yet), I would prefer the second option. XX=Customization, FA=Main EBS Module linked (you may have sometimes more, but FA is the main) DEPRN_RPT=Short name to specify the customization 02=a unique number Important here is that the HU isn’t used, because XX is enough to mark a custom object, and the 3rd+4th char can be used by the EBS module short name. How to name database objects (tables, packages etc.)? I was leading different developer teams, and I know that one common way is it to take the Customization reference and add more chars behind to classify the object (like _V for view and _T1 for triggers etc.). The only concern I have with this approach is the reusability. If you name your view XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02_V, no one will by choice reuse this nice view, as it seams to be specific for this CEMLI. My suggestion is rather to name the view XXFA_DEPRN_PERIODS_V and allow herewith reusability for other CEMLIs (although the view will be deployed primarily with CEMLI package XXFA_DEPRN_RPT_02). (check also one of the following Blogs where I will talk about deployment.) How to name Value Sets, Concurrent Programs, etc. For Value Sets I would go with the same convention as for database objects, starting with XX<Module> …. For Concurrent Programs the situation is a bit different. This “object” is seen and used by a lot of users, and they will search for. In many projects it is common to start again with the company short name, or with XX. My proposal would differ. If you have created your own report and you name it “XX: Invoice Report”, the user has to remember that this report does not start with “I”, it starts with X. Would you like typing an X if you are looking for an Invoice report? No, you wouldn’t! So my advise would be to name it:   “Invoice Report (XXAP)”. Still we know it is custom (because of the XXAP), but the end user will type the key “i” to get it (and will see similar reports starting also with “i”). I hope that the general schema behind has now become obvious. How to separate customizations from standard objects best? I would not have this section here if the naming would not play an important role. Unfortunately, we can not always link a custom application to our own object, therefore the naming is really important. In the file system structure we use our $XXyy_TOP, in JAVA_TOP it is perhaps also “xx” in front. But in the database itself? Although there are different concepts in place, still many implementations are using the standard “apps” approach, means custom objects are stored in the apps schema (which should not cause any trouble). Final advise: review the naming conventions regularly, once a month. You may have to add more! And, publish them! To summarize: Technical and functional customized objects should always follow a naming convention. This naming convention should be project wide, and only one place shall be used to maintain (like in a Wiki). If the name is for the end user, rather put a customization identifier at the end; if it is an internal name, start with XX…

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

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• Access Control Service V2 and Facebook Integration

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I haven’t been blogging about ACS2 in the past because it was not released and I was kinda busy with other stuff. Needless to say I spent quite some time with ACS2 already (both in customer situations as well as in the classroom and at conferences). ACS2 rocks! It’s IMHO the most interesting and useful (and most unique) part of the whole Azure offering! For my talk at VSLive yesterday, I played a little with the Facebook integration. See Steve’s post on the general setup. One claim that you get back from Facebook is an access token. This token can be used to directly talk to Facebook and query additional properties about the user. Which properties you have access to depends on which authorization your Facebook app requests. You can specify this in the identity provider registration page for Facebook in ACS2. In my example I added access to the home town property of the user. Once you have the access token from ACS you can use e.g. the Facebook SDK from Codeplex (also available via NuGet) to talk to the Facebook API. In my sample I used the WIF ClaimsAuthenticationManager to add the additional home town claim. This is not necessarily how you would do it in a “real” app. Depends ;) The code looks like this (sample code!): public class ClaimsTransformer : ClaimsAuthenticationManager {     public override IClaimsPrincipal Authenticate( string resourceName, IClaimsPrincipal incomingPrincipal)     {         if (!incomingPrincipal.Identity.IsAuthenticated)         {             return base.Authenticate(resourceName, incomingPrincipal);         }         string accessToken;         if (incomingPrincipal.TryGetClaimValue( "http://www.facebook.com/claims/AccessToken", out accessToken))         {             try             {                 var home = GetFacebookHometown(accessToken);                 if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(home))                 {                     incomingPrincipal.Identities[0].Claims.Add( new Claim("http://www.facebook.com/claims/HomeTown", home));                 }             }             catch { }         }         return incomingPrincipal;     }      private string GetFacebookHometown(string token)     {         var client = new FacebookClient(token);         dynamic parameters = new ExpandoObject();         parameters.fields = "hometown";         dynamic result = client.Get("me", parameters);         return result.hometown.name;     } }  

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• Custom page sizes in paging dropdown in Telerik RadGrid

  Working with Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX is actually quite easy and the initial effort to get started with the control suite is very low. Meaning that you can easily get good result with little time. But there are usually cases where you have to go a little further and dig a little bit deeper than the standard scenarios. In this article I am going to describe how you can customize the default values (10, 20 and 50) of the drop-down list in the paging element of RadGrid. Get control over the displayed page sizes while using numeric paging... The default page sizes are good but not always good enough The paging feature in RadGrid offers you 3, well actually 4, possible page sizes in the drop-down element out-of-the box, which are 10, 20 or 50 items. You can get a fourth option by specifying a value different than the three standards for the PageSize attribute, ie. 35 or 100. The drawback in that case is that it is the initial page size. Certainly, the available choices could be more flexible or even a little bit more intelligent. For example, by taking the total count of records into consideration. There are some interesting scenarios that would justify a customized page size element: A low number of records, like 14 or similar shouldn't provide a page size of 50, A high total count of records (ie: 300+) should offer more choices, ie: 100, 200, 500, or display of all records regardless of number of records I am sure that you might have your own requirements, and I hope that the following source code snippets might be helpful. Wiring the ItemCreated event In order to adjust and manipulate the existing RadComboBox in the paging element we have to handle the OnItemCreated event of RadGrid. Simply specify your code behind method in the attribute of the RadGrid tag, like so: <telerik:RadGrid ID="RadGridLive" runat="server" AllowPaging="true" PageSize="20"    AllowSorting="true" AutoGenerateColumns="false" OnNeedDataSource="RadGridLive_NeedDataSource"    OnItemDataBound="RadGrid_ItemDataBound" OnItemCreated="RadGrid_ItemCreated">    <ClientSettings EnableRowHoverStyle="true">        <ClientEvents OnRowCreated="RowCreated" OnRowSelected="RowSelected" />        <Resizing AllowColumnResize="True" AllowRowResize="false" ResizeGridOnColumnResize="false"            ClipCellContentOnResize="true" EnableRealTimeResize="false" AllowResizeToFit="true" />        <Scrolling AllowScroll="true" ScrollHeight="360px" UseStaticHeaders="true" SaveScrollPosition="true" />        <Selecting AllowRowSelect="true" />    </ClientSettings>    <MasterTableView DataKeyNames="AdvertID">        <PagerStyle AlwaysVisible="true" Mode="NextPrevAndNumeric" />        <Columns>            <telerik:GridBoundColumn HeaderText="Listing ID" DataField="AdvertID" DataType="System.Int32"                SortExpression="AdvertID" UniqueName="AdvertID">                <HeaderStyle Width="66px" />            </telerik:GridBoundColumn>             <!--//  ... and some more columns ... -->         </Columns>    </MasterTableView></telerik:RadGrid> To provide a consistent experience for your visitors it might be helpful to display the page size selection always. This is done by setting the AlwaysVisible attribute of the PagerStyle element to true, like highlighted above. Customize the values of page size Your delegate method for the ItemCreated event should look like this: protected void RadGrid_ItemCreated(object sender, GridItemEventArgs e){    if (e.Item is GridPagerItem)    {        var dropDown = (RadComboBox)e.Item.FindControl("PageSizeComboBox");        var totalCount = ((GridPagerItem)e.Item).Paging.DataSourceCount;        var sizes = new Dictionary<string, string>() {            {"10", "10"},            {"20", "20"},            {"50", "50"}        };        if (totalCount > 100)        {            sizes.Add("100", "100");        }        if (totalCount > 200)        {            sizes.Add("200", "200");        }        sizes.Add("All", totalCount.ToString());        dropDown.Items.Clear();        foreach (var size in sizes)        {            var cboItem = new RadComboBoxItem() { Text = size.Key, Value = size.Value };            cboItem.Attributes.Add("ownerTableViewId", e.Item.OwnerTableView.ClientID);            dropDown.Items.Add(cboItem);        }        dropDown.FindItemByValue(e.Item.OwnerTableView.PageSize.ToString()).Selected = true;    }} It is important that we explicitly check the event arguments for GridPagerItem as it is the control that contains the PageSizeComboBox control that we want to manipulate. To keep the actual modification and exposure of possible page size values flexible I am filling a Dictionary with the requested 'key/value'-pairs based on the number of total records displayed in the grid. As a final step, ensure that the previously selected value is the active one using the FindItemByValue() method. Of course, there might be different requirements but I hope that the snippet above provide a first insight into customized page size value in Telerik's Grid. The Grid demos describe a more advanced approach to customize the Pager.

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• Data Source Security Part 1

  - by Steve Felts

  I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet.  I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources.  There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6.  There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness.  This isn’t intended as a teaser.  If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6.   The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics.  It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down.  The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features.  Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source.  You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet.  This is a very simple and efficient approach to security.  All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out.  That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity).  Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS.   No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn =  mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console.  The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following.  java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently.  WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password.  The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks.  By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code.  More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work.  You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level.   Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it.  There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description.  It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops).  The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail.  Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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• Database Partitioning and Multiple Data Source Considerations

  - by Jeffrey McDaniel

  With the release of P6 Reporting Database 3.0 partitioning was added as a feature to help with performance and data management.  Careful investigation of requirements should be conducting prior to installation to help improve overall performance throughout the lifecycle of the data warehouse, preventing future maintenance that would result in data loss. Before installation try to determine how many data sources and partitions will be required along with the ranges.  In P6 Reporting Database 3.0 any adjustments outside of defaults must be made in the scripts and changes will require new ETL runs for each data source.  Considerations: 1. Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database.   If you aren't using Oracle Enterprise Edition Database; the partitioning feature is not available. Multiple Data sources are only supported on Enterprise Edition of Oracle   Database. 2. Number of Data source Ids for partitioning during configuration.   This setting will specify how many partitions will be allocated for tables containing data source information.  This setting requires some evaluation prior to installation as       there are repercussions if you don't estimate correctly.   For example, if you configured the software for only 2 data sources and the partition setting was set to 2, however along came a 3rd data source.  The necessary steps to  accommodate this change are as follows: a) By default, 3 partitions are configured in the Reporting Database scripts. Edit the create_star_tables_part.sql script located in <installation directory>\star\scripts   and search for partition.  You’ll see P1, P2, P3.  Add additional partitions and sub-partitions for P4 and so on. These will appear in several areas.  (See P6 Reporting Database 3.0 Installation and Configuration guide for more information on this and how to adjust partition ranges). b) Run starETL -r.  This will recreate each table with the new partition key.  The effect of this step is that all tables data will be lost except for history related tables.   c) Run starETL for each of the 3 data sources (with the data source # (starETL.bat "-s2" -as defined in P6 Reporting Database 3.0 Installation and Configuration guide) The best strategy for this setting is to overestimate based on possible growth.  If during implementation it is deemed that there are atleast 2 data sources with possibility for growth, it is a better idea to set this setting to 4 or 5, allowing room for the future and preventing a ‘start over’ scenario. 3. The Number of Partitions and the Number of Months per Partitions are not specific to multi-data source.  These settings work in accordance to a sub partition of larger tables with regard to time related data.  These settings are dataset specific for optimization.  The number of months per partition is self explanatory, optimally the smaller the partition, the better query performance so if the dataset has an extremely large number of spread/history records, a lower number of months is optimal.  Working in accordance with this setting is the number of partitions, this will determine how many "buckets" will be created per the number of months setting.  For example, if you kept the default for # of partitions of 3, and select 2 months for each partitions you would end up with: -1st partition, 2 months -2nd partition, 2 months -3rd partition, all the remaining records Therefore with records to this setting, it is important to analyze your source db spread ranges and history settings when determining the proper number of months per partition and number of partitions to optimize performance.  Also be aware the DBA will need to monitor when these partition ranges will fill up and when additional partitions will need to be added.  If you get to the final range partition and there are no additional range partitions all data will be included into the last partition. 

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• IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

  - by Phil Factor

  In SQL Server, probably the best-known 'broken' function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says 'ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the input expression evaluates to a valid numeric data type; otherwise it returns 0. ISNUMERIC returns 1 for some characters that are not numbers, such as plus (+), minus (-), and valid currency symbols such as the dollar sign ($).'Although it will take numeric data types (No, I don't understand why either), its main use is supposed to be to test strings to make sure that you can convert them to whatever numeric datatype you are using (int, numeric, bigint, money, smallint, smallmoney, tinyint, float, decimal, or real). It wouldn't actually be of much use anyway, since each datatype has different rules. You actually need a RegEx to do a reasonably safe check. The other snag is that the IsNumeric() function  is a bit broken. SELECT ISNUMERIC(',')This cheerfully returns 1, since it believes that a comma is a currency symbol (not a thousands-separator) and you meant to say 0, in this strange currency.  However, SELECT ISNUMERIC(N'£')isn't recognized as currency.  '+' and  '-' is seen to be numeric, which is stretching it a bit. You'll see that what it allows isn't really broken except that it doesn't recognize Unicode currency symbols: It just tells you that one numeric type is likely to accept the string if you do an explicit conversion to it using the string. Both these work fine, so poor IsNumeric has to follow suit. SELECT  CAST('0E0' AS FLOAT)SELECT  CAST (',' AS MONEY) but it is harder to predict which data type will accept a '+' sign. SELECT  CAST ('+' AS money) --0.00SELECT  CAST ('+' AS INT)   --0SELECT  CAST ('+' AS numeric)/* Msg 8115, Level 16, State 6, Line 4 Arithmetic overflow error converting varchar to data type numeric.*/SELECT  CAST ('+' AS FLOAT)/*Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 5Error converting data type varchar to float.*/> So we can begin to say that the maybe IsNumeric isn't really broken, but is answering a silly question 'Is there some numeric datatype to which i can convert this string? Almost, but not quite. The bug is that it doesn't understand Unicode currency characters such as the euro or franc which are actually valid when used in the CAST function. (perhaps they're delaying fixing the euro bug just in case it isn't necessary).SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'?23.67') --0SELECT  CAST (N'?23.67' AS money) --23.67SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'£100.20') --1SELECT  CAST (N'£100.20' AS money) --100.20 Also the CAST function itself is quirky in that it cannot convert perfectly reasonable string-representations of integers into integersSELECT ISNUMERIC('200,000')       --1SELECT  CAST ('200,000' AS INT)   --0/*Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '200,000' to data type int.*/  A more sensible question is 'Is this an integer or decimal number'. This cuts out a lot of the apparent quirkiness. We do this by the '+E0' trick. If we want to include floats in the check, we'll need to make it a bit more complicated. Here is a small test-rig. SELECT  PossibleNumber,         ISNUMERIC(CAST(PossibleNumber AS NVARCHAR(20)) + 'E+00') AS Hack,        ISNUMERIC (PossibleNumber + CASE WHEN PossibleNumber LIKE '%E%'                                          THEN '' ELSE 'E+00' END) AS Hackier,        ISNUMERIC(PossibleNumber) AS RawIsNumericFROM    (SELECT CAST(',' AS NVARCHAR(10)) AS PossibleNumber          UNION SELECT '£' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION SELECT '56' UNION SELECT '456.67890'         UNION SELECT '0E0' UNION SELECT '-'         UNION SELECT '-' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'¢'        UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'?34.56'         UNION SELECT '-345' UNION SELECT '3.332228E+09') AS examples Which gives the result ... PossibleNumber Hack Hackier RawIsNumeric-------------- ----------- ----------- ------------? 0 0 0- 0 0 1, 0 0 1. 0 0 1¢ 0 0 1£ 0 0 1? 0 0 0?34.56 0 0 00E0 0 1 13.332228E+09 0 1 1-345 1 1 1456.67890 1 1 156 1 1 1 I suspect that this is as far as you'll get before you abandon IsNumeric in favour of a regex. You can only get part of the way with the LIKE wildcards, because you cannot specify quantifiers. You'll need full-blown Regex strings like these ..[-+]?\b[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?\b #INT or REAL[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,3}\b #TINYINT[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,5}\b #SMALLINT.. but you'll get even these to fail to catch numbers out of range.So is IsNumeric() an out and out rogue function? Not really, I'd say, but then it would need a damned good lawyer.

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• Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers.

  - by mbcrump

  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 I wanted to create a series of blog post that gets right to the point and is aimed specifically at Silverlight Developers. The most important things I want this series to answer is : What is it?  Why do I care? How do I do it? I hope that you enjoy this series. Let’s get started: Tip/Trick #16) What is it? Find out version information about Silverlight and which WebKit it is using by going to http://issilverlightinstalled.com/scriptverify/. Why do I care? I’ve had those users that its just easier to give them a site and say copy/paste the line that says User Agent in order to troubleshoot a Silverlight problem. I’ve also been debugging my own Silverlight applications and needed an easy way to determine if the plugin is disabled or not. How do I do it: Simply navigate to http://issilverlightinstalled.com/scriptverify/ and hit the Verify button. An example screenshot is located below: Results from Chrome 7 Results from Internet Explorer 8 (With Silverlight Disabled) Tip/Trick #17) What is it? Use Lambdas whenever you can. Why do I care?  It is my personal opinion that code is easier to read using Lambdas after you get past the syntax. How do I do it: For example: You may write code like the following: void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { //Check and see if we have a newer .XAP file on the server Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(); Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted += new CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompletedEventHandler(Current_CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted); } void Current_CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted(object sender, CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.UpdateAvailable) { MessageBox.Show( "An update has been installed. To see the updates please exit and restart the application"); } } To me this style forces me to look for the other Method to see what the code is actually doing. The style located below is much easier to read in my opinion and does the exact same thing. void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { //Check and see if we have a newer .XAP file on the server Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(); Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted += (s, e) => { if (e.UpdateAvailable) { MessageBox.Show( "An update has been installed. To see the updates please exit and restart the application"); } }; } Tip/Trick #18) What is it? Prevent development Web Service references from breaking when Visual Studio auto generates a new port number. Why do I care?  We have all been there, we are developing a Silverlight Application and all of a sudden our development web services break. We check and find out that the local port number that Visual Studio assigned has changed and now we need up to update all of our service references. We need a way to stop this. How do I do it: This can actually be prevented with just a few mouse click. Right click on your web solution and goto properties. Click the tab that says, Web. You just need to click the radio button and specify a port number. Now you won’t be bothered with that anymore. Tip/Trick #19) What is it? You can disable the Close Button a ChildWindow. Why do I care?  I wouldn’t blog about it if I hadn’t seen it. Devs trying to override keystrokes to prevent users from closing a Child Window. How do I do it: A property exist on the ChildWindow called “HasCloseButton”, you simply change that to false and your close button is gone. You can delete the “Cancel” button and add some logic to the OK button if you want the user to respond before proceeding. Tip/Trick #20) What is it? Cleanup your XAML. Why do I care?  By removing unneeded namespaces, not naming all of your controls and getting rid of designer markup you can improve code quality and readability. How do I do it: (This is a 3 in one tip) Remove unused Designer markup: 1) Have you ever wondered what the following code snippet does? xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480" This code is telling the designer to do something special with this page in “Design mode” Specifically the width and the height of the page. When its running in the browser it will not use this information and it is actually ignored by the XAML parser. In other words, if you don’t need it then delete it. 2) If you are not using a namespace then remove it. In the code sample below, I am using Resharper which will tell me the ones that I’m not using by the grayed out line below. If you don’t have resharper you can look in your XAML and manually remove the unneeded namespaces. 3) Don’t name an control unless you actually need to refer to it in procedural code. If you name a control you will take a slight performance hit that is totally unnecessary if its not being called. <TextBlock Height="23" Text="TextBlock" />   That is the end of the series. I hope that you enjoyed it and please check out Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 if your hungry for more.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• Certificate Trusts Lists in IIS7

  - by BrettRobi

  I am trying to enable mutual authentication for my WebService hosted in IIS7. I have the server side cert setup and working but cannot figure out how to get a Certificate Trust List created and setup in IIS7 so that I can require and validate client side certificates. All of my client side certs are signed by my own root cert so I need to create a CTL that contains just my root cert and then have IIS validate client provided certs against the CTL. Can anyone shed some light on how to do this? IIS6 had a UI for assigning a CTL, but I can find nothing similar in IIS7. Update: I have now successfully used MakeCTL in wizard mode to create a CTL with a Friendly Name. However I don't have adsutil support on my IIS7 box so via other posts elsewhere I am trying to use the 'netsh http add sslcert' command to assign the CTL to my site. Before I could use this command I had to remove the existing SSL cert that was assigned to my site for server authentication. Then in my netsh command I specify the thumbprint of that very same SSL cert I removed, plus a made up appid, plus 'sslctlidentifier=MyCTL sslctlstorename=CA'. The resulting command is: netsh http add sslcert ipport=10.10.10.10:443 certhash=adfdffa988bb50736b8e58a54c1eac26ed005050 appid={ffc3e181-e14b-4a21-b022-59fc669b09ff} sslctlidentifier=MyCTL sslctlstorename=CA (the IP addr is munged), but I am getting this error: SSL Certificate add failed, Error: 1312 A specified logon session does not exist. It may already have been terminated. I am sure the error is related to the CTL options because if I remove them it works (though no CTL is assigned of course). Can anyone help me take this last step and make this work? UPDATE 01-07-2010: I never resolved this with IIS 7.0 and have since migrated our app to IIS 7.5 and am giving this another try. Per the response from Taras Chuhay I installed IIS6 Compatibility on my test server and tried the steps he documented using adsutil.vbs (which can also be found here). I immediately ran into this error: ErrNumber: -2147023584 Error trying to SET the Property: SslCtlIdentifier when running this command: adsutil.vbs set w3svc/1/SslCtlIdentifier MyFriendlyName I then went on to try the next adsutil.vbs command documented and it failed with the same error. I have verified that the CTL I created has a Friendly Name of MyFriendlyName and that it exists in the 'Intermediate Certification Authorities\Certificate Trust List' store of LocalComputer. So once again I am at a dead standstill. I don't know what else to try. Has anyone ever gotten CTL's to work with IIS7 or 7.5? Ever? Am I beating a DEAD horse. Google turns up nothing but my own posts and other similar stories. Update 2/23/10 - I've confirmed with Microsoft that this is a bug with IIS 7.5, but it does work with IIS 7. Check out this link for details: http://viisual.net/configuration/IIS7-CTLs.htm Update 6/08/10 - I can now confirm that KB981506 resolves this issue. There is a patch associated with this KB that must be applied to Server 2008 R2 machines to enable this functionality. Once that is installed all works flawlessly for me.

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• Windows Server: specifying the default IP address when NIC has multiple addresses

  - by Cédric Boivin

  I have a Windows Server which has ~10 IP addresses statically bound. The problem is I don't know how to specify the default IP address. Sometimes when I assign a new address to the NIC, the default IP address changes with the last IP entered in the advanced IP configuration on the NIC. This has the effect (since I use NAT) that the outgoing public IP changes too. Even though this problem is currently on Windows Server 2008, I've had the same problem with a Windows Server 2003. How can you set the default IP address on a NIC when it has multiple IP addresses bound? I remark something. When i check route print i see is it there the problem ? 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.x.x 192.168.99.49 261 if i want the default ip be example : 192.168.99.100 There is my route. Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.99.1 192.168.99.49 261 10.10.10.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 10.10.10.10 261 10.10.10.10 255.255.255.255 On-link 10.10.10.10 261 10.10.10.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 10.10.10.10 261 192.168.99.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.49 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.51 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.52 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.53 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.54 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.55 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.56 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.57 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.58 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.59 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.60 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.61 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.62 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.64 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.65 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.66 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.67 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.68 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.70 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.71 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.100 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.108 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.109 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.112 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 192.168.99.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 10.10.10.10 261 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.99.49 261 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 10.10.10.10 261 I need to be certain, when i go on internet i go with the 192.168.99.100 how i do that ?

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