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• Run Windows in Ubuntu with VMware Player

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you an enthusiast who loves their Ubuntu Linux experience but still needs to use Windows programs?  Here’s how you can get the full Windows experience on Ubuntu with the free VMware Player. Linux has become increasingly consumer friendly, but still, the wide majority of commercial software is only available for Windows and Macs.  Dual-booting between Windows and Linux has been a popular option for years, but this is a frustrating solution since you have to reboot into the other operating system each time you want to run a specific application.  With virtualization, you’ll never have to make this tradeoff.  VMware Player makes it quick and easy to install any edition of Windows in a virtual machine.  With VMware’s great integration tools, you can copy and paste between your Linux and Windows programs and even run native Windows applications side-by-side with Linux ones. Getting Started Download the latest version of VMware Player for Linux, and select either the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on your system.  VMware Player is a free download, but requires registration.  Sign in with your VMware account, or create a new one if you don’t already have one. VMware Player is fairly easy to install on Linux, but you will need to start out the installation from the terminal.  First, enter the following to make sure the installer is marked as executable, substituting version/build_number for the version number on the end of the file you downloaded. chmod +x ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle Then, enter the following to start the install, again substituting your version number: gksudo bash ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle You may have to enter your administrator password to start the installation, and then the VMware Player graphical installer will open.  Choose whether you want to check for product updates and submit usage data to VMware, and then proceed with the install as normal. VMware Player installed in only a few minutes in our tests, and was immediately ready to run, no reboot required.  You can now launch it from your Ubuntu menu: click Applications \ System Tools \ VMware Player. You’ll need to accept the license agreement the first time you run it. Welcome to VMware Player!  Now you can create new virtual machines and run pre-built ones on your Ubuntu desktop. Install Windows in VMware Player on Ubuntu Now that you’ve got VMware setup, it’s time to put it to work.  Click the Create a New Virtual Machine as above to start making a Windows virtual machine. In the dialog that opens, select your installer disk or ISO image file that you want to install Windows from.  In this example, we’re select a Windows 7 ISO.  VMware will automatically detect the operating system on the disk or image.  Click Next to continue. Enter your Windows product key, select the edition of Windows to install, and enter your name and password. You can leave the product key field blank and enter it later.  VMware will ask if you want to continue without a product key, so just click Yes to continue. Now enter a name for your virtual machine and select where you want to save it.  Note: This will take up at least 15Gb of space on your hard drive during the install, so make sure to save it on a drive with sufficient storage space. You can choose how large you want your virtual hard drive to be; the default is 40Gb, but you can choose a different size if you wish.  The entire amount will not be used up on your hard drive initially, but the virtual drive will increase in size up to your maximum as you add files.  Additionally, you can choose if you want the virtual disk stored as a single file or as multiple files.  You will see the best performance by keeping the virtual disk as one file, but the virtual machine will be more portable if it is broken into smaller files, so choose the option that will work best for your needs. Finally, review your settings, and if everything looks good, click Finish to create the virtual machine. VMware will take over now, and install Windows without any further input using its Easy Install.  This is one of VMware’s best features, and is the main reason we find it the easiest desktop virtualization solution to use.   Installing VMware Tools VMware Player doesn’t include the VMware Tools by default; instead, it automatically downloads them for the operating system you’re installing.  Once you’ve downloaded them, it will use those tools anytime you install that OS.  If this is your first Windows virtual machine to install, you may be prompted to download and install them while Windows is installing.  Click Download and Install so your Easy Install will finish successfully. VMware will then download and install the tools.  You may need to enter your administrative password to complete the install. Other than this, you can leave your Windows install unattended; VMware will get everything installed and running on its own. Our test setup took about 30 minutes, and when it was done we were greeted with the Windows desktop ready to use, complete with drivers and the VMware tools.  The only thing missing was the Aero glass feature.  VMware Player is supposed to support the Aero glass effects in virtual machines, and although this works every time when we use VMware Player on Windows, we could not get it to work in Linux.  Other than that, Windows is fully ready to use.  You can copy and paste text, images, or files between Ubuntu and Windows, or simply drag-and-drop files between the two. Unity Mode Using Windows in a window is awkward, and makes your Windows programs feel out of place and hard to use.  This is where Unity mode comes in.  Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu, and select Enter Unity. Your Windows desktop will now disappear, and you’ll see a new Windows menu underneath your Ubuntu menu.  This works the same as your Windows Start Menu, and you can open your Windows applications and files directly from it. By default, programs from Windows will have a colored border and a VMware badge in the corner.  You can turn this off from the VMware settings pane.  Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu and select Virtual Machine Settings.  Select Unity under the Options tab, and uncheck the Show borders and Show badges boxes if you don’t want them. Unity makes your Windows programs feel at home in Ubuntu.  Here we have Word 2010 and IE8 open beside the Ubuntu Help application.  Notice that the Windows applications show up in the taskbar on the bottom just like the Linux programs.  If you’re using the Compiz graphics effects in Ubuntu, your Windows programs will use them too, including the popular wobbly windows effect. You can switch back to running Windows inside VMware Player’s window by clicking the Exit Unity button in the VMware window. Now, whenever you want to run Windows applications in Linux, you can quickly launch it from VMware Player. Conclusion VMware Player is a great way to run Windows on your Linux computer.  It makes it extremely easy to get Windows installed and running, lets you run your Windows programs seamlessly alongside your Linux ones.  VMware products work great in our experience, and VMware Player on Linux was no exception. If you’re a Windows user and you’d like to run Ubuntu on Windows, check out our article on how to Run Ubuntu in Windows with VMware Player. Link Download VMware Player 3 (Registration required) Download Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware GuestInstall VMware Tools on Ubuntu Edgy EftRestart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyHow to Add a Program to the Ubuntu Startup List (After Login)How To Run Ubuntu in Windows 7 with VMware Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• Using a WPF ListView as a DataGrid

  - by psheriff

  Many people like to view data in a grid format of rows and columns. WPF did not come with a data grid control that automatically creates rows and columns for you based on the object you pass it. However, the WPF Toolkit can be downloaded from CodePlex.com that does contain a DataGrid control. This DataGrid gives you the ability to pass it a DataTable or a Collection class and it will automatically figure out the columns or properties and create all the columns for you and display the data.The DataGrid control also supports editing and many other features that you might not always need. This means that the DataGrid does take a little more time to render the data. If you want to just display data (see Figure 1) in a grid format, then a ListView works quite well for this task. Of course, you will need to create the columns for the ListView, but with just a little generic code, you can create the columns on the fly just like the WPF Toolkit’s DataGrid. Figure 1: A List of Data using a ListView A Simple ListView ControlThe XAML below is what you would use to create the ListView shown in Figure 1. However, the problem with using XAML is you have to pre-define the columns. You cannot re-use this ListView except for “Product” data. <ListView x:Name="lstData"          ItemsSource="{Binding}">  <ListView.View>    <GridView>      <GridViewColumn Header="Product ID"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=ProductId}" />      <GridViewColumn Header="Product Name"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=ProductName}" />      <GridViewColumn Header="Price"                      Width="Auto"               DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Path=Price}" />    </GridView>  </ListView.View></ListView> So, instead of creating the GridViewColumn’s in XAML, let’s learn to create them in code to create any amount of columns in a ListView. Create GridViewColumn’s From Data TableTo display multiple columns in a ListView control you need to set its View property to a GridView collection object. You add GridViewColumn objects to the GridView collection and assign the GridView to the View property. Each GridViewColumn object needs to be bound to a column or property name of the object that the ListView will be bound to. An ADO.NET DataTable object contains a collection of columns, and these columns have a ColumnName property which you use to bind to the GridViewColumn objects. Listing 1 shows a sample of reading and XML file into a DataSet object. After reading the data a GridView object is created. You can then loop through the DataTable columns collection and create a GridViewColumn object for each column in the DataTable. Notice the DisplayMemberBinding property is set to a new Binding to the ColumnName in the DataTable. C#private void FirstSample(){  // Read the data  DataSet ds = new DataSet();  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() + @"\Xml\Product.xml");    // Create the GridView  GridView gv = new GridView();   // Create the GridView Columns  foreach (DataColumn item in ds.Tables[0].Columns)  {    GridViewColumn gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.ColumnName);    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = gv;  // Display the Data  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables[0];} VB.NETPrivate Sub FirstSample()  ' Read the data  Dim ds As New DataSet()  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() & "\Xml\Product.xml")   ' Create the GridView  Dim gv As New GridView()   ' Create the GridView Columns  For Each item As DataColumn In ds.Tables(0).Columns    Dim gvc As New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.ColumnName)    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = gv  ' Display the Data  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables(0)End SubListing 1: Loop through the DataTable columns collection to create GridViewColumn objects A Generic Method for Creating a GridViewInstead of having to write the code shown in Listing 1 for each ListView you wish to create, you can create a generic method that given any DataTable will return a GridView column collection. Listing 2 shows how you can simplify the code in Listing 1 by setting up a class called WPFListViewCommon and create a method called CreateGridViewColumns that returns your GridView. C#private void DataTableSample(){  // Read the data  DataSet ds = new DataSet();  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() + @"\Xml\Product.xml");   // Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View =      WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(ds.Tables[0]);  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables[0];} VB.NETPrivate Sub DataTableSample()  ' Read the data  Dim ds As New DataSet()  ds.ReadXml(GetCurrentDirectory() & "\Xml\Product.xml")   ' Setup the GridView Columns  lstData.View = _      WPFListViewCommon.CreateGridViewColumns(ds.Tables(0))  lstData.DataContext = ds.Tables(0)End SubListing 2: Call a generic method to create GridViewColumns. The CreateGridViewColumns MethodThe CreateGridViewColumns method will take a DataTable as a parameter and create a GridView object with a GridViewColumn object in its collection for each column in your DataTable. C#public static GridView CreateGridViewColumns(DataTable dt){  // Create the GridView  GridView gv = new GridView();  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = true;   // Create the GridView Columns  foreach (DataColumn item in dt.Columns)  {    GridViewColumn gvc = new GridViewColumn();    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(item.ColumnName);    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName;    gvc.Width = Double.NaN;    gv.Columns.Add(gvc);  }   return gv;} VB.NETPublic Shared Function CreateGridViewColumns _  (ByVal dt As DataTable) As GridView  ' Create the GridView  Dim gv As New GridView()  gv.AllowsColumnReorder = True   ' Create the GridView Columns  For Each item As DataColumn In dt.Columns    Dim gvc As New GridViewColumn()    gvc.DisplayMemberBinding = New Binding(item.ColumnName)    gvc.Header = item.ColumnName    gvc.Width = [Double].NaN    gv.Columns.Add(gvc)  Next   Return gvEnd FunctionListing 3: The CreateGridViewColumns method takes a DataTable and creates GridViewColumn objects in a GridView. By separating this method out into a class you can call this method anytime you want to create a ListView with a collection of columns from a DataTable. SummaryIn this blog you learned how to create a ListView that acts like a DataGrid. You are able to use a DataTable as both the source of the data, and for creating the columns for the ListView. In the next blog entry you will learn how to use the same technique, but for Collection classes. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "WPF ListView as a DataGrid" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Part 2: Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  Seems like my previous post inspired by the work of Michael “Doc” Norton was a great success for the amount of emails I have received. Yet amazed how many people didn’t want to discuss their questions in the comments  sections. I would encourage people to be more public, still I would like to reply to all of you on this public media. I still welcome those emails. What I found out is that many people feels like me, they want to be developers and still be compensated for their experience without wanting to take a job as a manager. Their perfect day is a full day of coding and learning. Many believe their companies will never pay a manager’s salary to a developer no matter what. Most of you ask how to get the ball rolling. And is the later that I’m addressing here, the previous group, will never try. What companies understand developers value and where can I find them? This is a very difficult question to ask, I don’t have a list of those companies or departments, I have seen in my past signs in companies bending backwards to compensate, in more ways the monetary, a developer that is a good resource to them. Allowing the person to move out of the state and still let them work for the company from home is a sign that company goes by individual cases. Allowing them to go to conference that will not benefit the company is another big sign. Simple signs like flexible hours and letting some people work from home. To see those signs you need to be working in that company for awhile and look at the departments where the manager is taking care of their employees in individual cases. Look for the department where people get quiet extra perks, where some people in the department work from home or remotely. In my experience, but not always true, medium to big companies, are prompt to recognize good developers. Then again, some companies just don’t get it and is when you see many technical people managing developers. For all the people that email me stating that developers can also be very good managers, I do not disagree, I just think that a good developers loves writing code, when you remove that part the better salary isn’t enough to keep a developer happy. Burned out developers appreciate being promoted to managers. How do I know I work in a bad company? In my experience I have been a consultant and seen many companies, a few signs I have learned about companies that will not recognize good developers are: When the turn over is pretty high, when developers are moving out in a big rate, no rocket scientist needs to tap you in the shoulder. When the company is looking always to outsource their development resources. The product is not that interesting nor the company cares too much for their final result and support. Code sweat shops. You’ll know when you start working in one of those. Run for the hills! Where do I start? Disclaimer: I have only based this post on Michael “Doc” Norton, this is just my interpretation and ideas. First thing is to look at Michael “Doc” Norton presentation Take Control of Your Development Career http://docondev.blogspot.com/ That should be the first thing any developer should look and follow like it was a pattern. I would personally recommend to find some language or pattern you are interested with and learn it, learn something that will make you happy. Second, join a User Group and get involve in the community. There are hundreds of user groups, and I’m sure you’ll find one in your city or near you town. Code Camps are Developers Meet Ups are also good resources. Third, I would join a open source project you are interested or better yet, create a new open source project with the new technology that you have learn and get coding. Fourth, create a Twitter account and follow the people that talks about the technology you are interested on. If you follow this 4 steps above I think you’ll be on your way, after they are complete, when you release your Open Source project you can say that you accomplished the first steps. Now, do not expect anything to change in your career life, you are changing and should not expect anything in return, besides borrowing some time from sleeping and your family. Creating a good schedule may help you, I find wasted time in many places that I use. Flying for work is actually one of those that allows me to do my best work on a airplane, don’t need to borrow time from anywhere else. Making sure you always have a light, charged laptop is so important. Next steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern or my interpretation of. First, help run a user group or better yet, start a new user group. I’ll add, as well, go to one conference a year and free development events around your city; Code Camps, Geek Dinners, etc. There are many free events sponsored by different companies for developers to get to know their products, I highly recommend those as the way to get connected. Second, chose a mentor, this is a very hard thing to do I experienced, find an expert in the technology you are learning that has the time for you, it is difficult, I wish you best of luck. Third, learn another technology or pattern, open your horizons a little bit more. Why not, if you had fun previously, keep doing it. Fourth, get involved in forums to answer and ask questions, getting notice in public forums is rewarding for your ego after such a long journey. Final steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern Teach what you know, become humble on your knowledge, find as many opportunities to teach and to get involved with the community, bring all that to your day job. Mr. Norton talks about getting naked, expose yourself to others in your knowledge and what you do not know. You are never too important for small opportunities, yet don’t  be afraid to take anything big and learn from the experience. Anytime you have the opportunity to talk to somebody that has reach the point the community knows his or her name, means that you should learn from it. Take opportunities that won’t make you money, yet will make you happy. Sometimes you need to spend money and time. Register talks in Code Camps and Dev Meet Ups, those are free, also go to Conference, Development Summits and Geek Diners for example. One day, people will pay you to attend. When will all these pay off? I don’t know. I’m still in the path, there are a few things that during your journey you may get little acknowledgements that you are in the correct path. In my case I think those are the little signs that tells you about your journey. I got awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for ASP.NET in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I got selected to speak at the DevConnections in Las Vegas in 2010 and Orlando 2011. I do believe that I do have a long way to go, yet what I do makes me happy and I hope I can keep doing for years to come. Every year I can see an improvement on my code, and more frameworks and languages are under my belt, I learn to embrace them all as well as in my daily job, I have been able to work in a few projects beyond my department. I’m a learner and believer of the Michael “Doc” Norton pattern. Looking forward to learn more about it to be able to apply it better. In my short journey I now see my mistakes, I did a few things right, I have been listening the intelligent people and not being afraid to move along the technology changes. In my professional life, I have tried to avoid being placed in only one technology and product. I have always share my code and never confused anybody that wanted to take over any of my projects, I didn’t think anything I created as my own nor care too much when politics didn’t see my vision. I stayed flexible, ready and visible, yet humble. I keep my head just below the clouds, and avoided managers meetings. I credit my manager for my success, and I faulted publicly only myself for the failures. Hope this helps. Cheers, Al Follow me in Twitter  Read my previous post tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/09/part-2-career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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• Right-Time Retail Part 3

  - by David Dorf

  This is part three of the three-part series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Normal 0 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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

  - by James Michael Hare

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

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• How to create an array of User Objects in Powerbuilder?

  - by TomatoSandwich

  The application has many different windows. One is a single 'row' window, which relates to a single row of data in a table, say 'Order'. Another is a 'multiple row' datawindow, where each row in the datawindow relates to a row in 'Order', used for spreadsheet-like data entry Functionality extentions have create a detail table, say 'Suppliers', where an order may require multiple suppliers to fill the order. Normally, suppliers are not required, because they are already in the warehouse (0), or there may need to be an order to a supplier to complete an order (1), or multiple suppliers may need to be contacted (more than one). As a single order is entered, once the items are entered, a User Object is populated depending on the status of the items in the warehouse. If required, this creates a 1-to-many relationship between the order and the "backorder". In the PB side, there is a single object uo_backorder which is created on the window, and is referenced by the window depending on the command (button popup, save, etc) I have been tasked to create the 'backorder' functionality on the spreadsheet-line window. Previously the default options for backorders were used when orders were created from the multiple-row window. A workaround already exists where unconfirmed orders could be opened in the single-row window, and the backorder information manipulated there. However, the userbase wants this functionality on the one window. Since the functionality of uo_backorder already exists, I assumed I could just copy the code from the single-order window, but create an array of uo_backorder objects to cope with multiple rows. I tried the following: forward .. type uo_backorder from popupdwpb within w_order_conv end type end forward global type w_order_conv from singleform .. uo_backorder uo_backorder end type type variables .. uo_backorder iuo_backorders[] end variables .. public function boolean iuo_backorders(); .. long ll_count ll_count = UpperBound(iuo_backorders[]) iuo_backorders[ll_count+1] = uo_backorder //THIS ISN'T RIGHT lb_ok = iuo_backorders[ll_count+1].init('w_backorder_popup', '', '', '', 'd_backorder_popup', sqlca, useTransObj()) return lb_ok end function .. <utility functions> .. type uo_backorder from popupdwpb within w_order_conv integer x = 28 integer y = 28 integer width ... end type on uo_backorder.destroy call popupdwpb::destroy end on The issue I face now is that the code commented "THIS ISN'T RIGHT" isn't correct. It is associating the visual object placed on the face of the main window to each array cell, so anytime I reference the array cell object it's actually referencing the one original object, not the new instances that I (thought) I was creating. If I change the code iuo_backorders[ll_count+1] = create uo_backorder the code doesn't run, saying that it failed to initalize the popup window. I think this is related to the class being called the same thing as the instance. What I want to end up with is an array of uo_backorder objects that I can associate to each row of my datawindow (first row = first cell, etc). I think the issue lays in the fact it's a visual object, and I can't seem to get the window to run without adding a dummy object on the face of the window (functionality from the original single-row window). Since it's a VISUAL object, does the object indeed need to be embedded on the windowface for the window to know what object I'm talking about? If so, how does one create multiple windowface objects (one to many, depending on when a row is added)? Don't hesitate to inquire regarding any more information this issue may require from myself. I have no idea what is 'standard' or 'default' in PB, or what is custom and needs more explaining.

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• Any tool to make git build every commit to a branch in a seperate repository?

  - by Wayne

  A git tool that meets the specs below is needed. Does one already exists? If not, I will create a script and make it available on GitHub for others to use or contribute. Is there a completely different and better way to solve the need to build/test every commit to a branch in a git repository? Not just to the latest but each one back to a certain staring point. Background: Our development environment uses a separate continuous integration server which is wonderful. However, it is still necessary to do full builds locally on each developer's PC to make sure the commit won't "break the build" when pushed to the CI server. Unfortunately, with auto unit tests, those build force the developer to wait 10 or 15 minutes for a build every time. To solve this we have setup a "mirror" git repository on each developer PC. So we develop in the main repository but anytime a local full build is needed. We run a couple commands in a in the mirror repository to fetch, checkout the commit we want to build, and build. It's works extremely lovely so we can continue working in the main one with the build going in parallel. There's only one main concern now. We want to make sure every single commit builds and tests fine. But we often get busy and neglect to build several fresh commits. Then if it the build fails you have to do a bisect or manually figure build each interim commit to figure out which one broke. Requirements for this tool. The tool will look at another repo, origin by default, fetch and compare all commits that are in branches to 2 lists of commits. One list must hold successfully built commits and the other lists commits that failed. It identifies any commit or commits not yet in either list and begins to build them in a loop in the order that they were committed. It stops on the first one that fails. The tool appropriately adds each commit to either the successful or failed list after it as attempted to build each one. The tool will ignore any "legacy" commits which are prior to the oldest commit in the success list. This logic makes the starting point possible in the next point. Starting Point. The tool building a specific commit so that, if successful it gets added to the success list. If it is the earliest commit in the success list, it becomes the "starting point" so that none of the commits prior to that are examined for builds. Only linear tree support? Much like bisect, this tool works best on a commit tree which is, at least from it's starting point, linear without any merges. That is, it should be a tree which was built and updated entirely via rebase and fast forward commits. If it fails on one commit in a branch it will stop without building the rest that followed after that one. Instead if will just move on to another branch, if any. The tool must do these steps once by default but allow a parameter to loop with an option to set how many seconds between loops. Other tools like Hudson or CruiseControl could do more fancy scheduling options. The tool must have good defaults but allow optional control. Which repo? origin by default. Which branches? all of them by default. What tool? by default an executable file to be provided by the user named "buildtest", "buildtest.sh" "buildtest.cmd", or buildtest.exe" in the root folder of the repository. Loop delay? run once by default with option to loop after a number of seconds between iterations.

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• wpf display staggered content

  - by Chris Cap

  I am trying to display a rather dynamic list of data in WPF. I have essentially a LineItem class that contains a list of strings and a line type. The line type separates different categories of line items. All line items with the same type should be displayed the same and their data should line up. For example, this list will contain an order summary. And the there will be a line type that represents something with a width and height. The width and height must line up vertically. However, there may be other line types that don't have to line up vertically. I want to produce a table similar to what you see below: ------------------------------------------------------------------ | some content here | some more content here | last content here | |----------------------------------------------------------------| | some content here | | last content here | |----------------------------------------------------------------| | spanning content that is longer then most | last content here | |----------------------------------------------------------------| | some content that can span a really long distance | ------------------------------------------------------------------ I attempted to do this by creating ListView with a single column that had a datatemplate that contained a grid with a fixed number of fields and then bind to the Colspan value. Unfortunately, this didn't work. I ended up with incorrect or overlapping content anytime I tried to do a column span. Here's the XAML I was working with <ListView ItemsSource="{Binding}" > <ListView.View> <GridView> <GridViewColumn Header="Content"> <GridViewColumn.CellTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition /> <ColumnDefinition /> <ColumnDefinition /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBlock Grid.Column="0" Grid.ColumnSpan="{Binding Path=Tokens[0].ColumnSpan}" Text="{Binding Path=Tokens[0].Content}" ></TextBlock> <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.ColumnSpan="{Binding Path=Tokens[1].ColumnSpan}" Text="{Binding Path=Tokens[1].Content}" ></TextBlock> <TextBlock Grid.Column="2" Text="{Binding Path=Tokens[2].Content}"></TextBlock> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </GridViewColumn.CellTemplate> </GridViewColumn> </GridView> </ListView.View> And here's the classes I was binding to public class DisplayLine { public LineType Linetype { get; set; } public List<Token> Tokens { get; set; } public DisplayLine() { Tokens = new List<Token>(); } } public class Token { public string Content { get; set; } public bool IsEmpty { get { return string.IsNullOrEmpty(Content); } } public int ColumnSpan { get; set; } public Token() { ColumnSpan = 1; } } Does anyone have any suggestions of maybe a way of making this work. I may be taking the wrong approach. I'm trying to avoid any solutions where I explcitily build something in the code behind as I'm using the MVVM pattern so it has to be something that I can bind from exposed through the controller. My intial plan was to create a factory and separate classes that display the data differently based on type. However, I'm struggling coming up with a strategy for this using MVVM as I really can't just build something and display it. I have toyed with the idea of making some kind of UI service class that is injected, but it would still require some pretty detailed UI information from the controller to do it's work.

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• onCommand on button not firing inside gridView??

  - by sah302

  This is really driving me crazy. I've got a button inside a gridview to remove that item from the gridview (its datasource is a list). I've got the list being saved to session anytime a change is being made to it, and on page_load check if that session variable is empty, if not, then set that list to bind to the gridview. Code Behind: Public accomplishmentTypeDao As New AccomplishmentTypeDao() Public accomplishmentDao As New AccomplishmentDao() Public userDao As New UserDao() Public facultyDictionary As New Dictionary(Of Guid, String) Public facultyList As New List(Of User) Public associatedFaculty As New List(Of User) Public facultyId As New Guid Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load 'If Not Session("associatedFaculty") Is Nothing Then' ' Dim associatedFacultyArray As User() = DirectCast(Session("associatedFaculty"), User())' ' associatedFaculty = associatedFacultyArray.ToList()' 'End If' Page.Title = "Add a New Faculty Accomplishment" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataSource = accomplishmentTypeDao.getEntireTable() ddlAccomplishmentType.DataTextField = "Name" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataValueField = "Id" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataBind() facultyList = userDao.getListOfUsersByUserGroupName("Faculty") For Each faculty As User In facultyList facultyDictionary.Add(faculty.Id, faculty.LastName & ", " & faculty.FirstName) Next If Not Page.IsPostBack Then ddlFacultyList.DataSource = facultyDictionary ddlFacultyList.DataTextField = "Value" ddlFacultyList.DataValueField = "Key" ddlFacultyList.DataBind() End If gvAssociatedUsers.DataSource = associatedFaculty gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() End Sub Protected Sub deleteUser(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandEventArgs) facultyId = New Guid(e.CommandArgument.ToString()) associatedFaculty.Remove(associatedFaculty.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) Session("associatedFaculty") = associatedFaculty.ToArray() gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Protected Sub btnAddUser_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles btnAddUser.Click facultyId = New Guid(ddlFacultyList.SelectedValue) associatedFaculty.Add(facultyList.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) Session.Add("associatedFaculty", associatedFaculty.ToArray()) gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Protected Sub Delete(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandEventArgs) End Sub End Class Markup: <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upAssociatedFaculty" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional"> <ContentTemplate> <p><b>Created By:</b> <asp:Label ID="lblCreatedBy" runat="server"></asp:Label></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Type: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlAccomplishmentType" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Applies To: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlFacultyList" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList> &nbsp;<asp:Button ID="btnAddUser" runat="server" Text="Add Faculty" OnClientClick="incrementCounter();" /></p> <p> <asp:GridView ID="gvAssociatedUsers" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" GridLines="None" ShowHeader="false"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" Visible="False" /> <asp:TemplateField ShowHeader="False"> <ItemTemplate> <span style="margin-left: 15px;"> <p><%#Eval("LastName")%>, <%#Eval("FirstName")%> <asp:Button ID="btnUnassignUser" runat="server" CausesValidation="false" CommandArgument='<%# Eval("Id") %>' CommandName="Delete" OnCommand="deleteUser" Text='Remove' /></p> </span> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> <EmptyDataTemplate> <em>There are currently no faculty associated with this accomplishment.</em> </EmptyDataTemplate> </asp:GridView> </p> </ContentTemplate> </asp:UpdatePanel> Now here is the crazy part I am simply boggled by, if I uncomment the If Not Session... block of page_load, then deleteUser will never fire when btnUnassignUser is clicked. If I keep it commented out...it fires no problem, but then of course my list can never have more than one item since I am not loading the saved list from session into the gridview but just a fresh one. But the button click is being registered, because page_load is being stepped through again when I am viewing in debug mode, just deleteUser never fires. Why is this happening?? And how can I fix it??

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• How to figure out who owns a worker thread that is still running when my app exits?

  - by Dave

  Not long after upgrading to VS2010, my application won't shut down cleanly. If I close the app and then hit pause in the IDE, I see this: The problem is, there's no context. The call stack just says [External code], which isn't too helpful. Here's what I've done so far to try to narrow down the problem: deleted all extraneous plugins to minimize the number of worker threads launched set breakpoints in my code anywhere I create worker threads (and delegates + BeginInvoke, since I think they are labeled "Worker Thread" in the debugger anyway). None were hit. set IsBackground = true for all threads While I could do the next brute force step, which is to roll my code back to a point where this didn't happen and then look over all of the change logs, this isn't terribly efficient. Can anyone recommend a better way to figure this out, given the notable lack of information presented by the debugger? The only other things I can think of include: read up on WinDbg and try to use it to stop anytime a thread is started. At least, I thought that was possible... :) comment out huge blocks of code until the app closes properly, then start uncommenting until it doesn't. UPDATE Perhaps this information will be of use. I decided to use WinDbg and attach to my application. I then closed it, and switched to thread 0 and dumped the stack contents. Here's what I have: ThreadCount: 6 UnstartedThread: 0 BackgroundThread: 1 PendingThread: 0 DeadThread: 4 Hosted Runtime: no PreEmptive GC Alloc Lock ID OSID ThreadOBJ State GC Context Domain Count APT Exception 0 1 1c70 005a65c8 6020 Enabled 02dac6e0:02dad7f8 005a03c0 0 STA 2 2 1b20 005b1980 b220 Enabled 00000000:00000000 005a03c0 0 MTA (Finalizer) XXXX 3 08504048 19820 Enabled 00000000:00000000 005a03c0 0 Ukn XXXX 4 08504540 19820 Enabled 00000000:00000000 005a03c0 0 Ukn XXXX 5 08516a90 19820 Enabled 00000000:00000000 005a03c0 0 Ukn XXXX 6 08517260 19820 Enabled 00000000:00000000 005a03c0 0 Ukn 0:008> ~0s eax=c0674960 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000000 edx=00000000 esi=0040f320 edi=005a65c8 eip=76c37e47 esp=0040f23c ebp=0040f258 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz na po nc cs=0023 ss=002b ds=002b es=002b fs=0053 gs=002b efl=00000202 USER32!NtUserGetMessage+0x15: 76c37e47 83c404 add esp,4 0:000> !clrstack OS Thread Id: 0x1c70 (0) Child SP IP Call Site 0040f274 76c37e47 [InlinedCallFrame: 0040f274] 0040f270 6baa8976 DomainBoundILStubClass.IL_STUB_PInvoke(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef, System.Runtime.InteropServices.HandleRef, Int32, Int32)*** WARNING: Unable to verify checksum for C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages_v4.0.30319_32\WindowsBase\d17606e813f01376bd0def23726ecc62\WindowsBase.ni.dll 0040f274 6ba924c5 [InlinedCallFrame: 0040f274] MS.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods.IntGetMessageW(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef, System.Runtime.InteropServices.HandleRef, Int32, Int32) 0040f2c4 6ba924c5 MS.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods.GetMessageW(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef, System.Runtime.InteropServices.HandleRef, Int32, Int32) 0040f2dc 6ba8e5f8 System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.GetMessage(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef, IntPtr, Int32, Int32) 0040f318 6ba8d579 System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrameImpl(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame) 0040f368 6ba8d2a1 System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrame(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame) 0040f374 6ba7fba0 System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run() 0040f380 62e6ccbb System.Windows.Application.RunDispatcher(System.Object)*** WARNING: Unable to verify checksum for C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages_v4.0.30319_32\PresentationFramewo#\7f91eecda3ff7ce478146b6458580c98\PresentationFramework.ni.dll 0040f38c 62e6c8ff System.Windows.Application.RunInternal(System.Windows.Window) 0040f3b0 62e6c682 System.Windows.Application.Run(System.Windows.Window) 0040f3c0 62e6c30b System.Windows.Application.Run() 0040f3cc 001f00bc MyApplication.App.Main() [C:\code\trunk\MyApplication\obj\Debug\GeneratedInternalTypeHelper.g.cs @ 24] 0040f608 66c421db [GCFrame: 0040f608] EDIT -- not sure if this helps, but the main thread's call stack looks like this: [Managed to Native Transition] > WindowsBase.dll!MS.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods.GetMessageW(ref System.Windows.Interop.MSG msg, System.Runtime.InteropServices.HandleRef hWnd, int uMsgFilterMin, int uMsgFilterMax) + 0x15 bytes WindowsBase.dll!System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.GetMessage(ref System.Windows.Interop.MSG msg, System.IntPtr hwnd, int minMessage, int maxMessage) + 0x48 bytes WindowsBase.dll!System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrameImpl(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame frame = {System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame}) + 0x85 bytes WindowsBase.dll!System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrame(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame frame) + 0x49 bytes WindowsBase.dll!System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run() + 0x4c bytes PresentationFramework.dll!System.Windows.Application.RunDispatcher(object ignore) + 0x17 bytes PresentationFramework.dll!System.Windows.Application.RunInternal(System.Windows.Window window) + 0x6f bytes PresentationFramework.dll!System.Windows.Application.Run(System.Windows.Window window) + 0x26 bytes PresentationFramework.dll!System.Windows.Application.Run() + 0x1b bytes I did a search on it and found some posts related to WPF GUIs hanging, and maybe that'll give me some more clues.

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• setting something disposed or invisible java

  - by OVERTONE

  this might be simple enough as just inserting the right method but i cant seem to get it right. i have a simple program with two buttons. each one changes the picture above them. but anytime i click the buttons i get some odd awt event queue error. i think its because im trying to add something to a frame after its already been made. package icnon; import javax.imageio.*; import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class FrameIconExample extends JFrame implements ActionListener { JLabel j; JPanel p, l, k; JButton picOne, picTwo; Container cPane; public FrameIconExample() { JButton picOne = new JButton("picOne"); JButton picTwo = new JButton("picTwo"); picOne.setName("picOne"); picTwo.setName("picTwo"); picOne.addActionListener(this); picTwo.addActionListener(this); JPanel p = new JPanel(new GridLayout(2, 1)); JPanel l = new JPanel(new FlowLayout()); JPanel k = new JPanel(new FlowLayout()); cPane = getContentPane(); j = new JLabel(new ImageIcon("../meet/src/images/beautiful-closeup-portrait-photography.jpg")); l.add(j); k.add(picOne); k.add(picTwo); p.add(l); p.add(k); add(p); } public static void main(String[] args) { FrameIconExample frame = new FrameIconExample(); frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); frame.setSize(new Dimension(300, 800)); frame.setTitle("Frame Icon Example"); // Display the form frame.setVisible(true); } @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { JButton temp = (JButton) e.getSource(); String src = "../meet/src/images/Majken Kruse portrait - john.jpg"; //System.out.println(src + " " + temp.getName()); if(temp.getName().equalsIgnoreCase("picOne")) { src = "../meet/src/images/beautiful-closeup-portrait-photography.jpg"; System.out.println(src + " " + temp.getName()); Icon img; j = new JLabel(new ImageIcon(src)); l.add(j); System.out.println("1"); } if(temp.getName().equalsIgnoreCase("picTwo")) { src = "../icontest/images/Majken Kruse portrait - john.jpg"; System.out.println(src + " " + temp.getName()); Icon img; j = new JLabel(new ImageIcon(src)); l.add(j); System.out.println("2"); } } } its all just the one program so if you copy paste it into an editor you can see the stack trace. but the source of the image files wont be there. does anyone know how id do it? or where im goin wrong? stack trace: ../meet/src/images/beautiful-closeup-portrait-photography.jpg picOne Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException at icnon.FrameIconExample.actionPerformed(FrameIconExample.java:68) at javax.swing.AbstractButton.fireActionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.AbstractButton$Handler.actionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.fireActionPerformed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.setPressed(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicButtonListener.mouseReleased(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.processMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.processMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.processEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.processEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.retargetMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.processMouseEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Window.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

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• Trying to reinvent the wheel of StackOverflow to have a good learning experience. Need some suggesti

  - by Legend

  I want to learn and am not able to do it unless I have a real "mission" to complete. SO is my favorite and I can't imagine a better experience than actually recreating it but not in ASP. I'd like to use PHP+MySQL+jQuery. So far, I have been a self-taught programmer but I would like to master one paradigm that forces you to adhere to the standards. For instance, recently, jQuery forced me to use some "rules". The plugins were supposed to be written in a particular way and that's it. When I started off, everything seemed like Greek and Latin but when I finished a very small plugin, I felt really happy because it forced me to program in a certain way. I am looking for something like this only in a larger project. I've heard a lot about MVC and all but I am confused about the various frameworks out there. Zend seems awesome but looks heavy at the same time and also requires you to have a lot more control over the web-server whereas CakePHP is a good and a fast framework that needs only little control. Do I use one of these or just write my own MVC? I have the following goals: Goals: Site should be fast - I know this depends on my coding skills but I will learn on my way. The framework itself should not slow me down) Setting up the site should not require you to use command-line - This requirement is ok during development. But some frameworks like Symphony require you to initialize certain things through command-line Should support pluggable modules - For instance, if I want to be able to use the FCK editor, I should be able to organize things in a good way. Should be possible to extend - For instance, SO is mainly a Q&A site but I should be able to logically extend it into an Idea Management System (optional but I'm curious). This goes more into code re-usability I guess. I am comfortable with MySQL so I should be done with database design etc. with some serious effort. As for PHP, I can write code on my own but haven't really used any frameworks that much. jQuery, I started off recently and love it. I would be glad if someone can guide me during these initial steps. Precisely, when designing something like SO, I have the following questions: Do I use a framework? If yes, should it be MVC? If MVC, which one is a good and a scalable one? (I'd love something like jQuery that will not die anytime soon) How do I balance the functionality? The same logic can sometimes be made server centric or client centric. (more Ajax?). Is it a good idea to make a heavy javascript site considering the recent advances on client-side JS processing? Just in case anyone is wondering, I am not interested in commercializing any of this. I need a reason to learn something :)

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Has glassfish 2.1.1 a bug handling http request and handle them twice?

  - by marabol

  I'm using glassfish 2.1.1. I've watched a mysterious http/webservice-call handling. It seams an http request is handled by two different threads. After http basic authentication the first thread is faster. Persisting some data end, but writing response fails in glassfish internal. The second thread fails, because it tries to persist identical data and there are (unique) constrain failures. The response (the failure) of second thread was delivered to client. I don't won't discuss the behavior with the unique constrain failure. I've improve the webservice, so it can handle this better, because it could be happen anytime, that the client send the ws call a second time. But I think, glassfish 2.1.1 has an bug handling http request. Is there any known issue? Have I done an mistake? [#|2010-03-22T10:40:54.150+0000|INFO|sun-appserver2.1|javax.enterprise.system.core|_ThreadID=10;_ThreadName=main;|Starting Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 ((v2.1 Patch06)(9.1_02 Patch12)) (build b31g-fcs) ...|#] ... [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.module.security.auth.realm.YaJdbcRealm|_ThreadID=26;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-1;ClassName=mypackage.module.security.auth.realm.YaJdbcRealm;MethodName=authenticate;_RequestID=4d8f23e9-5106-4d64-b865-1638d7075bde;|JDBC authenticate successful for: 8002 groups:[roleUser]|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.module.security.auth.login.YaJdbcLoginModule|_ThreadID=26;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-1;ClassName=mypackage.module.security.auth.login.YaJdbcLoginModule;MethodName=authenticate;_RequestID=4d8f23e9-5106-4d64-b865-1638d7075bde;|JDBC login succeeded for: 8002 groups:[roleUser]|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.module.security.auth.realm.YaJdbcRealm|_ThreadID=39;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-2;ClassName=mypackage.module.security.auth.realm.YaJdbcRealm;MethodName=authenticate;_RequestID=4ca7e3e5-5ab7-41ec-b3c9-d9260b1164c9;|JDBC authenticate successful for: 8002 groups:[roleUser]|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.module.security.auth.login.YaJdbcLoginModule|_ThreadID=39;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-2;ClassName=mypackage.module.security.auth.login.YaJdbcLoginModule;MethodName=authenticate;_RequestID=4ca7e3e5-5ab7-41ec-b3c9-d9260b1164c9;|JDBC login succeeded for: 8002 groups:[roleUser]|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.MyWebService|_ThreadID=26;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-1;ClassName=mypackage.MyWebService;MethodName=enqueue;_RequestID=4d8f23e9-5106-4d64-b865-1638d7075bde;|Received WebService call to enqueue() from client 59|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.220+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.MyWebService|_ThreadID=39;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-2;ClassName=mypackage.MyWebService;MethodName=enqueue;_RequestID=4ca7e3e5-5ab7-41ec-b3c9-d9260b1164c9;|Received WebService call to enqueue() from client 59|#] ... [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.267+0000|FINE|sun-appserver2.1|mypackage.MyWebService|_ThreadID=26;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-1;ClassName=mypackage.MyWebService;MethodName=enqueue;_RequestID=4d8f23e9-5106-4d64-b865-1638d7075bde;|Successfully finished WebService call to enqueue() from client 59|#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.329+0000|WARNING|sun-appserver2.1|javax.enterprise.system.container.ejb|_ThreadID=26;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-1;_RequestID=4d8f23e9-5106-4d64-b865-1638d7075bde;|invocation error on ejb endpoint MyWebService at /MyWebserviceService/MyWebservice : com.sun.xml.stream.XMLStreamException2 javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: com.sun.xml.stream.XMLStreamException2 at com.sun.xml.ws.encoding.StreamSOAPCodec.encode(StreamSOAPCodec.java:111) at com.sun.xml.ws.encoding.SOAPBindingCodec.encode(SOAPBindingCodec.java:281) at com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter.encodePacket(HttpAdapter.java:320) at com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter.access$100(HttpAdapter.java:93) at com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter$HttpToolkit.handle(HttpAdapter.java:454) at com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.HttpAdapter.handle(HttpAdapter.java:244) at com.sun.xml.ws.transport.http.servlet.ServletAdapter.handle(ServletAdapter.java:135) at com.sun.enterprise.webservice.Ejb3MessageDispatcher.handlePost(Ejb3MessageDispatcher.java:113) at com.sun.enterprise.webservice.Ejb3MessageDispatcher.invoke(Ejb3MessageDispatcher.java:87) at com.sun.enterprise.webservice.EjbWebServiceServlet.dispatchToEjbEndpoint(EjbWebServiceServlet.java:231) at com.sun.enterprise.webservice.EjbWebServiceServlet.service(EjbWebServiceServlet.java:157) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:847) at com.sun.enterprise.web.AdHocContextValve.invoke(AdHocContextValve.java:114) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:648) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:593) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:587) at com.sun.enterprise.web.WebPipeline.invoke(WebPipeline.java:87) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:222) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:648) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:593) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:587) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:1093) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:166) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:648) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:593) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:587) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:1093) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:291) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.DefaultProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(DefaultProcessorTask.java:666) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.comet.CometEngine.executeServlet(CometEngine.java:616) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.comet.CometEngine.handle(CometEngine.java:362) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.comet.CometAsyncFilter.doFilter(CometAsyncFilter.java:84) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.DefaultAsyncExecutor.invokeFilters(DefaultAsyncExecutor.java:189) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.DefaultAsyncExecutor.interrupt(DefaultAsyncExecutor.java:164) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.AsyncProcessorTask.doTask(AsyncProcessorTask.java:92) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.TaskBase.run(TaskBase.java:264) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.ssl.SSLWorkerThread.run(SSLWorkerThread.java:106) Caused by: com.sun.xml.stream.XMLStreamException2 at com.sun.xml.stream.writers.XMLStreamWriterImpl.flush(XMLStreamWriterImpl.java:416) at com.sun.xml.ws.encoding.StreamSOAPCodec.encode(StreamSOAPCodec.java:109) ... 36 more Caused by: ClientAbortException: java.nio.channels.ClosedChannelException at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.doFlush(OutputBuffer.java:385) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.flush(OutputBuffer.java:351) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteOutputStream.flush(CoyoteOutputStream.java:176) at com.sun.xml.stream.writers.UTF8OutputStreamWriter.flush(UTF8OutputStreamWriter.java:153) at com.sun.xml.stream.writers.XMLStreamWriterImpl.flush(XMLStreamWriterImpl.java:414) ... 37 more Caused by: java.nio.channels.ClosedChannelException at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.ensureWriteOpen(SocketChannelImpl.java:126) at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.write(SocketChannelImpl.java:324) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.OutputWriter.flushChannel(OutputWriter.java:91) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.OutputWriter.flushChannel(OutputWriter.java:66) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.SocketChannelOutputBuffer.flushChannel(SocketChannelOutputBuffer.java:172) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.AsynchronousOutputBuffer.flushChannel(AsynchronousOutputBuffer.java:81) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.SocketChannelOutputBuffer.flushBuffer(SocketChannelOutputBuffer.java:205) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.AsynchronousOutputBuffer.flushBuffer(AsynchronousOutputBuffer.java:114) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.SocketChannelOutputBuffer.flush(SocketChannelOutputBuffer.java:183) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.async.AsynchronousOutputBuffer.flush(AsynchronousOutputBuffer.java:104) at com.sun.enterprise.web.connector.grizzly.DefaultProcessorTask.action(DefaultProcessorTask.java:1100) at org.apache.coyote.Response.action(Response.java:237) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.doFlush(OutputBuffer.java:381) ... 41 more |#] [#|2010-03-22T11:18:44.376+0000|WARNING|sun-appserver2.1|oracle.toplink.essentials.session.file:/mygf-211/domains/mydomain/applications/j2ee-apps/myear/myjar-myPu|_ThreadID=39;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-8080-2;_RequestID=4ca7e3e5-5ab7-41ec-b3c9-d9260b1164c9;| Local Exception Stack: Exception [TOPLINK-4002] (Oracle TopLink Essentials - 2.1 (Build b31g-fcs (10/19/2009))): oracle.toplink.essentials.exceptions.DatabaseException Internal Exception: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: Eine Zeile mit doppeltem Schlüssel kann in das 'dbo.MY_TABLE'-Objekt mit dem eindeutigen 'MY_INDEX'-Index nicht eingefügt werden.

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• List getting cleared every button click inside Update Panel?

  - by sah302

  No this isn't a copy of this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/654423/button-in-update-panel-is-doing-a-full-postback I've got a drop down inside an update panel, and I am trying to get it to allow the person using the page to add users to a list that is bound to a gridview. The list is a global variable, and on page_load I set that to the gridview's datasource and databind it. However, anytime I click the 'add a user' button, or the button to remove the user from the list. It appears like it is doing a full post back even though all these elements are inside the update Panel. Code Behind: Public accomplishmentTypeDao As New AccomplishmentTypeDao() Public accomplishmentDao As New AccomplishmentDao() Public userDao As New UserDao() Public facultyDictionary As New Dictionary(Of Guid, String) Public facultyList As New List(Of User) Public associatedFaculty As New List(Of User) Public facultyId As New Guid Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load Page.Title = "Add a New Faculty Accomplishment" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataSource = accomplishmentTypeDao.getEntireTable() ddlAccomplishmentType.DataTextField = "Name" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataValueField = "Id" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataBind() facultyList = userDao.getListOfUsersByUserGroupName("Faculty") For Each faculty As User In facultyList facultyDictionary.Add(faculty.Id, faculty.LastName & ", " & faculty.FirstName) Next If Not Page.IsPostBack Then ddlFacultyList.DataSource = facultyDictionary ddlFacultyList.DataTextField = "Value" ddlFacultyList.DataValueField = "Key" ddlFacultyList.DataBind() End If gvAssociatedUsers.DataSource = associatedFaculty gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() End Sub Protected Sub deleteUser(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandEventArgs) facultyId = New Guid(e.CommandArgument.ToString()) associatedFaculty.Remove(associatedFaculty.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Protected Sub btnAddUser_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles btnAddUser.Click facultyId = New Guid(ddlFacultyList.SelectedValue) associatedFaculty.Add(facultyList.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Markup: <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upAssociatedFaculty" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional"> <ContentTemplate> <p><b>Created By:</b> <asp:Label ID="lblCreatedBy" runat="server"></asp:Label></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Type: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlAccomplishmentType" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Applies To: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlFacultyList" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList> &nbsp;<asp:Button ID="btnAddUser" runat="server" Text="Add Faculty" /></p> <p> <asp:GridView ID="gvAssociatedUsers" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" GridLines="None" ShowHeader="false"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" Visible="False" /> <asp:TemplateField ShowHeader="False"> <ItemTemplate> <span style="margin-left: 15px;"> <p><%#Eval("LastName")%>, <%#Eval("FirstName")%> <asp:Button ID="btnUnassignUser" runat="server" CausesValidation="false" CommandArgument='<%# Eval("Id") %>' CommandName="Delete" OnCommand="deleteUser" Text='Remove' /></p> </span> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> <EmptyDataTemplate> <em>There are currently no faculty associated with this accomplishment.</em> </EmptyDataTemplate> </asp:GridView> </p> </ContentTemplate> </asp:UpdatePanel> Now I thought the point of an update panel was to be able to update things inside of it without doing a full post_back and reloading the page. So if that's the case, why is it calling page_load everytime I click the buttons? I ran this code and debug and I see that even before any of the code associated with button press fires, page_load runs again. I tried putting the gvAssociatedUser.Datasource = associatedFaculty and the line below inside the Page.IsPostBack check, that prevented the page from working. I tried every combination of settings of the update panel for ChildrenAsTriggers and UpdateMode, and none of them worked. I know this is something simple, but all the combinations I've tried won't get it to work. How can I make this thing work? Edited: It wasn't causing a full postback so I was wrong as to the cause. I thought the page was doing a full post back thus resetting my associatedFaculty list global variable, but it isn't doing a full postback. The issue I am having is everytime I click btnAddUser it will add one element to the associatedFaculty list and thus bound to gvAssociatedusers. This works the first time, but the second time I click it, it overwrites the first element. So it appears like my associatedFaculty list is getting reset each time I click the button?

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack.Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while.Self-Service BISelf-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI.This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me:PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.)Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.)One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.)Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.)Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.)This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users.It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations.Collaborative BII have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time.Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people."The Microsoft BI Stack in GeneralA question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years.Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?"Expo HallI had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here.Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions.Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind!Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Html shows after submitting form and is nowhere to be found in php script.

  - by Kelbizzle

  Upon submitting this form on my site. It send me to a page that says. "Use Back - fill in all fields Use back! ! " But this html isn't in the mail script anywhere. Where could this be coming from? I started out using this contact form (http://www.ibdhost.com/contact/) then changed it a little. Here is the mail script. <?php session_start(); ?> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Sendemail Script</title> </head> <body> <!-- Reminder: Add the link for the 'next page' (at the bottom) --> <!-- Reminder: Change 'YourEmail' to Your real email --> <?php //the 3 variables below were changed to use the SERVER variable $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; $httpref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; $httpagent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $visitorf = $_POST['visitorf']; $visitorl = $_POST['visitorl']; $visitormail = $_POST['visitormail']; $visitorphone = $_POST['visitorphone']; //$notes = $_POST['notes']; //$attn = $_POST['attn']; $lookup = array( 'The Election Report' => 'http://www.mydowmain.net/', '5 Resons' => 'http://www.mydomain.net/', 'Report 3' => 'http://someotherurl3.com/', 'Report 4' => 'http://someotherurl4.com/', 'Report 5' => 'http://someotherurl5.com/', // et cetera for your other values ); $attn = trim($_POST['attn']); $url = $lookup[$attn]; //echo 'attn: ' . $attn . ', url:' . $url; die; //additional headers $headers = 'From: US <[email protected]>' . "\r\n"; //$headers .= 'BCC: [email protected]' . "\r\n"; $todayis = date("l, F j, Y, g:i a") ; $subject = "your lead has downloaded a report."; $subjectdp = "Someone has downloaded a report!"; $notes = stripcslashes($notes); $message = "Dear PAl Affiliate,\n\nA prospective lead of yours has downloaded a report from our Website.\nAny contact information they have left and a link to the report they downloaded\ncan be found below. This is the perfect opportunity for you to open up a line of\ncommunication with the prospect and find out their intrests! If you have any questions\nabout this email please feel free to email us at [email protected]\n\n\nFrom: $visitorf $visitorl ($visitormail)\nTelephone Number: $visitorphone \nReport Downloaded:$url\n \n\nBest regards,\nThe Crew"; //$message = "$todayis [EST] \nAttention: \nMessage: $notes \nFrom: $visitorf $visitorl ($visitormail) \nTelephone Number: //$visitorphone \nReport Downloaded:$url\nAdditional Info : IP = $ip \nBrowser Info: $httpagent \nReferral : $httpref\n"; $messagedp = "A Visitor has just downloaded a report. You can find their contact information below.\n \n ***********************************************************************\n From: $visitorf $visitorl\n Email: $visitormail\n Telephone Number: $visitorphone \n Report Downloaded:$url\n \n \n Best regards,\n The Crew\n"; $messagelead = "Dear, $visitorf\n \n \n We appreciate your interest. Below you will find the URL to download the report you requested.\n Things are always changing in costa rica , so check back often. Also, check us out on Facebook & Twitter \n for daily updates. If there is anything we can do at anytime to enhance your experience, please do\n not hesitate to contact us.\n \n To download your report simply click on the link below. (You must have Adobe Reader or an alternative PDF reader installed)\n \n *** Download Link ***\n $url\n"; //check if the function even exists if(function_exists("mail")) { //send the email mail($_SESSION['email'], $subject, $message, $headers) or die("could not send email"); } else { die("mail fucntion not enabled"); } //send the email to us mail('[email protected]', $subjectdp, $messagedp); //send the email to the lead mail($visitormail, 'Thanks for downloading the report!', $messagelead, $headers); header( "Location: http://www.mydomain.com/thanks_report.php" ); ?> </body> </html>

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• A new method of supporting FOSS?

  - by James

  I have been kicking an idea around for sometime and wondered if something of it's nature hadn't already been invented. The premise is a website that integrates code management, project/team management, and micro-transactions. Donations, in and of themselves, are a sporadic, and unreliable method of supporting developers. Furthermore most free software that accepts donations is started by programmers ,be it to learn, because of a hobby, or because they saw a niche that needed to be filled. There is no method in place of of saying "hay, the FOSS community needs this kind of software, will someone develop it, and accept donations!?" Programmers should be programming, not busy begging for money. Basically the idea is people can go to the site in question, and start a project or make a request. Anyone signed up with the site can start a request. Each member account is free to support or "upvote" a project request. Requests and the associated number of votes let programmers in the community know the needs of the community. When a project is started a request for developers can be put forth. Developers have a ranking based on commits to other projects. The project founder can send invites to known Developers, or accept invites from members based on developer ranking. Once the project has at least one team-member, an objectives sheet or "draft" can be put out, listing design, goals, and features. The founding member and each team-member may contribute to this sheet. Each "milestone", or "Feature" is represented by an article. An article is any unit of a draft that can be voted on by The Project Founder, Team-members, and contributors...which brings me to the next half of this idea. --Microtransactions-- People signed up with this hypothetical website can purchase credits which then can be transfered to projects they would like to support. Anyone who transfers credits to a project is known as a contributor to that project. At anytime a Founder, or the lead team-member may submit an article, or a design (multiple articles) for consideration. All team-members, as well as the Founder, can vote once for each article freely. Contributors may vote yes or no on a number of articles (independent of any given meeting where a particular design or article is considered) equal to the number of credits they have placed into a contributors fund for that particular project. A contributors fund is a proxy between a sites credit account, and a projects credit account. It is sort of like a promise to contribute, instead of an actual contribution. Contributers may place constraints on particular articles such that if those constraints (a yes or no vote) are satisfied then a manually specified amount of credits is automatically transfered to the project account. This allows a project to develop based on the needs of those who may (in the future) financially rely on the project. --- Code commits & milestones --- When a team-member makes a commit, they may specify if it's a minor commit, a bug fix, a compatibility patch (i.e. for a new platform), or a milestone (an article voted on previously). People signed up with the website, may download the updated project and test it to see if the programmer's assertion is true about the commit. A report may then be filed on a small form, giving a one or two paragraphs, and a positive or negative confirmation of the programmer's goal for that particular commit. After all milestones for a particular draft are complete, a new draft is submitted for voting. Also funds may withdrawn by each team-member based on the proportion of commits and milestones confirmed (fulfilled the stated purpose) for each programmer. --- voting --- Members, contributor, and non-contributor, may make priority requests for particular articles of a draft. The project founder may or may not opt to fill those requests based on the volume of upvotes. A fulfilled priority request means that any team-member that makes a community-confirmed commit for an article is, when all articles for the draft are fulfilled, granted a portion of project credits in proportion to the average priority of all the articles he committed. ---- Notes --- While this is horribly prone to design-by-committee the one saving grace is that the lead team-member may place constraints on a draft such that some, or ALL articles must be voted yes. Commits may not begin until a draft satisfying said constraints is approved. What does SO think, is this idea feasible? Does anyone see major problems with this? Is there any insights, or improvements that could be made?

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked CompareExchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Two posts ago, I discussed the Interlocked Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods (here) for adding and subtracting values in a thread-safe, lightweight manner.  Then, last post I talked about the Interlocked Read() and Exchange() methods (here) for safely and efficiently reading and setting 32 or 64 bit values (or references).  This week, we’ll round out the discussion by talking about the Interlocked CompareExchange() method and how it can be put to use to exchange a value if the current value is what you expected it to be. Dirty reads can lead to bad results Many of the uses of Interlocked that we’ve explored so far have centered around either reading, setting, or adding values.  But what happens if you want to do something more complex such as setting a value based on the previous value in some manner? Perhaps you were creating an application that reads a current balance, applies a deposit, and then saves the new modified balance, where of course you’d want that to happen atomically.  If you read the balance, then go to save the new balance and between that time the previous balance has already changed, you’ll have an issue!  Think about it, if we read the current balance as $400, and we are applying a new deposit of $50.75, but meanwhile someone else deposits $200 and sets the total to $600, but then we write a total of $450.75 we’ve lost $200! Now, certainly for int and long values we can use Interlocked.Add() to handles these cases, and it works well for that.  But what if we want to work with doubles, for example?  Let’s say we wanted to add the numbers from 0 to 99,999 in parallel.  We could do this by spawning several parallel tasks to continuously add to a total: 1: double total = 0; 2:  3: Parallel.For(0, 10000, next => 4: { 5: total += next; 6: }); Were this run on one thread using a standard for loop, we’d expect an answer of 4,999,950,000 (the sum of all numbers from 0 to 99,999).  But when we run this in parallel as written above, we’ll likely get something far off.  The result of one of my runs, for example, was 1,281,880,740.  That is way off!  If this were banking software we’d be in big trouble with our clients.  So what happened?  The += operator is not atomic, it will read in the current value, add the result, then store it back into the total.  At any point in all of this another thread could read a “dirty” current total and accidentally “skip” our add.   So, to clean this up, we could use a lock to guarantee concurrency: 1: double total = 0.0; 2: object locker = new object(); 3:  4: Parallel.For(0, count, next => 5: { 6: lock (locker) 7: { 8: total += next; 9: } 10: }); Which will give us the correct result of 4,999,950,000.  One thing to note is that locking can be heavy, especially if the operation being locked over is trivial, or the life of the lock is a high percentage of the work being performed concurrently.  In the case above, the lock consumes pretty much all of the time of each parallel task – and the task being locked on is relatively trivial. Now, let me put in a disclaimer here before we go further: For most uses, lock is more than sufficient for your needs, and is often the simplest solution!    So, if lock is sufficient for most needs, why would we ever consider another solution?  The problem with locking is that it can suspend execution of your thread while it waits for the signal that the lock is free.  Moreover, if the operation being locked over is trivial, the lock can add a very high level of overhead.  This is why things like Interlocked.Increment() perform so well, instead of locking just to perform an increment, we perform the increment with an atomic, lockless method. As with all things performance related, it’s important to profile before jumping to the conclusion that you should optimize everything in your path.  If your profiling shows that locking is causing a high level of waiting in your application, then it’s time to consider lighter alternatives such as Interlocked. CompareExchange() – Exchange existing value if equal some value So let’s look at how we could use CompareExchange() to solve our problem above.  The general syntax of CompareExchange() is: T CompareExchange<T>(ref T location, T newValue, T expectedValue) If the value in location == expectedValue, then newValue is exchanged.  Either way, the value in location (before exchange) is returned. Actually, CompareExchange() is not one method, but a family of overloaded methods that can take int, long, float, double, pointers, or references.  It cannot take other value types (that is, can’t CompareExchange() two DateTime instances directly).  Also keep in mind that the version that takes any reference type (the generic overload) only checks for reference equality, it does not call any overridden Equals(). So how does this help us?  Well, we can grab the current total, and exchange the new value if total hasn’t changed.  This would look like this: 1: // grab the snapshot 2: double current = total; 3:  4: // if the total hasn’t changed since I grabbed the snapshot, then 5: // set it to the new total 6: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current); So what the code above says is: if the amount in total (1st arg) is the same as the amount in current (3rd arg), then set total to current + next (2nd arg).  This check and exchange pair is atomic (and thus thread-safe). This works if total is the same as our snapshot in current, but the problem, is what happens if they aren’t the same?  Well, we know that in either case we will get the previous value of total (before the exchange), back as a result.  Thus, we can test this against our snapshot to see if it was the value we expected: 1: // if the value returned is != current, then our snapshot must be out of date 2: // which means we didn't (and shouldn't) apply current + next 3: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current) != current) 4: { 5: // ooops, total was not equal to our snapshot in current, what should we do??? 6: } So what do we do if we fail?  That’s up to you and the problem you are trying to solve.  It’s possible you would decide to abort the whole transaction, or perhaps do a lightweight spin and try again.  Let’s try that: 1: double current = total; 2:  3: // make first attempt... 4: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current) 5: { 6: // if we fail, go into a spin wait, spin, and try again until succeed 7: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 8:  9: do 10: { 11: spinner.SpinOnce(); 12: current = total; 13: } 14: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current); 15: } 16:  This is not trivial code, but it illustrates a possible use of CompareExchange().  What we are doing is first checking to see if we succeed on the first try, and if so great!  If not, we create a SpinWait and then repeat the process of SpinOnce(), grab a fresh snapshot, and repeat until CompareExchnage() succeeds.  You may wonder why not a simple do-while here, and the reason it’s more efficient to only create the SpinWait until we absolutely know we need one, for optimal efficiency. Though not as simple (or maintainable) as a simple lock, this will perform better in many situations.  Comparing an unlocked (and wrong) version, a version using lock, and the Interlocked of the code, we get the following average times for multiple iterations of adding the sum of 100,000 numbers: 1: Unlocked money average time: 2.1 ms 2: Locked money average time: 5.1 ms 3: Interlocked money average time: 3 ms So the Interlocked.CompareExchange(), while heavier to code, came in lighter than the lock, offering a good compromise of safety and performance when we need to reduce contention. CompareExchange() - it’s not just for adding stuff… So that was one simple use of CompareExchange() in the context of adding double values -- which meant we couldn’t have used the simpler Interlocked.Add() -- but it has other uses as well. If you think about it, this really works anytime you want to create something new based on a current value without using a full lock.  For example, you could use it to create a simple lazy instantiation implementation.  In this case, we want to set the lazy instance only if the previous value was null: 1: public static class Lazy<T> where T : class, new() 2: { 3: private static T _instance; 4:  5: public static T Instance 6: { 7: get 8: { 9: // if current is null, we need to create new instance 10: if (_instance == null) 11: { 12: // attempt create, it will only set if previous was null 13: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _instance, new T(), (T)null); 14: } 15:  16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } So, if _instance == null, this will create a new T() and attempt to exchange it with _instance.  If _instance is not null, then it does nothing and we discard the new T() we created. This is a way to create lazy instances of a type where we are more concerned about locking overhead than creating an accidental duplicate which is not used.  In fact, the BCL implementation of Lazy<T> offers a similar thread-safety choice for Publication thread safety, where it will not guarantee only one instance was created, but it will guarantee that all readers get the same instance.  Another possible use would be in concurrent collections.  Let’s say, for example, that you are creating your own brand new super stack that uses a linked list paradigm and is “lock free”.  We could use Interlocked.CompareExchange() to be able to do a lockless Push() which could be more efficient in multi-threaded applications where several threads are pushing and popping on the stack concurrently. Yes, there are already concurrent collections in the BCL (in .NET 4.0 as part of the TPL), but it’s a fun exercise!  So let’s assume we have a node like this: 1: public sealed class Node<T> 2: { 3: // the data for this node 4: public T Data { get; set; } 5:  6: // the link to the next instance 7: internal Node<T> Next { get; set; } 8: } Then, perhaps, our stack’s Push() operation might look something like: 1: public sealed class SuperStack<T> 2: { 3: private volatile T _head; 4:  5: public void Push(T value) 6: { 7: var newNode = new Node<int> { Data = value, Next = _head }; 8:  9: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next) 10: { 11: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 12:  13: do 14: { 15: spinner.SpinOnce(); 16: newNode.Next = _head; 17: } 18: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // ... 23: } Notice a similar paradigm here as with adding our doubles before.  What we are doing is creating the new Node with the data to push, and with a Next value being the original node referenced by _head.  This will create our stack behavior (LIFO – Last In, First Out).  Now, we have to set _head to now refer to the newNode, but we must first make sure it hasn’t changed! So we check to see if _head has the same value we saved in our snapshot as newNode.Next, and if so, we set _head to newNode.  This is all done atomically, and the result is _head’s original value, as long as the original value was what we assumed it was with newNode.Next, then we are good and we set it without a lock!  If not, we SpinWait and try again. Once again, this is much lighter than locking in highly parallelized code with lots of contention.  If I compare the method above with a similar class using lock, I get the following results for pushing 100,000 items: 1: Locked SuperStack average time: 6 ms 2: Interlocked SuperStack average time: 4.5 ms So, once again, we can get more efficient than a lock, though there is the cost of added code complexity.  Fortunately for you, most of the concurrent collection you’d ever need are already created for you in the System.Collections.Concurrent (here) namespace – for more information, see my Little Wonders – The Concurent Collections Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here). Summary We’ve seen before how the Interlocked class can be used to safely and efficiently add, increment, decrement, read, and exchange values in a multi-threaded environment.  In addition to these, Interlocked CompareExchange() can be used to perform more complex logic without the need of a lock when lock contention is a concern. The added efficiency, though, comes at the cost of more complex code.  As such, the standard lock is often sufficient for most thread-safety needs.  But if profiling indicates you spend a lot of time waiting for locks, or if you just need a lock for something simple such as an increment, decrement, read, exchange, etc., then consider using the Interlocked class’s methods to reduce wait. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked,CompareExchange,threading,concurrency

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• Button in Update Panel doing full postback?

  - by sah302

  No this isn't a copy of this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/654423/button-in-update-panel-is-doing-a-full-postback I've got a drop down inside an update panel, and I am trying to get it to allow the person using the page to add users to a list that is bound to a gridview. The list is a global variable, and on page_load I set that to the gridview's datasource and databind it. However, anytime I click the 'add a user' button, or the button to remove the user from the list. It appears like it is doing a full post back even though all these elements are inside the update Panel. Code Behind: Public accomplishmentTypeDao As New AccomplishmentTypeDao() Public accomplishmentDao As New AccomplishmentDao() Public userDao As New UserDao() Public facultyDictionary As New Dictionary(Of Guid, String) Public facultyList As New List(Of User) Public associatedFaculty As New List(Of User) Public facultyId As New Guid Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load Page.Title = "Add a New Faculty Accomplishment" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataSource = accomplishmentTypeDao.getEntireTable() ddlAccomplishmentType.DataTextField = "Name" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataValueField = "Id" ddlAccomplishmentType.DataBind() facultyList = userDao.getListOfUsersByUserGroupName("Faculty") For Each faculty As User In facultyList facultyDictionary.Add(faculty.Id, faculty.LastName & ", " & faculty.FirstName) Next If Not Page.IsPostBack Then ddlFacultyList.DataSource = facultyDictionary ddlFacultyList.DataTextField = "Value" ddlFacultyList.DataValueField = "Key" ddlFacultyList.DataBind() End If gvAssociatedUsers.DataSource = associatedFaculty gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() End Sub Protected Sub deleteUser(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandEventArgs) facultyId = New Guid(e.CommandArgument.ToString()) associatedFaculty.Remove(associatedFaculty.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Protected Sub btnAddUser_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs) Handles btnAddUser.Click facultyId = New Guid(ddlFacultyList.SelectedValue) associatedFaculty.Add(facultyList.Find(Function(user) user.Id = facultyId)) gvAssociatedUsers.DataBind() upAssociatedFaculty.Update() End Sub Markup: <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upAssociatedFaculty" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional"> <ContentTemplate> <p><b>Created By:</b> <asp:Label ID="lblCreatedBy" runat="server"></asp:Label></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Type: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlAccomplishmentType" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList></p> <p><b>Accomplishment Applies To: </b><asp:DropDownList ID="ddlFacultyList" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList> &nbsp;<asp:Button ID="btnAddUser" runat="server" Text="Add Faculty" /></p> <p> <asp:GridView ID="gvAssociatedUsers" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" GridLines="None" ShowHeader="false"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Id" HeaderText="Id" Visible="False" /> <asp:TemplateField ShowHeader="False"> <ItemTemplate> <span style="margin-left: 15px;"> <p><%#Eval("LastName")%>, <%#Eval("FirstName")%> <asp:Button ID="btnUnassignUser" runat="server" CausesValidation="false" CommandArgument='<%# Eval("Id") %>' CommandName="Delete" OnCommand="deleteUser" Text='Remove' /></p> </span> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> <EmptyDataTemplate> <em>There are currently no faculty associated with this accomplishment.</em> </EmptyDataTemplate> </asp:GridView> </p> </ContentTemplate> </asp:UpdatePanel> Now I thought the point of an update panel was to be able to update things inside of it without doing a full post_back and reloading the page. So if that's the case, why is it calling page_load everytime I click the buttons? I ran this code and debug and I see that even before any of the code associated with button press fires, page_load runs again. I tried putting the gvAssociatedUser.Datasource = associatedFaculty and the line below inside the Page.IsPostBack check, that prevented the page from working. I tried every combination of settings of the update panel for ChildrenAsTriggers and UpdateMode, and none of them worked. I know this is something simple, but all the combinations I've tried won't get it to work. How can I make this thing work?

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• Qt C++ signals and slots did not fire

  - by Xegara

  I have programmed Qt a couple of times already and I really like the signals and slots feature. But now, I guess I'm having a problem when a signal is emitted from one thread, the corresponding slot from another thread is not fired. The connection was made in the main program. This is also my first time to use Qt for ROS which uses CMake. The signal fired by the QThread triggered their corresponding slots but the emitted signal of my class UserInput did not trigger the slot in tflistener where it supposed to. I have tried everything I can. Any help? The code is provided below. Main.cpp #include <QCoreApplication> #include <QThread> #include "userinput.h" #include "tfcompleter.h" int main(int argc, char** argv) { QCoreApplication app(argc, argv); QThread *thread1 = new QThread(); QThread *thread2 = new QThread(); UserInput *input1 = new UserInput(); TfCompleter *completer = new TfCompleter(); QObject::connect(input1, SIGNAL(togglePause2()), completer, SLOT(toggle())); QObject::connect(thread1, SIGNAL(started()), completer, SLOT(startCounting())); QObject::connect(thread2, SIGNAL(started()), input1, SLOT(start())); completer->moveToThread(thread1); input1->moveToThread(thread2); thread1->start(); thread2->start(); app.exec(); return 0; } What I want to do is.. There are two seperate threads. One thread is for the user input. When the user enters [space], the thread emits a signal to toggle the boolean member field of the other thread. The other thread 's task is to just continue its process if the user wants it to run, otherwise, the user does not want it to run. I wanted to grant the user to toggle the processing anytime that he wants, that's why I decided to bring them into seperate threads. The following codes are the tflistener and userinput. tfcompleter.h #ifndef TFCOMPLETER_H #define TFCOMPLETER_H #include <QObject> #include <QtCore> class TfCompleter : public QObject { Q_OBJECT private: bool isCount; public Q_SLOTS: void toggle(); void startCounting(); }; #endif tflistener.cpp #include "tfcompleter.h" #include <iostream> void TfCompleter::startCounting() { static uint i = 0; while(true) { if(isCount) std::cout << i++ << std::endl; } } void TfCompleter::toggle() { // isCount = ~isCount; std::cout << "isCount " << std::endl; } UserInput.h #ifndef USERINPUT_H #define USERINPUT_H #include <QObject> #include <QtCore> class UserInput : public QObject { Q_OBJECT public Q_SLOTS: void start(); // Waits for the keypress from the user and emits the corresponding signal. public: Q_SIGNALS: void togglePause2(); }; #endif UserInput.cpp #include "userinput.h" #include <iostream> #include <cstdio> // Implementation of getch #include <termios.h> #include <unistd.h> /* reads from keypress, doesn't echo */ int getch(void) { struct termios oldattr, newattr; int ch; tcgetattr( STDIN_FILENO, &oldattr ); newattr = oldattr; newattr.c_lflag &= ~( ICANON | ECHO ); tcsetattr( STDIN_FILENO, TCSANOW, &newattr ); ch = getchar(); tcsetattr( STDIN_FILENO, TCSANOW, &oldattr ); return ch; } void UserInput::start() { char c = 0; while (true) { c = getch(); if (c == ' ') { Q_EMIT togglePause2(); std::cout << "SPACE" << std::endl; } c = 0; } } Here is the CMakeLists.txt. I just placed it here also since I don't know maybe the CMake has also a factor here. CMakeLists.txt ############################################################################## # CMake ############################################################################## cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.4.6) ############################################################################## # Ros Initialisation ############################################################################## include($ENV{ROS_ROOT}/core/rosbuild/rosbuild.cmake) rosbuild_init() set(CMAKE_AUTOMOC ON) #set the default path for built executables to the "bin" directory set(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/bin) #set the default path for built libraries to the "lib" directory set(LIBRARY_OUTPUT_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/lib) # Set the build type. Options are: # Coverage : w/ debug symbols, w/o optimization, w/ code-coverage # Debug : w/ debug symbols, w/o optimization # Release : w/o debug symbols, w/ optimization # RelWithDebInfo : w/ debug symbols, w/ optimization # MinSizeRel : w/o debug symbols, w/ optimization, stripped binaries #set(ROS_BUILD_TYPE Debug) ############################################################################## # Qt Environment ############################################################################## # Could use this, but qt-ros would need an updated deb, instead we'll move to catkin # rosbuild_include(qt_build qt-ros) rosbuild_find_ros_package(qt_build) include(${qt_build_PACKAGE_PATH}/qt-ros.cmake) rosbuild_prepare_qt4(QtCore) # Add the appropriate components to the component list here ADD_DEFINITIONS(-DQT_NO_KEYWORDS) ############################################################################## # Sections ############################################################################## #file(GLOB QT_FORMS RELATIVE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} ui/*.ui) #file(GLOB QT_RESOURCES RELATIVE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} resources/*.qrc) file(GLOB_RECURSE QT_MOC RELATIVE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} FOLLOW_SYMLINKS include/rgbdslam_client/*.hpp) #QT4_ADD_RESOURCES(QT_RESOURCES_CPP ${QT_RESOURCES}) #QT4_WRAP_UI(QT_FORMS_HPP ${QT_FORMS}) QT4_WRAP_CPP(QT_MOC_HPP ${QT_MOC}) ############################################################################## # Sources ############################################################################## file(GLOB_RECURSE QT_SOURCES RELATIVE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} FOLLOW_SYMLINKS src/*.cpp) ############################################################################## # Binaries ############################################################################## rosbuild_add_executable(rgbdslam_client ${QT_SOURCES} ${QT_MOC_HPP}) #rosbuild_add_executable(rgbdslam_client ${QT_SOURCES} ${QT_RESOURCES_CPP} ${QT_FORMS_HPP} ${QT_MOC_HPP}) target_link_libraries(rgbdslam_client ${QT_LIBRARIES})

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• Capturing and Transforming ASP.NET Output with Response.Filter

  - by Rick Strahl

  During one of my Handlers and Modules session at DevConnections this week one of the attendees asked a question that I didn’t have an immediate answer for. Basically he wanted to capture response output completely and then apply some filtering to the output – effectively injecting some additional content into the page AFTER the page had completely rendered. Specifically the output should be captured from anywhere – not just a page and have this code injected into the page. Some time ago I posted some code that allows you to capture ASP.NET Page output by overriding the Render() method, capturing the HtmlTextWriter() and reading its content, modifying the rendered data as text then writing it back out. I’ve actually used this approach on a few occasions and it works fine for ASP.NET pages. But this obviously won’t work outside of the Page class environment and it’s not really generic – you have to create a custom page class in order to handle the output capture. [updated 11/16/2009 – updated ResponseFilterStream implementation and a few additional notes based on comments] Enter Response.Filter However, ASP.NET includes a Response.Filter which can be used – well to filter output. Basically Response.Filter is a stream through which the OutputStream is piped back to the Web Server (indirectly). As content is written into the Response object, the filter stream receives the appropriate Stream commands like Write, Flush and Close as well as read operations although for a Response.Filter that’s uncommon to be hit. The Response.Filter can be programmatically replaced at runtime which allows you to effectively intercept all output generation that runs through ASP.NET. A common Example: Dynamic GZip Encoding A rather common use of Response.Filter hooking up code based, dynamic  GZip compression for requests which is dead simple by applying a GZipStream (or DeflateStream) to Response.Filter. The following generic routines can be used very easily to detect GZip capability of the client and compress response output with a single line of code and a couple of library helper routines: WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); which is handled with a few lines of reusable code and a couple of static helper methods: /// <summary> ///Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter ///IMPORTANT:  ///You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() {     HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response;     if(IsGZipSupported())     {         stringAcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"];         if(AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))         {             Response.Filter = newSystem.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter,                                        System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress);             Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate");         }         else        {             Response.Filter = newSystem.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter,                                       System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress);             Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip");                            }     }     // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately    Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } GZipStream and DeflateStream are streams that are assigned to Response.Filter and by doing so apply the appropriate compression on the active Response. Response.Filter content is chunked So to implement a Response.Filter effectively requires only that you implement a custom stream and handle the Write() method to capture Response output as it’s written. At first blush this seems very simple – you capture the output in Write, transform it and write out the transformed content in one pass. And that indeed works for small amounts of content. But you see, the problem is that output is written in small buffer chunks (a little less than 16k it appears) rather than just a single Write() statement into the stream, which makes perfect sense for ASP.NET to stream data back to IIS in smaller chunks to minimize memory usage en route. Unfortunately this also makes it a more difficult to implement any filtering routines since you don’t directly get access to all of the response content which is problematic especially if those filtering routines require you to look at the ENTIRE response in order to transform or capture the output as is needed for the solution the gentleman in my session asked for. So in order to address this a slightly different approach is required that basically captures all the Write() buffers passed into a cached stream and then making the stream available only when it’s complete and ready to be flushed. As I was thinking about the implementation I also started thinking about the few instances when I’ve used Response.Filter implementations. Each time I had to create a new Stream subclass and create my custom functionality but in the end each implementation did the same thing – capturing output and transforming it. I thought there should be an easier way to do this by creating a re-usable Stream class that can handle stream transformations that are common to Response.Filter implementations. Creating a semi-generic Response Filter Stream Class What I ended up with is a ResponseFilterStream class that provides a handful of Events that allow you to capture and/or transform Response content. The class implements a subclass of Stream and then overrides Write() and Flush() to handle capturing and transformation operations. By exposing events it’s easy to hook up capture or transformation operations via single focused methods. ResponseFilterStream exposes the following events: CaptureStream, CaptureString Captures the output only and provides either a MemoryStream or String with the final page output. Capture is hooked to the Flush() operation of the stream. TransformStream, TransformString Allows you to transform the complete response output with events that receive a MemoryStream or String respectively and can you modify the output then return it back as a return value. The transformed output is then written back out in a single chunk to the response output stream. These events capture all output internally first then write the entire buffer into the response. TransformWrite, TransformWriteString Allows you to transform the Response data as it is written in its original chunk size in the Stream’s Write() method. Unlike TransformStream/TransformString which operate on the complete output, these events only see the current chunk of data written. This is more efficient as there’s no caching involved, but can cause problems due to searched content splitting over multiple chunks. Using this implementation, creating a custom Response.Filter transformation becomes as simple as the following code. To hook up the Response.Filter using the MemoryStream version event: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformStream += filter_TransformStream; Response.Filter = filter; and the event handler to do the transformation: MemoryStream filter_TransformStream(MemoryStream ms) { Encoding encoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding; string output = encoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); output = FixPaths(output); ms = new MemoryStream(output.Length); byte[] buffer = encoding.GetBytes(output); ms.Write(buffer,0,buffer.Length); return ms; } private string FixPaths(string output) { string path = HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath; // override root path wonkiness if (path == "/") path = ""; output = output.Replace("\"~/", "\"" + path + "/").Replace("'~/", "'" + path + "/"); return output; } The idea of the event handler is that you can do whatever you want to the stream and return back a stream – either the same one that’s been modified or a brand new one – which is then sent back to as the final response. The above code can be simplified even more by using the string version events which handle the stream to string conversions for you: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; and the event handler to do the transformation calling the same FixPaths method shown above: string filter_TransformString(string output) { return FixPaths(output); } The events for capturing output and capturing and transforming chunks work in a very similar way. By using events to handle the transformations ResponseFilterStream becomes a reusable component and we don’t have to create a new stream class or subclass an existing Stream based classed. By the way, the example used here is kind of a cool trick which transforms “~/” expressions inside of the final generated HTML output – even in plain HTML controls not HTML controls – and transforms them into the appropriate application relative path in the same way that ResolveUrl would do. So you can write plain old HTML like this: <a href=”~/default.aspx”>Home</a>  and have it turned into: <a href=”/myVirtual/default.aspx”>Home</a>  without having to use an ASP.NET control like Hyperlink or Image or having to constantly use: <img src=”<%= ResolveUrl(“~/images/home.gif”) %>” /> in MVC applications (which frankly is one of the most annoying things about MVC especially given the path hell that extension-less and endpoint-less URLs impose). I can’t take credit for this idea. While discussing the Response.Filter issues on Twitter a hint from Dylan Beattie who pointed me at one of his examples which does something similar. I thought the idea was cool enough to use an example for future demos of Response.Filter functionality in ASP.NET next I time I do the Modules and Handlers talk (which was great fun BTW). How practical this is is debatable however since there’s definitely some overhead to using a Response.Filter in general and especially on one that caches the output and the re-writes it later. Make sure to test for performance anytime you use Response.Filter hookup and make sure it' doesn’t end up killing perf on you. You’ve been warned :-}. How does ResponseFilterStream work? The big win of this implementation IMHO is that it’s a reusable  component – so for implementation there’s no new class, no subclassing – you simply attach to an event to implement an event handler method with a straight forward signature to retrieve the stream or string you’re interested in. The implementation is based on a subclass of Stream as is required in order to handle the Response.Filter requirements. What’s different than other implementations I’ve seen in various places is that it supports capturing output as a whole to allow retrieving the full response output for capture or modification. The exception are the TransformWrite and TransformWrite events which operate only active chunk of data written by the Response. For captured output, the Write() method captures output into an internal MemoryStream that is cached until writing is complete. So Write() is called when ASP.NET writes to the Response stream, but the filter doesn’t pass on the Write immediately to the filter’s internal stream. The data is cached and only when the Flush() method is called to finalize the Stream’s output do we actually send the cached stream off for transformation (if the events are hooked up) and THEN finally write out the returned content in one big chunk. Here’s the implementation of ResponseFilterStream: /// <summary> /// A semi-generic Stream implementation for Response.Filter with /// an event interface for handling Content transformations via /// Stream or String. /// <remarks> /// Use with care for large output as this implementation copies /// the output into a memory stream and so increases memory usage. /// </remarks> /// </summary> public class ResponseFilterStream : Stream { /// <summary> /// The original stream /// </summary> Stream _stream; /// <summary> /// Current position in the original stream /// </summary> long _position; /// <summary> /// Stream that original content is read into /// and then passed to TransformStream function /// </summary> MemoryStream _cacheStream = new MemoryStream(5000); /// <summary> /// Internal pointer that that keeps track of the size /// of the cacheStream /// </summary> int _cachePointer = 0; /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="responseStream"></param> public ResponseFilterStream(Stream responseStream) { _stream = responseStream; } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the stream is captured /// </summary> private bool IsCaptured { get { if (CaptureStream != null || CaptureString != null || TransformStream != null || TransformString != null) return true; return false; } } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the Write method is outputting data immediately /// or delaying output until Flush() is fired. /// </summary> private bool IsOutputDelayed { get { if (TransformStream != null || TransformString != null) return true; return false; } } /// <summary> /// Event that captures Response output and makes it available /// as a MemoryStream instance. Output is captured but won't /// affect Response output. /// </summary> public event Action<MemoryStream> CaptureStream; /// <summary> /// Event that captures Response output and makes it available /// as a string. Output is captured but won't affect Response output. /// </summary> public event Action<string> CaptureString; /// <summary> /// Event that allows you transform the stream as each chunk of /// the output is written in the Write() operation of the stream. /// This means that that it's possible/likely that the input /// buffer will not contain the full response output but only /// one of potentially many chunks. /// /// This event is called as part of the filter stream's Write() /// operation. /// </summary> public event Func<byte[], byte[]> TransformWrite; /// <summary> /// Event that allows you to transform the response stream as /// each chunk of bytep[] output is written during the stream's write /// operation. This means it's possibly/likely that the string /// passed to the handler only contains a portion of the full /// output. Typical buffer chunks are around 16k a piece. /// /// This event is called as part of the stream's Write operation. /// </summary> public event Func<string, string> TransformWriteString; /// <summary> /// This event allows capturing and transformation of the entire /// output stream by caching all write operations and delaying final /// response output until Flush() is called on the stream. /// </summary> public event Func<MemoryStream, MemoryStream> TransformStream; /// <summary> /// Event that can be hooked up to handle Response.Filter /// Transformation. Passed a string that you can modify and /// return back as a return value. The modified content /// will become the final output. /// </summary> public event Func<string, string> TransformString; protected virtual void OnCaptureStream(MemoryStream ms) { if (CaptureStream != null) CaptureStream(ms); } private void OnCaptureStringInternal(MemoryStream ms) { if (CaptureString != null) { string content = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); OnCaptureString(content); } } protected virtual void OnCaptureString(string output) { if (CaptureString != null) CaptureString(output); } protected virtual byte[] OnTransformWrite(byte[] buffer) { if (TransformWrite != null) return TransformWrite(buffer); return buffer; } private byte[] OnTransformWriteStringInternal(byte[] buffer) { Encoding encoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding; string output = OnTransformWriteString(encoding.GetString(buffer)); return encoding.GetBytes(output); } private string OnTransformWriteString(string value) { if (TransformWriteString != null) return TransformWriteString(value); return value; } protected virtual MemoryStream OnTransformCompleteStream(MemoryStream ms) { if (TransformStream != null) return TransformStream(ms); return ms; } /// <summary> /// Allows transforming of strings /// /// Note this handler is internal and not meant to be overridden /// as the TransformString Event has to be hooked up in order /// for this handler to even fire to avoid the overhead of string /// conversion on every pass through. /// </summary> /// <param name="responseText"></param> /// <returns></returns> private string OnTransformCompleteString(string responseText) { if (TransformString != null) TransformString(responseText); return responseText; } /// <summary> /// Wrapper method form OnTransformString that handles /// stream to string and vice versa conversions /// </summary> /// <param name="ms"></param> /// <returns></returns> internal MemoryStream OnTransformCompleteStringInternal(MemoryStream ms) { if (TransformString == null) return ms; //string content = ms.GetAsString(); string content = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); content = TransformString(content); byte[] buffer = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetBytes(content); ms = new MemoryStream(); ms.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length); //ms.WriteString(content); return ms; } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override bool CanRead { get { return true; } } public override bool CanSeek { get { return true; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override bool CanWrite { get { return true; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override long Length { get { return 0; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override long Position { get { return _position; } set { _position = value; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="direction"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override long Seek(long offset, System.IO.SeekOrigin direction) { return _stream.Seek(offset, direction); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="length"></param> public override void SetLength(long length) { _stream.SetLength(length); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override void Close() { _stream.Close(); } /// <summary> /// Override flush by writing out the cached stream data /// </summary> public override void Flush() { if (IsCaptured && _cacheStream.Length > 0) { // Check for transform implementations _cacheStream = OnTransformCompleteStream(_cacheStream); _cacheStream = OnTransformCompleteStringInternal(_cacheStream); OnCaptureStream(_cacheStream); OnCaptureStringInternal(_cacheStream); // write the stream back out if output was delayed if (IsOutputDelayed) _stream.Write(_cacheStream.ToArray(), 0, (int)_cacheStream.Length); // Clear the cache once we've written it out _cacheStream.SetLength(0); } // default flush behavior _stream.Flush(); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="buffer"></param> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="count"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) { return _stream.Read(buffer, offset, count); } /// <summary> /// Overriden to capture output written by ASP.NET and captured /// into a cached stream that is written out later when Flush() /// is called. /// </summary> /// <param name="buffer"></param> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="count"></param> public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) { if ( IsCaptured ) { // copy to holding buffer only - we'll write out later _cacheStream.Write(buffer, 0, count); _cachePointer += count; } // just transform this buffer if (TransformWrite != null) buffer = OnTransformWrite(buffer); if (TransformWriteString != null) buffer = OnTransformWriteStringInternal(buffer); if (!IsOutputDelayed) _stream.Write(buffer, offset, buffer.Length); } } The key features are the events and corresponding OnXXX methods that handle the event hookups, and the Write() and Flush() methods of the stream implementation. All the rest of the members tend to be plain jane passthrough stream implementation code without much consequence. I do love the way Action<t> and Func<T> make it so easy to create the event signatures for the various events – sweet. A few Things to consider Performance Response.Filter is not great for performance in general as it adds another layer of indirection to the ASP.NET output pipeline, and this implementation in particular adds a memory hit as it basically duplicates the response output into the cached memory stream which is necessary since you may have to look at the entire response. If you have large pages in particular this can cause potentially serious memory pressure in your server application. So be careful of wholesale adoption of this (or other) Response.Filters. Make sure to do some performance testing to ensure it’s not killing your app’s performance. Response.Filter works everywhere A few questions came up in comments and discussion as to capturing ALL output hitting the site and – yes you can definitely do that by assigning a Response.Filter inside of a module. If you do this however you’ll want to be very careful and decide which content you actually want to capture especially in IIS 7 which passes ALL content – including static images/CSS etc. through the ASP.NET pipeline. So it is important to filter only on what you’re looking for – like the page extension or maybe more effectively the Response.ContentType. Response.Filter Chaining Originally I thought that filter chaining doesn’t work at all due to a bug in the stream implementation code. But it’s quite possible to assign multiple filters to the Response.Filter property. So the following actually works to both compress the output and apply the transformed content: WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; However the following does not work resulting in invalid content encoding errors: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); In other words multiple Response filters can work together but it depends entirely on the implementation whether they can be chained or in which order they can be chained. In this case running the GZip/Deflate stream filters apparently relies on the original content length of the output and chokes when the content is modified. But if attaching the compression first it works fine as unintuitive as that may seem. Resources Download example code Capture Output from ASP.NET Pages © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Help Me Make My Pascal Program Display Multiple Names Which Were Entered Plz.

  - by Sketchie

  Hey,Guys I'm having trouble displaying names using arrays in my Pascal program. But first heres the question I'm writing the program to answer : Develop pseudocode that accepts as input the name of an unspecified number of masqueraders who each have paid the full cost of their costume and the amount each has paid. A masquerader may have paid for a costume in any of the five sections in the band. The algorithm should determine the section in which the masquerader plays, based on the amount he/she has paid for the costume. The algorithm should also determine the number of masqueraders who have paid for costumes in each section. The names of persons and the section for which they have paid should be printed. A listing of the sections and the total number of persons registered to play in each section should also be printed, along with the total amount paid in each section. And here's what I've done so far(It's a bit messy): program Maqueprgrm; uses wincrt; type names=array [1..30]of string; var name:string; s1_nms:names; s2_nms:names; s3_nms:names; s4_nms:names; s5_nms:names; amt_paid:integer; stop,x,full,ins,ttl1,ttl2,ttl3,ttl4,ttl5,sec_1,sec_2,sec_3,sec_4,sec_5,sec:integer; begin stop := 0; writeln ('To Begin Data Collecting Section Press 1, To End Press 0'); readln(stop); while stop <0 do begin for x:= 1 to 30 do x:= x+1; writeln ('Please Enter The Name of Masquerader.'); readln (name); writeln ('Please Enter The Amount Paid For Costume.'); readln (amt_paid); IF amt_paid = 144 THEN Begin full:=full+1; {people who paid in full + 1} sec_1:=sec_1+1; {people in this section + 1} ttl1:= ttl1+amt_paid; {total money earned in this section + amount person paid} s1_nms[x]:= name; {People's names in this section plus current entry's name} End else IF amt_paid = 184 then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_1:=sec_1+1; ttl1:=ttl1+amt_paid; s1_nms[x]:= name; end else IF amt_paid = 198 then Begin full:=full+1; sec_2:=sec_2+1; ttl2:=ttl2+amt_paid; s2_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 153 then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_2:=sec_2+1; ttl2:=ttl2+amt_paid; s2_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 264 then Begin full:=full+1; sec_3:=sec_3+1; ttl3:=ttl3+amt_paid; s3_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 322 then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_3:=sec_3+1; ttl3:=ttl3+amt_paid; s3_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 315 then Begin full:=full+1; sec_4:=sec_4+1; ttl4:=ttl4+amt_paid; s4_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 402 then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_4:=sec_4+1; ttl4:=ttl4+amt_paid; s4_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 382. then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_4:=sec_4+1; ttl4:=ttl4+amt_paid; s4_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else IF amt_paid = 488 then Begin ins:=ins+1; sec_5:=sec_5+1; ttl5:=ttl5+amt_paid; s5_nms[x]:= 'name'; end else begin Writeln ('Invalid Entry'); For x:= 1 to 30 do end; writeln (' To Enter More Data Press 1, To Print Data and Calculations Press 0'); Readln (stop); End; writeln ('For Information on Sections Press 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 Respectively'); Readln (sec); IF Sec= 1 THEN Begin for x:= 1 to 30 do; begin writeln ('The Number of Revelers in This Section is ',Sec_1,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Full Is ', Full,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Installments is ', Ins ,'.'); Writeln ('The Names of Revelers in This Section is ', S1_Nms[x], '.'); Writeln ('The Total Amount Collected By This Section Is ', Ttl1, '.'); End; end else IF Sec= 2 THEN Begin For x:= 1 to 30 do begin Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in This Section is ', Sec_2,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Full Is ', Full,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Installments is ', Ins ,'.'); Writeln ('The Names of Revelers in This Section is ', S2_Nms[x] ,'.'); Writeln ('The Total Amount Collected By This Section Is ', Ttl2, '.'); End; End else IF Sec= 3 THEN Begin For x:= 1 to 30 do begin writeln ('The Number of Revelers in This Section is ', Sec_3,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Full Is ', Full,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Installments is ', Ins ,'.'); Writeln ('The Names of Revelers in This Section is ', S3_Nms[x] ,'.'); Writeln ('The Total Amount Collected By This Section Is ', Ttl3, '.'); End; End else IF Sec= 4 THEN Begin For x:= 1 to 30 do begin writeln ('The Number of Revelers in This Section is ', Sec_4,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Full Is ', Full,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Installments is ', Ins, '.'); Writeln ('The Names of Revelers in This Section is ', S4_Nms [x],'.'); Writeln ('The Total Amount Collected By This Section Is ', Ttl4 ,'.'); End; End else IF Sec= 5 THEN Begin For x:= 1 to 30 do begin writeln ('The Number of Revelers in This Section is ', Sec_5,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Full Is ', Full,'.'); Writeln ('The Number of Revelers in the Band Who Paid in Installments is ', Ins, '.'); Writeln ('The Names of Revelers in This Section is ', S5_Nms[x], '.'); Writeln ('The Total Amount Collected By This Section Is ', Ttl5 ,'.'); End; End else BEGIN Writeln ('Invalid Entry. For Information on Sections Press 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 Respectively. '); End; end. The result I keep getting is that for the names in the section it is only the name of the last person entered that is displayed. For example it would display: The number of revelers in this section is 2 The number of revelers in the band who paid in full is 2 {Band is the whole thing divided into 5 section} The number of revelers in the band who paid in installments is 0 The names of revelers in this section is Amy Total amount collected by this section is 288 So yea, the program only displays "Amy" even though I entered more than 1 name. Do you guys know how to fix it also if it's not asking too much could you help me to make a while loop for the last portion of the program so that after the user sees the info for a section he can see another section. It sucks that I've been working on it for a while but if it doesn't run properly tomorrow I'll fail. Help would be greatly appreciated and responses are welcome anytime cause i'll be up anyway. P.S. Sorry for the long post.

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