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• The HTG Guide to Using a Bluetooth Keyboard with Your Android Device

  - by Matt Klein

  Android devices aren’t usually associated with physical keyboards. But, since Google is now bundling their QuickOffice app with the newly-released Kit-Kat, it appears inevitable that at least some Android tablets (particularly 10-inch models) will take on more productivity roles. In recent years, physical keyboards have been rendered obsolete by swipe style input methods such as Swype and Google Keyboard. Physical keyboards tend to make phones thick and plump, and that won’t fly today when thin (and even flexible and curved) is in vogue. So, you’ll be hard-pressed to find smartphone manufacturers launching new models with physical keyboards, thus rendering sliders to a past chapter in mobile phone evolution. It makes sense to ditch the clunky keyboard phone in favor of a lighter, thinner model. You’re going to carry around in your pocket or purse all day, why have that extra bulk and weight? That said, there is sound logic behind pairing tablets with keyboards. Microsoft continues to plod forward with its Surface models, and while critics continue to lavish praise on the iPad, its functionality is obviously enhanced and extended when you add a physical keyboard. Apple even has an entire page devoted specifically to iPad-compatible keyboards. But an Android tablet and a keyboard? Does such a thing even exist? They do actually. There are docking keyboards and keyboard/case combinations, there’s the Asus Transformer family, Logitech markets a Windows 8 keyboard that speaks “Android”, and these are just to name a few. So we know that keyboard products that are designed to work with Android exist, but what about an everyday Bluetooth keyboard you might use with Windows or OS X? How-To Geek wanted look at how viable it is to use such a keyboard with Android. We conducted some research and examined some lists of Android keyboard shortcuts. Most of what we found was long outdated. Many of the shortcuts don’t even apply anymore, while others just didn’t work. Regardless, after a little experimentation and a dash of customization, it turns out using a keyboard with Android is kind of fun, and who knows, maybe it will catch on. Setting things up Setting up a Bluetooth keyboard with Android is very easy. First, you’ll need a Bluetooth keyboard and of course an Android device, preferably running version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) or higher. For our test, we paired a second-generation Google Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 with a Samsung Series 7 keyboard. In Android, enable Bluetooth if it isn’t already on. We’d like to note that if you don’t normally use Bluetooth accessories and peripherals with your Android device (or any device really), it’s best practice to leave Bluetooth off because, like GPS, it drains the device’s battery more quickly. To enable Bluetooth, simply go to “Settings” -> “Bluetooth” and tap the slider button to “On”. To set up the keyboard, make sure it is on and then tap “Bluetooth” in the Android settings. On the resulting screen, your Android device should automatically search for and hopefully find your keyboard. If you don’t get it right the first time, simply turn the keyboard on again and then tap “Search for Devices” to try again. If it still doesn’t work, make sure you have fresh batteries and the keyboard isn’t paired to another device. If it is, you will need to unpair it before it will work with your Android device (consult your keyboard manufacturer’s documentation or Google if you don’t know how to do this). When Android finds your keyboard, select it under “Available Devices” … … and you should be prompted to type in a code: If successful, you will see that device is now “Connected” and you’re ready to go. If you want to test things out, try pressing the “Windows” key (“Apple” or “Command”) + ESC, and you will be whisked to your Home screen. So, what can you do? Traditional Mac and Windows users know there’s usually a keyboard shortcut for just about everything (and if there isn’t, there’s all kinds of ways to remap keys to do a variety of commands, tasks, and functions). So where does Android fall in terms of baked-in keyboard commands? There answer to that is kind of enough, but not too much. There are definitely established combos you can use to get around, but they aren’t clear and there doesn’t appear to be any one authority on what they are. Still, there is enough keyboard functionality in Android to make it a viable option, if only for those times when you need to get something done (long e-mail or important document) and an on-screen keyboard simply won’t do. It’s important to remember that Android is, and likely always will be a touch-first interface. That said, it does make some concessions to physical keyboards. In other words, you can get around Android fairly well without having to lift your hands off the keys, but you will still have to tap the screen regularly, unless you add a mouse. For example, you can wake your device by tapping a key rather than pressing its power button. However, if your device is slide or pattern-locked, then you’ll have to use the touchscreen to unlock it – a password or PIN however, works seamlessly with a keyboard – other things like widgets and app controls and features, have to be tapped. You get the idea. Keyboard shortcuts and navigation As we said, baked-in keyboard shortcut combos aren’t necessarily abundant nor apparent. The one thing you can always do is search. Any time you want to Google something, start typing from the Home screen and the search screen will automatically open and begin displaying results. Other than that, here is what we were able to figure out: ESC = go back CTRL + ESC = menu CTRL + ALT + DEL = restart (no questions asked) ALT + SPACE = search page (say “OK Google” to voice search) ALT + TAB (ALT + SHIFT + TAB) = switch tasks Also, if you have designated volume function keys, those will probably work too. There’s also some dedicated app shortcuts like calculator, Gmail, and a few others: CMD + A = calculator CMD + C = contacts CMD + E = e-mail CMD + G = Gmail CMD + L = Calendar CMD + P = Play Music CMD + Y = YouTube Overall, it’s not a long comprehensive list and there’s no dedicated keyboard combos for the full array of Google’s products. Granted, it’s hard to imagine getting a lot of mileage out of a keyboard with Maps but with something like Keep, you could type out long, detailed lists on your tablet, and then view them on your smartphone when you go out shopping. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate your Home screen over shortcuts and open the app drawer. When something on the screen is selected, it will be highlighted in blue. Press “Enter” to open your selection. Additionally, if an app has its own set of shortcuts, e.g. Gmail has quite a few unique shortcuts to it, as does Chrome, some – though not many – will work in Android (not for YouTube though). Also, many “universal” shortcuts such as Copy (CTRL + C), Cut (CTRL + X), Paste (CTRL + V), and Select All (CTRL + A) work where needed – such as in instant messaging, e-mail, social media apps, etc. Creating custom application shortcuts What about custom shortcuts? When we were researching this article, we were under the impression that it was possible to assign keyboard combinations to specific apps, such as you could do on older Android versions such as Gingerbread. This no long seems to be the case and nowhere in “Settings” could we find a way to assign hotkey combos to any of our favorite, oft-used apps or functions. If you do want custom keyboard shortcuts, what can you do? Luckily, there’s an app on Google Play that allows you to, among other things, create custom app shortcuts. It is called External Keyboard Helper (EKH) and while there is a free demo version, the pay version is only a few bucks. We decided to give EKH a whirl and through a little experimentation and finally reading the developer’s how-to, we found we could map custom keyboard combos to just about anything. To do this, first open the application and you’ll see the main app screen. Don’t worry about choosing a custom layout or anything like that, you want to go straight to the “Advanced settings”: In the “Advanced settings” select “Application shortcuts” to continue: You can have up to 16 custom application shortcuts. We are going to create a custom shortcut to the Facebook app. We choose “A0”, and from the resulting list, Facebook. You can do this for any number of apps, services, and settings. As you can now see, the Facebook app has now been linked to application-zero (A0): Go back to the “Advanced settings” and choose “Customize keyboard mappings”: You will be prompted to create a custom keyboard layout so we choose “Custom 1”: When you choose to create a custom layout, you can do a great many more things with your keyboard. For example, many keyboards have predefined function (Fn) keys, which you can map to your tablet’s brightness controls, toggle WiFi on/off, and much more. A word of advice, the application automatically remaps certain keys when you create a custom layout. This might mess up some existing keyboard combos. If you simply want to add some functionality to your keyboard, you can go ahead and delete EKH’s default changes and start your custom layout from scratch. To create a new combo, select “Add new key mapping”: For our new shortcut, we are going to assign the Facebook app to open when we key in “ALT + F”. To do this, we press the “F” key while in the “Scancode” field and we see it returns a value of “33”. If we wanted to use a different key, we can press “Change” and scan another key’s numerical value. We now want to assign the “ALT” key to application “A0”, previously designated as the Facebook app. In the “AltGr” field, we enter “A0” and then “Save” our custom combo. And now we see our new application shortcut. Now, as long as we’re using our custom layout, every time we press “ALT + F”, the Facebook app will launch: External Keyboard Helper extends far beyond simple application shortcuts and if you are looking for deeper keyboard customization options, you should definitely check it out. Among other things, EKH also supports dozens of languages, allows you to quickly switch between layouts using a key or combo, add up to 16 custom text shortcuts, and much more! It can be had on Google Play for $2.53 for the full version, but you can try the demo version for free. More extensive documentation on how to use the app is also available. Android? Keyboard? Sure, why not? Unlike traditional desktop operating systems, you don’t need a physical keyboard and mouse to use a mobile operating system. You can buy an iPad or Nexus 10 or Galaxy Note, and never need another accessory or peripheral – they work as intended right out of the box. It’s even possible you can write the next great American novel on one these devices, though that might require a lot of practice and patience. That said, using a keyboard with Android is kind of fun. It’s not revelatory but it does elevate the experience. You don’t even need to add customizations (though they are nice) because there are enough existing keyboard shortcuts in Android to make it usable. Plus, when it comes to inputting text such as in an editor or terminal application, we fully advocate big, physical keyboards. Bottom line, if you’re looking for a way to enhance your Android tablet, give a keyboard a chance. Do you use your Android device for productivity? Is a physical keyboard an important part of your setup? Do you have any shortcuts that we missed? Sound off in the comments and let us know what you think.     

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• Heaps of Trouble?

  - by Paul White NZ

  If you’re not already a regular reader of Brad Schulz’s blog, you’re missing out on some great material.  In his latest entry, he is tasked with optimizing a query run against tables that have no indexes at all.  The problem is, predictably, that performance is not very good.  The catch is that we are not allowed to create any indexes (or even new statistics) as part of our optimization efforts. In this post, I’m going to look at the problem from a slightly different angle, and present an alternative solution to the one Brad found.  Inevitably, there’s going to be some overlap between our entries, and while you don’t necessarily need to read Brad’s post before this one, I do strongly recommend that you read it at some stage; he covers some important points that I won’t cover again here. The Example We’ll use data from the AdventureWorks database, copied to temporary unindexed tables.  A script to create these structures is shown below: CREATE TABLE #Custs ( CustomerID INTEGER NOT NULL, TerritoryID INTEGER NULL, CustomerType NCHAR(1) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #Prods ( ProductMainID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, Name NVARCHAR(50) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #OrdHeader ( SalesOrderID INTEGER NOT NULL, OrderDate DATETIME NOT NULL, SalesOrderNumber NVARCHAR(25) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, CustomerID INTEGER NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #OrdDetail ( SalesOrderID INTEGER NOT NULL, OrderQty SMALLINT NOT NULL, LineTotal NUMERIC(38,6) NOT NULL, ProductMainID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ); GO INSERT #Custs ( CustomerID, TerritoryID, CustomerType ) SELECT C.CustomerID, C.TerritoryID, C.CustomerType FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.Customer C WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #Prods ( ProductMainID, ProductSubID, ProductSubSubID, Name ) SELECT P.ProductID, P.ProductID, P.ProductID, P.Name FROM AdventureWorks.Production.Product P WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #OrdHeader ( SalesOrderID, OrderDate, SalesOrderNumber, CustomerID ) SELECT H.SalesOrderID, H.OrderDate, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.CustomerID FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderHeader H WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #OrdDetail ( SalesOrderID, OrderQty, LineTotal, ProductMainID, ProductSubID, ProductSubSubID ) SELECT D.SalesOrderID, D.OrderQty, D.LineTotal, D.ProductID, D.ProductID, D.ProductID FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderDetail D WITH (TABLOCK); The query itself is a simple join of the four tables: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #Prods P JOIN #OrdDetail D ON P.ProductMainID = D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID JOIN #OrdHeader H ON D.SalesOrderID = H.SalesOrderID JOIN #Custs C ON H.CustomerID = C.CustomerID ORDER BY P.ProductMainID ASC OPTION (RECOMPILE, MAXDOP 1); Remember that these tables have no indexes at all, and only the single-column sampled statistics SQL Server automatically creates (assuming default settings).  The estimated query plan produced for the test query looks like this (click to enlarge): The Problem The problem here is one of cardinality estimation – the number of rows SQL Server expects to find at each step of the plan.  The lack of indexes and useful statistical information means that SQL Server does not have the information it needs to make a good estimate.  Every join in the plan shown above estimates that it will produce just a single row as output.  Brad covers the factors that lead to the low estimates in his post. In reality, the join between the #Prods and #OrdDetail tables will produce 121,317 rows.  It should not surprise you that this has rather dire consequences for the remainder of the query plan.  In particular, it makes a nonsense of the optimizer’s decision to use Nested Loops to join to the two remaining tables.  Instead of scanning the #OrdHeader and #Custs tables once (as it expected), it has to perform 121,317 full scans of each.  The query takes somewhere in the region of twenty minutes to run to completion on my development machine. A Solution At this point, you may be thinking the same thing I was: if we really are stuck with no indexes, the best we can do is to use hash joins everywhere. We can force the exclusive use of hash joins in several ways, the two most common being join and query hints.  A join hint means writing the query using the INNER HASH JOIN syntax; using a query hint involves adding OPTION (HASH JOIN) at the bottom of the query.  The difference is that using join hints also forces the order of the join, whereas the query hint gives the optimizer freedom to reorder the joins at its discretion. Adding the OPTION (HASH JOIN) hint results in this estimated plan: That produces the correct output in around seven seconds, which is quite an improvement!  As a purely practical matter, and given the rigid rules of the environment we find ourselves in, we might leave things there.  (We can improve the hashing solution a bit – I’ll come back to that later on). Faster Nested Loops It might surprise you to hear that we can beat the performance of the hash join solution shown above using nested loops joins exclusively, and without breaking the rules we have been set. The key to this part is to realize that a condition like (A = B) can be expressed as (A <= B) AND (A >= B).  Armed with this tremendous new insight, we can rewrite the join predicates like so: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #OrdDetail D JOIN #OrdHeader H ON D.SalesOrderID >= H.SalesOrderID AND D.SalesOrderID <= H.SalesOrderID JOIN #Custs C ON H.CustomerID >= C.CustomerID AND H.CustomerID <= C.CustomerID JOIN #Prods P ON P.ProductMainID >= D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductMainID <= D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID ORDER BY D.ProductMainID OPTION (RECOMPILE, LOOP JOIN, MAXDOP 1, FORCE ORDER); I’ve also added LOOP JOIN and FORCE ORDER query hints to ensure that only nested loops joins are used, and that the tables are joined in the order they appear.  The new estimated execution plan is: This new query runs in under 2 seconds. Why Is It Faster? The main reason for the improvement is the appearance of the eager Index Spools, which are also known as index-on-the-fly spools.  If you read my Inside The Optimiser series you might be interested to know that the rule responsible is called JoinToIndexOnTheFly. An eager index spool consumes all rows from the table it sits above, and builds a index suitable for the join to seek on.  Taking the index spool above the #Custs table as an example, it reads all the CustomerID and TerritoryID values with a single scan of the table, and builds an index keyed on CustomerID.  The term ‘eager’ means that the spool consumes all of its input rows when it starts up.  The index is built in a work table in tempdb, has no associated statistics, and only exists until the query finishes executing. The result is that each unindexed table is only scanned once, and just for the columns necessary to build the temporary index.  From that point on, every execution of the inner side of the join is answered by a seek on the temporary index – not the base table. A second optimization is that the sort on ProductMainID (required by the ORDER BY clause) is performed early, on just the rows coming from the #OrdDetail table.  The optimizer has a good estimate for the number of rows it needs to sort at that stage – it is just the cardinality of the table itself.  The accuracy of the estimate there is important because it helps determine the memory grant given to the sort operation.  Nested loops join preserves the order of rows on its outer input, so sorting early is safe.  (Hash joins do not preserve order in this way, of course). The extra lazy spool on the #Prods branch is a further optimization that avoids executing the seek on the temporary index if the value being joined (the ‘outer reference’) hasn’t changed from the last row received on the outer input.  It takes advantage of the fact that rows are still sorted on ProductMainID, so if duplicates exist, they will arrive at the join operator one after the other. The optimizer is quite conservative about introducing index spools into a plan, because creating and dropping a temporary index is a relatively expensive operation.  It’s presence in a plan is often an indication that a useful index is missing. I want to stress that I rewrote the query in this way primarily as an educational exercise – I can’t imagine having to do something so horrible to a production system. Improving the Hash Join I promised I would return to the solution that uses hash joins.  You might be puzzled that SQL Server can create three new indexes (and perform all those nested loops iterations) faster than it can perform three hash joins.  The answer, again, is down to the poor information available to the optimizer.  Let’s look at the hash join plan again: Two of the hash joins have single-row estimates on their build inputs.  SQL Server fixes the amount of memory available for the hash table based on this cardinality estimate, so at run time the hash join very quickly runs out of memory. This results in the join spilling hash buckets to disk, and any rows from the probe input that hash to the spilled buckets also get written to disk.  The join process then continues, and may again run out of memory.  This is a recursive process, which may eventually result in SQL Server resorting to a bailout join algorithm, which is guaranteed to complete eventually, but may be very slow.  The data sizes in the example tables are not large enough to force a hash bailout, but it does result in multiple levels of hash recursion.  You can see this for yourself by tracing the Hash Warning event using the Profiler tool. The final sort in the plan also suffers from a similar problem: it receives very little memory and has to perform multiple sort passes, saving intermediate runs to disk (the Sort Warnings Profiler event can be used to confirm this).  Notice also that because hash joins don’t preserve sort order, the sort cannot be pushed down the plan toward the #OrdDetail table, as in the nested loops plan. Ok, so now we understand the problems, what can we do to fix it?  We can address the hash spilling by forcing a different order for the joins: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #Prods P JOIN #Custs C JOIN #OrdHeader H ON H.CustomerID = C.CustomerID JOIN #OrdDetail D ON D.SalesOrderID = H.SalesOrderID ON P.ProductMainID = D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID ORDER BY D.ProductMainID OPTION (MAXDOP 1, HASH JOIN, FORCE ORDER); With this plan, each of the inputs to the hash joins has a good estimate, and no hash recursion occurs.  The final sort still suffers from the one-row estimate problem, and we get a single-pass sort warning as it writes rows to disk.  Even so, the query runs to completion in three or four seconds.  That’s around half the time of the previous hashing solution, but still not as fast as the nested loops trickery. Final Thoughts SQL Server’s optimizer makes cost-based decisions, so it is vital to provide it with accurate information.  We can’t really blame the performance problems highlighted here on anything other than the decision to use completely unindexed tables, and not to allow the creation of additional statistics. I should probably stress that the nested loops solution shown above is not one I would normally contemplate in the real world.  It’s there primarily for its educational and entertainment value.  I might perhaps use it to demonstrate to the sceptical that SQL Server itself is crying out for an index. Be sure to read Brad’s original post for more details.  My grateful thanks to him for granting permission to reuse some of his material. Paul White Email: [email protected] Twitter: @PaulWhiteNZ

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Jonathan Kehayias – Wait Type – Day 16 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter) is a MCITP Database Administrator and Developer, who got started in SQL Server in 2004 as a database developer and report writer in the natural gas industry. After spending two and a half years working in TSQL, in late 2006, he transitioned to the role of SQL Database Administrator. His primary passion is performance tuning, where he frequently rewrites queries for better performance and performs in depth analysis of index implementation and usage. Jonathan blogs regularly on SQLBlog, and was a coauthor of Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. On a personal note, I think Jonathan is extremely positive person. In every conversation with him I have found that he is always eager to help and encourage. Every time he finds something needs to be approved, he has contacted me without hesitation and guided me to improve, change and learn. During all the time, he has not lost his focus to help larger community. I am honored that he has accepted to provide his views on complex subject of Wait Types and Queues. Currently I am reading his series on Extended Events. Here is the guest blog post by Jonathan: SQL Server troubleshooting is all about correlating related pieces of information together to indentify where exactly the root cause of a problem lies. In my daily work as a DBA, I generally get phone calls like, “So and so application is slow, what’s wrong with the SQL Server.” One of the funny things about the letters DBA is that they go so well with Default Blame Acceptor, and I really wish that I knew exactly who the first person was that pointed that out to me, because it really fits at times. A lot of times when I get this call, the problem isn’t related to SQL Server at all, but every now and then in my initial quick checks, something pops up that makes me start looking at things further. The SQL Server is slow, we see a number of tasks waiting on ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION, IO_COMPLETION, or PAGEIOLATCH_* waits in sys.dm_exec_requests and sys.dm_exec_waiting_tasks. These are also some of the highest wait types in sys.dm_os_wait_stats for the server, so it would appear that we have a disk I/O bottleneck on the machine. A quick check of sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats() and tempdb shows a high write stall rate, while our user databases show high read stall rates on the data files. A quick check of some performance counters and Page Life Expectancy on the server is bouncing up and down in the 50-150 range, the Free Page counter consistently hits zero, and the Free List Stalls/sec counter keeps jumping over 10, but Buffer Cache Hit Ratio is 98-99%. Where exactly is the problem? In this case, which happens to be based on a real scenario I faced a few years back, the problem may not be a disk bottleneck at all; it may very well be a memory pressure issue on the server. A quick check of the system spec’s and it is a dual duo core server with 8GB RAM running SQL Server 2005 SP1 x64 on Windows Server 2003 R2 x64. Max Server memory is configured at 6GB and we think that this should be enough to handle the workload; or is it? This is a unique scenario because there are a couple of things happening inside of this system, and they all relate to what the root cause of the performance problem is on the system. If we were to query sys.dm_exec_query_stats for the TOP 10 queries, by max_physical_reads, max_logical_reads, and max_worker_time, we may be able to find some queries that were using excessive I/O and possibly CPU against the system in their worst single execution. We can also CROSS APPLY to sys.dm_exec_sql_text() and see the statement text, and also CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan() to get the execution plan stored in cache. Ok, quick check, the plans are pretty big, I see some large index seeks, that estimate 2.8GB of data movement between operators, but everything looks like it is optimized the best it can be. Nothing really stands out in the code, and the indexing looks correct, and I should have enough memory to handle this in cache, so it must be a disk I/O problem right? Not exactly! If we were to look at how much memory the plan cache is taking by querying sys.dm_os_memory_clerks for the CACHESTORE_SQLCP and CACHESTORE_OBJCP clerks we might be surprised at what we find. In SQL Server 2005 RTM and SP1, the plan cache was allowed to take up to 75% of the memory under 8GB. I’ll give you a second to go back and read that again. Yes, you read it correctly, it says 75% of the memory under 8GB, but you don’t have to take my word for it, you can validate this by reading Changes in Caching Behavior between SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 RTM and SQL Server 2005 SP2. In this scenario the application uses an entirely adhoc workload against SQL Server and this leads to plan cache bloat, and up to 4.5GB of our 6GB of memory for SQL can be consumed by the plan cache in SQL Server 2005 SP1. This in turn reduces the size of the buffer cache to just 1.5GB, causing our 2.8GB of data movement in this expensive plan to cause complete flushing of the buffer cache, not just once initially, but then another time during the queries execution, resulting in excessive physical I/O from disk. Keep in mind that this is not the only query executing at the time this occurs. Remember the output of sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats() showed high read stalls on the data files for our user databases versus higher write stalls for tempdb? The memory pressure is also forcing heavier use of tempdb to handle sorting and hashing in the environment as well. The real clue here is the Memory counters for the instance; Page Life Expectancy, Free List Pages, and Free List Stalls/sec. The fact that Page Life Expectancy is fluctuating between 50 and 150 constantly is a sign that the buffer cache is experiencing constant churn of data, once every minute to two and a half minutes. If you add to the Page Life Expectancy counter, the consistent bottoming out of Free List Pages along with Free List Stalls/sec consistently spiking over 10, and you have the perfect memory pressure scenario. All of sudden it may not be that our disk subsystem is the problem, but is instead an innocent bystander and victim. Side Note: The Page Life Expectancy counter dropping briefly and then returning to normal operating values intermittently is not necessarily a sign that the server is under memory pressure. The Books Online and a number of other references will tell you that this counter should remain on average above 300 which is the time in seconds a page will remain in cache before being flushed or aged out. This number, which equates to just five minutes, is incredibly low for modern systems and most published documents pre-date the predominance of 64 bit computing and easy availability to larger amounts of memory in SQL Servers. As food for thought, consider that my personal laptop has more memory in it than most SQL Servers did at the time those numbers were posted. I would argue that today, a system churning the buffer cache every five minutes is in need of some serious tuning or a hardware upgrade. Back to our problem and its investigation: There are two things really wrong with this server; first the plan cache is excessively consuming memory and bloated in size and we need to look at that and second we need to evaluate upgrading the memory to accommodate the workload being performed. In the case of the server I was working on there were a lot of single use plans found in sys.dm_exec_cached_plans (where usecounts=1). Single use plans waste space in the plan cache, especially when they are adhoc plans for statements that had concatenated filter criteria that is not likely to reoccur with any frequency.  SQL Server 2005 doesn’t natively have a way to evict a single plan from cache like SQL Server 2008 does, but MVP Kalen Delaney, showed a hack to evict a single plan by creating a plan guide for the statement and then dropping that plan guide in her blog post Geek City: Clearing a Single Plan from Cache. We could put that hack in place in a job to automate cleaning out all the single use plans periodically, minimizing the size of the plan cache, but a better solution would be to fix the application so that it uses proper parameterized calls to the database. You didn’t write the app, and you can’t change its design? Ok, well you could try to force parameterization to occur by creating and keeping plan guides in place, or we can try forcing parameterization at the database level by using ALTER DATABASE <dbname> SET PARAMETERIZATION FORCED and that might help. If neither of these help, we could periodically dump the plan cache for that database, as discussed as being a problem in Kalen’s blog post referenced above; not an ideal scenario. The other option is to increase the memory on the server to 16GB or 32GB, if the hardware allows it, which will increase the size of the plan cache as well as the buffer cache. In SQL Server 2005 SP1, on a system with 16GB of memory, if we set max server memory to 14GB the plan cache could use at most 9GB  [(8GB*.75)+(6GB*.5)=(6+3)=9GB], leaving 5GB for the buffer cache.  If we went to 32GB of memory and set max server memory to 28GB, the plan cache could use at most 16GB [(8*.75)+(20*.5)=(6+10)=16GB], leaving 12GB for the buffer cache. Thankfully we have SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2, 3, and 4 these days which include the changes in plan cache sizing discussed in the Changes to Caching Behavior between SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 RTM and SQL Server 2005 SP2 blog post. In real life, when I was troubleshooting this problem, I spent a week trying to chase down the cause of the disk I/O bottleneck with our Server Admin and SAN Admin, and there wasn’t much that could be done immediately there, so I finally asked if we could increase the memory on the server to 16GB, which did fix the problem. It wasn’t until I had this same problem occur on another system that I actually figured out how to really troubleshoot this down to the root cause.  I couldn’t believe the size of the plan cache on the server with 16GB of memory when I actually learned about this and went back to look at it. SQL Server is constantly telling a story to anyone that will listen. As the DBA, you have to sit back and listen to all that it’s telling you and then evaluate the big picture and how all the data you can gather from SQL about performance relate to each other. One of the greatest tools out there is actually a free in the form of Diagnostic Scripts for SQL Server 2005 and 2008, created by MVP Glenn Alan Berry. Glenn’s scripts collect a majority of the information that SQL has to offer for rapid troubleshooting of problems, and he includes a lot of notes about what the outputs of each individual query might be telling you. When I read Pinal’s blog post SQL SERVER – ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 11 of 28, I noticed that he referenced Checking Memory Related Performance Counters in his post, but there was no real explanation about why checking memory counters is so important when looking at an I/O related wait type. I thought I’d chat with him briefly on Google Talk/Twitter DM and point this out, and offer a couple of other points I noted, so that he could add the information to his blog post if he found it useful.  Instead he asked that I write a guest blog for this. I am honored to be a guest blogger, and to be able to share this kind of information with the community. The information contained in this blog post is a glimpse at how I do troubleshooting almost every day of the week in my own environment. SQL Server provides us with a lot of information about how it is running, and where it may be having problems, it is up to us to play detective and find out how all that information comes together to tell us what’s really the problem. This blog post is written by Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• C# Neural Networks with Encog

  - by JoshReuben

  Neural Networks ·       I recently read a book Introduction to Neural Networks for C# , by Jeff Heaton. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Neural-Networks-C-2nd/dp/1604390093/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296821004&sr=8-2-spell. Not the 1st ANN book I've perused, but a nice revision.   ·       Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a mechanism of machine learning – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Machine_learning ·       Problems Not Suited to a Neural Network Solution- Programs that are easily written out as flowcharts consisting of well-defined steps, program logic that is unlikely to change, problems in which you must know exactly how the solution was derived. ·       Problems Suited to a Neural Network – pattern recognition, classification, series prediction, and data mining. Pattern recognition - network attempts to determine if the input data matches a pattern that it has been trained to recognize. Classification - take input samples and classify them into fuzzy groups. ·       As far as machine learning approaches go, I thing SVMs are superior (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine ) - a neural network has certain disadvantages in comparison: an ANN can be overtrained, different training sets can produce non-deterministic weights and it is not possible to discern the underlying decision function of an ANN from its weight matrix – they are black box. ·       In this post, I'm not going to go into internals (believe me I know them). An autoassociative network (e.g. a Hopfield network) will echo back a pattern if it is recognized. ·       Under the hood, there is very little maths. In a nutshell - Some simple matrix operations occur during training: the input array is processed (normalized into bipolar values of 1, -1) - transposed from input column vector into a row vector, these are subject to matrix multiplication and then subtraction of the identity matrix to get a contribution matrix. The dot product is taken against the weight matrix to yield a boolean match result. For backpropogation training, a derivative function is required. In learning, hill climbing mechanisms such as Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing are used to escape local minima. For unsupervised training, such as found in Self Organizing Maps used for OCR, Hebbs rule is applied. ·       The purpose of this post is not to mire you in technical and conceptual details, but to show you how to leverage neural networks via an abstraction API - Encog   Encog ·       Encog is a neural network API ·       Links to Encog: http://www.encog.org , http://www.heatonresearch.com/encog, http://www.heatonresearch.com/forum ·       Encog requires .Net 3.5 or higher – there is also a Silverlight version. Third-Party Libraries – log4net and nunit. ·       Encog supports feedforward, recurrent, self-organizing maps, radial basis function and Hopfield neural networks. ·       Encog neural networks, and related data, can be stored in .EG XML files. ·       Encog Workbench allows you to edit, train and visualize neural networks. The Encog Workbench can generate code. Synapses and layers ·       the primary building blocks - Almost every neural network will have, at a minimum, an input and output layer. In some cases, the same layer will function as both input and output layer. ·       To adapt a problem to a neural network, you must determine how to feed the problem into the input layer of a neural network, and receive the solution through the output layer of a neural network. ·       The Input Layer - For each input neuron, one double value is stored. An array is passed as input to a layer. Encog uses the interface INeuralData to hold these arrays. The class BasicNeuralData implements the INeuralData interface. Once the neural network processes the input, an INeuralData based class will be returned from the neural network's output layer. ·       convert a double array into an INeuralData object : INeuralData data = new BasicNeuralData(= new double[10]); ·       the Output Layer- The neural network outputs an array of doubles, wraped in a class based on the INeuralData interface. ·        The real power of a neural network comes from its pattern recognition capabilities. The neural network should be able to produce the desired output even if the input has been slightly distorted. ·       Hidden Layers– optional. between the input and output layers. very much a “black box”. If the structure of the hidden layer is too simple it may not learn the problem. If the structure is too complex, it will learn the problem but will be very slow to train and execute. Some neural networks have no hidden layers. The input layer may be directly connected to the output layer. Further, some neural networks have only a single layer. A single layer neural network has the single layer self-connected. ·       connections, called synapses, contain individual weight matrixes. These values are changed as the neural network learns. Constructing a Neural Network ·       the XOR operator is a frequent “first example” -the “Hello World” application for neural networks. ·       The XOR Operator- only returns true when both inputs differ. 0 XOR 0 = 0 1 XOR 0 = 1 0 XOR 1 = 1 1 XOR 1 = 0 ·       Structuring a Neural Network for XOR  - two inputs to the XOR operator and one output. ·       input: 0.0,0.0 1.0,0.0 0.0,1.0 1.0,1.0 ·       Expected output: 0.0 1.0 1.0 0.0 ·       A Perceptron - a simple feedforward neural network to learn the XOR operator. ·       Because the XOR operator has two inputs and one output, the neural network will follow suit. Additionally, the neural network will have a single hidden layer, with two neurons to help process the data. The choice for 2 neurons in the hidden layer is arbitrary, and often comes down to trial and error. ·       Neuron Diagram for the XOR Network ·       ·       The Encog workbench displays neural networks on a layer-by-layer basis. ·       Encog Layer Diagram for the XOR Network:   ·       Create a BasicNetwork - Three layers are added to this network. the FinalizeStructure method must be called to inform the network that no more layers are to be added. The call to Reset randomizes the weights in the connections between these layers. var network = new BasicNetwork(); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(2)); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(2)); network.AddLayer(new BasicLayer(1)); network.Structure.FinalizeStructure(); network.Reset(); ·       Neural networks frequently start with a random weight matrix. This provides a starting point for the training methods. These random values will be tested and refined into an acceptable solution. However, sometimes the initial random values are too far off. Sometimes it may be necessary to reset the weights again, if training is ineffective. These weights make up the long-term memory of the neural network. Additionally, some layers have threshold values that also contribute to the long-term memory of the neural network. Some neural networks also contain context layers, which give the neural network a short-term memory as well. The neural network learns by modifying these weight and threshold values. ·       Now that the neural network has been created, it must be trained. Training a Neural Network ·       construct a INeuralDataSet object - contains the input array and the expected output array (of corresponding range). Even though there is only one output value, we must still use a two-dimensional array to represent the output. public static double[][] XOR_INPUT ={ new double[2] { 0.0, 0.0 }, new double[2] { 1.0, 0.0 }, new double[2] { 0.0, 1.0 }, new double[2] { 1.0, 1.0 } };   public static double[][] XOR_IDEAL = { new double[1] { 0.0 }, new double[1] { 1.0 }, new double[1] { 1.0 }, new double[1] { 0.0 } };   INeuralDataSet trainingSet = new BasicNeuralDataSet(XOR_INPUT, XOR_IDEAL); ·       Training is the process where the neural network's weights are adjusted to better produce the expected output. Training will continue for many iterations, until the error rate of the network is below an acceptable level. Encog supports many different types of training. Resilient Propagation (RPROP) - general-purpose training algorithm. All training classes implement the ITrain interface. The RPROP algorithm is implemented by the ResilientPropagation class. Training the neural network involves calling the Iteration method on the ITrain class until the error is below a specific value. The code loops through as many iterations, or epochs, as it takes to get the error rate for the neural network to be below 1%. Once the neural network has been trained, it is ready for use. ITrain train = new ResilientPropagation(network, trainingSet);   for (int epoch=0; epoch < 10000; epoch++) { train.Iteration(); Debug.Print("Epoch #" + epoch + " Error:" + train.Error); if (train.Error > 0.01) break; } Executing a Neural Network ·       Call the Compute method on the BasicNetwork class. Console.WriteLine("Neural Network Results:"); foreach (INeuralDataPair pair in trainingSet) { INeuralData output = network.Compute(pair.Input); Console.WriteLine(pair.Input[0] + "," + pair.Input[1] + ", actual=" + output[0] + ",ideal=" + pair.Ideal[0]); } ·       The Compute method accepts an INeuralData class and also returns a INeuralData object. Neural Network Results: 0.0,0.0, actual=0.002782538818034049,ideal=0.0 1.0,0.0, actual=0.9903741937121177,ideal=1.0 0.0,1.0, actual=0.9836807956566187,ideal=1.0 1.0,1.0, actual=0.0011646072586172778,ideal=0.0 ·       the network has not been trained to give the exact results. This is normal. Because the network was trained to 1% error, each of the results will also be within generally 1% of the expected value.

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• GuestPost: Unit Testing Entity Framework (v1) Dependent Code using TypeMock Isolator

  - by Eric Nelson

  Time for another guest post (check out others in the series), this time bringing together the world of mocking with the world of Entity Framework. A big thanks to Moses for agreeing to do this. Unit Testing Entity Framework Dependent Code using TypeMock Isolator by Muhammad Mosa Introduction Unit testing data access code in my opinion is a challenging thing. Let us consider unit tests and integration tests. In integration tests you are allowed to have environmental dependencies such as a physical database connection to insert, update, delete or retrieve your data. However when performing unit tests it is often much more efficient and productive to remove environmental dependencies. Instead you will need to fake these dependencies. Faking a database (also known as mocking) can be relatively straight forward but the version of Entity Framework released with .Net 3.5 SP1 has a number of implementation specifics which actually makes faking the existence of a database quite difficult. Faking Entity Framework As mentioned earlier, to effectively unit test you will need to fake/simulate Entity Framework calls to the database. There are many free open source mocking frameworks that can help you achieve this but it will require additional effort to overcome & workaround a number of limitations in those frameworks. Examples of these limitations include: Not able to fake calls to non virtual methods Not able to fake sealed classes Not able to fake LINQ to Entities queries (replace database calls with in-memory collection calls) There is a mocking framework which is flexible enough to handle limitations such as those above. The commercially available TypeMock Isolator can do the job for you with less code and ultimately more readable unit tests. I’m going to demonstrate tackling one of those limitations using MoQ as my mocking framework. Then I will tackle the same issue using TypeMock Isolator. Mocking Entity Framework with MoQ One basic need when faking Entity Framework is to fake the ObjectContext. This cannot be done by passing any connection string. You have to pass a correct Entity Framework connection string that specifies CSDL, SSDL and MSL locations along with a provider connection string. Assuming we are going to do that, we’ll explore another limitation. The limitation we are going to face now is related to not being able to fake calls to non-virtual/overridable members with MoQ. I have the following repository method that adds an EntityObject (instance of a Blog entity) to Blogs entity set in an ObjectContext. public override void Add(Blog blog) { if(BlogContext.Blogs.Any(b=>b.Name == blog.Name)) { throw new InvalidOperationException("Blog with same name already exists!"); } BlogContext.AddToBlogs(blog); } The method does a very simple check that the name of the new Blog entity instance doesn’t exist. This is done through the simple LINQ query above. If the blog doesn’t already exist it simply adds it to the current context to be saved when SaveChanges of the ObjectContext instance (e.g. BlogContext) is called. However, if a blog with the same name exits, and exception (InvalideOperationException) will be thrown. Let us now create a unit test for the Add method using MoQ. [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public void Add_Should_Throw_InvalidOperationException_When_Blog_With_Same_Name_Already_Exits() { //(1) We shouldn't depend on configuration when doing unit tests! But, //its a workaround to fake the ObjectContext string connectionString = ConfigurationManager .ConnectionStrings["MyBlogConnString"] .ConnectionString; //(2) Arrange: Fake ObjectContext var fakeContext = new Mock<MyBlogContext>(connectionString); //(3) Next Line will pass, as ObjectContext now can be faked with proper connection string var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext.Object); //(4) Create fake ObjectQuery<Blog>. Will be used to substitute MyBlogContext.Blogs property var fakeObjectQuery = new Mock<ObjectQuery<Blog>>("[Blogs]", fakeContext.Object); //(5) Arrange: Set Expectations //Next line will throw an exception by MoQ: //System.ArgumentException: Invalid setup on a non-overridable member fakeContext.SetupGet(c=>c.Blogs).Returns(fakeObjectQuery.Object); fakeObjectQuery.Setup(q => q.Any(b => b.Name == "NewBlog")).Returns(true); //Act repo.Add(new Blog { Name = "NewBlog" }); } This test method is checking to see if the correct exception ([ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))]) is thrown when a developer attempts to Add a blog with a name that’s already exists. On (1) a connection string is initialized from configuration file. To retrieve the full connection string. On (2) a fake ObjectContext is being created. The ObjectContext here is MyBlogContext and its being created using this var fakeContext = new Mock<MyBlogContext>(connectionString); This way a fake context is being created using MoQ. On (3) a BlogRepository instance is created. BlogRepository has dependency on generate Entity Framework ObjectContext, MyObjectContext. And so the fake context is passed to the constructor. var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext.Object); On (4) a fake instance of ObjectQuery<Blog> is being created to use as a substitute to MyObjectContext.Blogs property as we will see in (5). On (5) setup an expectation for calling Blogs property of MyBlogContext and substitute the return result with the fake ObjectQuery<Blog> instance created on (4). When you run this test it will fail with MoQ throwing an exception because of this line: fakeContext.SetupGet(c=>c.Blogs).Returns(fakeObjectQuery.Object); This happens because the generate property MyBlogContext.Blogs is not virtual/overridable. And assuming it is virtual or you managed to make it virtual it will fail at the following line throwing the same exception: fakeObjectQuery.Setup(q => q.Any(b => b.Name == "NewBlog")).Returns(true); This time the test will fail because the Any extension method is not virtual/overridable. You won’t be able to replace ObjectQuery<Blog> with fake in memory collection to test your LINQ to Entities queries. Now lets see how replacing MoQ with TypeMock Isolator can help. Mocking Entity Framework with TypeMock Isolator The following is the same test method we had above for MoQ but this time implemented using TypeMock Isolator: [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public void Add_New_Blog_That_Already_Exists_Should_Throw_InvalidOperationException() { //(1) Create fake in memory collection of blogs var fakeInMemoryBlogs = new List<Blog> {new Blog {Name = "FakeBlog"}}; //(2) create fake context var fakeContext = Isolate.Fake.Instance<MyBlogContext>(); //(3) Setup expected call to MyBlogContext.Blogs property through the fake context Isolate.WhenCalled(() => fakeContext.Blogs) .WillReturnCollectionValuesOf(fakeInMemoryBlogs.AsQueryable()); //(4) Create new blog with a name that already exits in the fake in memory collection in (1) var blog = new Blog {Name = "FakeBlog"}; //(5) Instantiate instance of BlogRepository (Class under test) var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext); //(6) Acting by adding the newly created blog () repo.Add(blog); } When running the above test method it will pass as the Add method of BlogRepository is going to throw an InvalidOperationException which is the expected behaviour. Nothing prevents us from faking out the database interaction! Even faking ObjectContext  at (2) didn’t require a connection string. On (3) Isolator sets up a faking result for MyBlogContext.Blogs when its being called through the fake instance fakeContext created on (2). The faking result is just an in-memory collection declared an initialized on (1). Finally at (6) action we call the Add method of BlogRepository passing a new Blog instance that has a name that’s already exists in the fake in-memory collection which we set up at (1). As expected the test will pass because it will throw the expected exception defined on top of the test method - InvalidOperationException. TypeMock Isolator succeeded in faking Entity Framework with ease. Conclusion We explored how to write a simple unit test using TypeMock Isolator for code which is using Entity Framework. We also explored a few of the limitations of other mocking frameworks which TypeMock is successfully able to handle. There are workarounds that you can use to overcome limitations when using MoQ or Rhino Mock, however the workarounds will require you to write more code and your tests will likely be more complex. For a comparison between different mocking frameworks take a look at this document produced by TypeMock. You might also want to check out this open source project to compare mocking frameworks. I hope you enjoyed this post Muhammad Mosa http://mosesofegypt.net/ http://twitter.com/mosessaur Screencast of unit testing Entity Framework Related Links GuestPost: Introduction to Mocking GuesPost: Typemock Isolator – Much more than an Isolation framework

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – August 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Lucas Jellema ?Published an article about organizing Fusion Middleware Administration: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/07/31/organizing-fusion-middleware-administration-in-a-smart-and-frugal-way … - many organizations are struggling with this. ServiceTechSymposium Countdown to the Early Bird Registration Discount deadline. Only 4 days left! http://ow.ly/cBCiv demed ?Good chatting w Bob Rhubart, Thomas Erl & Tim Hall on SOA & Cloud Symposium https://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/podcast_show_notes_thomas_erl … @soaschool @OTNArchBeat -- CU in London! SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-july-2012/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Are You a facebook member - do You follow http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity ? #soacommunity #soa SOA Community ?SOA 24/7 - Home Page: http://soa247.com/#.UBJsN8n3kyk.twitter … #soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Handling Large Payloads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1lFAih OracleBlogs ?SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://ow.ly/1lFx6s OTNArchBeat Podcast Show Notes: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology http://bit.ly/OOHTUJ SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-s7 OTNArchBeat ?OTN ArchBeat Podcast: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology - Part 1 http://pub.vitrue.com/fMti OProcessAccel ?Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 1 of 4 - A conversation with SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology Symposiu... http://ow.ly/1lDyAK OracleBlogs ?SOA Suite 11g PS5 Bundled Patch 3 (11.1.1.6.3) http://ow.ly/1lCW1S Simon Haslam My write-up of the virtues of the #ukoug App Server & Middleware SIG http://bit.ly/LMWdfY What's important to you for our next meeting? SOA Community SOA Partner Community Survey 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-qY Simone Geib ?RT @jswaroop: #Oracle positioned in the Leader's quadrant - Gartner Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure (SOA & SOA Gov)... ServiceTechSymposium New Supporting Organization, IBTI has joined the Symposium! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lA7XS OTNArchBeat Oracle content at SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium (and discount code!) http://pub.vitrue.com/FPcW OracleBlogs ?BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lzOrX OTNArchBeat BPM 11g #ADF Task Form Versioning | Christopher Karl Chan #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/0qP2 OTNArchBeat Lightweight ADF Task Flow for BPM Human Tasks Overview | @AndrejusB #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/z7x9 SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon report by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/oracle-fusion-middleware-summer-camps-in-lisbon/ … #ofmsummercamps #soa #bpm SOA Community ?Clemens Utschig-Utschig & Manas Deb The Successful Execution of the SOA and BPM Vision Using a Business Capability Framework: Concepts… Simone Geib ?RT @oprocessaccel: Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … jornica ?Report from Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Munich: SOA Suite 11g advanced training experiences @soacommunity http://bit.ly/Mw3btE Simone Geib ?Bruce Tierney: Update - SOA & BPM Customer Insights Webcast Series: | https://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/update_soa_bpm_customer_insights … OTNArchBeat Business SOA: Thinking is Dead | @mosesjones http://pub.vitrue.com/k8mw esentri ?had 3 great days in Munich at #Oracle #soacommunity Summercamp! Special thanks to Geoffroy de Lamalle from eProseed! Danilo Schmiedel ?Used my time in train to setup the ps5 soa/bpm vbox-image.Works like a dream. Setup-Readme is perfect! Saves a lot of time!!! @soacommunity 18 Jul SOA Community ?THANKS for the excellent OFM summer camps - save trip home - share your pictures at http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity doors BBQ-party with Oracle @soacommunity. 5Star! #lovemunich #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/ztfcGn2S leonsmiers ?New #Capgemini blog post "Continuous Improvement of Business Agility" http://bit.ly/Lr0EwG #bpm #yam Eric Elzinga ?MDS Explorer utility, http://see.sc/4qdb43 #soasuite ServiceTechSymposium ?@techsymp New speaker Demed L’Her from Oracle has been added to the symposium calendar. http://ow.ly/cjnyw SOA Community ?Last day of the Fusion Middleware summer camps - we continue at 9.00 am. send us your barbecue pictures! #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity SOA Community ?Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/delivering-soa-governance-with-eams-and-oracle-enterprise-repository/ … #soacommunity #soa #oer OracleBlogs ?Process Accelerator Kit http://ow.ly/1loaCw 15 Jul SOA Community ?Sun is back in Munich! Send your pictures Middleware summer camps! #ofmsummercamps We start tomorrow 11.00 at Oracle pic.twitter.com/6FStxomk Walter Montantes ?Gracias, Obrigado, Thank you, Danke a Lisboa y a @soacommunity @wlscommunity. From the Mexican guys!! cc @mikeintoch #ofmsummercamps Andrejus Baranovskis Tips & Tricks How to Run Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Workspace from Custom ADF 11g Application http://fb.me/1zOf3h2K8 JDeveloper & ADF ?Fusion Apps Enterprise Repository - Explained http://dlvr.it/1rpjWd Steve Walker ?Oracle #Exalogic is the logical choice for running business applications. Exalogic Software 2.0 launches 7/25. Reg at http://bit.ly/NedQ9L A. Chatziantoniou ?Landed in rainy Amsterdam after a great week in Lisbon for the #ofmsummercamps - multo obrigado for Jürgen for another fantastic event SOA Community ?Teams present #BPM11g POC results at #ofmsummercamps - great job! #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/0d4txkWF Sabine Leitner ?#DOAG SIG Middleware 29.08.2012 Köln über MW, Administration, Monitoring http://bit.ly/P47w82 @soacommunity @OracleMW @OracleFMW 12 Jul philmulhall ?Thanks @soacommunity for a great week at the #ofmsummercamps. Hard work done so time for a few cold ones in Lisboa. pic.twitter.com/LVUUuwTh peter230769 ?RT: andrea_rocco_31: RT @soacommunity: Enjoy the networking event at #ofmsummercamps want to attend next time ... pic.twitter.com/D1HRndi4 Niels Gorter ?#ofmsummercamps dinner in Lisbon. Great weather, scenery, training, people, on and on. Big THANKS @soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF ?Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Domain http://dlvr.it/1r0c2j Andrea Rocco ?RT @soacommunity: Jamy pastry at cafe Belem - who is the ghost there?!? http://via.me/-2x33uk6 Simon Haslam ?Sounds great - sorry I couldn't make it. RT @soacommunity: 6pm BPM advanced training hard work to build the POC #ofmsummercamps philmulhall ?A well earned rest after a hard days work @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/LKK7VOVS philmulhall ?Some more hard working delegates @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/gWpk1HZh SOA Community ?Error message at the BPM POC - will The #ace director understand the message and solve it? #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/LFTEzNck Daniel Kleine-Albers ?posted on the #thecattlecrew blog: Assigning more memory to JDeveloper http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/jdeveloper-quicktip-assigning-more-memory/ … OTNArchBeat ?BAM design pointers | Kavitha Srinivasan http://pub.vitrue.com/TOhP SOA Community ?Did you receive the July SOA community newsletter? read it! Want to become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity #soa #opn OracleBlogs ?Markus Zirn, Big Data with CEP and SOA @ SOA, Cloud &amp; Service Technology Symposium 2012 http://ow.ly/1lcSkb Andrejus Baranovskis Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Eric Elzinga ?Service Facade design pattern in OSB, http://bit.ly/NnOExN Eric Elzinga ?New BPEL Thread Pool in SOA 11g for Non-Blocking Invoke Activities from 11.1.1.6 (PS5), http://bit.ly/NnOc2G Gilberto Holms New Post: Siebel Connection Pool in Oracle Service Bus 11g http://wp.me/pRE8V-2z Oracle UPK & Tutor ?UPK Pre-Built Content Update: UPK pre-built content development efforts are always underway and growing. Ove... http://bit.ly/R2HeTj JDeveloper & ADF ?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove... http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA Community BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 … #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic –Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koser http://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. 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• Issuing Current Time Increments in StreamInsight (A Practical Example)

  The issuing of a Current Time Increment, Cti, in StreamInsight is very definitely one of the most important concepts to learn if you want your Streams to be responsive. A full discussion of how to issue Ctis is beyond the scope of this article but a very good explanation in addition to Books Online can be found in these three articles by a member of the StreamInsight team at Microsoft, Ciprian Gerea. Time in StreamInsight Series http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/23/time-in-streaminsight-i.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/07/30/time-in-streaminsight-ii.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/streaminsight/archive/2010/08/03/time-in-streaminsight-iii.aspx A lot of the problems I see with unresponsive or stuck streams on the MSDN Forums are to do with how Ctis are enqueued or in a lot of cases not enqueued. If you enqueue events and never enqueue a Cti then StreamInsight will be perfectly happy. You, on the other hand, will never see data on the output as you have not told StreamInsight to flush the stream. This article deals with a specific implementation problem I had recently whilst working on a StreamInsight project. I look at some possible options and discuss why they would not work before showing the way I solved the problem. The stream of data I was dealing with on this project was very bursty that is to say when events were flowing they came through very quickly and in large numbers (1000 events/sec), but when the stream calmed down it could be a few seconds between each event. When enqueuing events into the StreamInsight engne it is best practice to do so with a StartTime that is given to you by the system producing the event . StreamInsight processes events and it doesn't matter whether those events are being pushed into the engine by a source system or the events are being read from something like a flat file in a directory somewhere. You can apply the same logic and temporal algebra to both situations. Reading from a file is an excellent example of where the time of the event on the source itself is very important. We could be reading that file a long time after it was written. Being able to read the StartTime from the events allows us to define windows that will hold the correct sets of events. I was able to do this with my stream but this is where my problems started. Below is a very simple script to create a SQL Server table and populate it with sample data that will show exactly the problem I had. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[t] ( [c1] [int] PRIMARY KEY, [c2] [datetime] NULL ) INSERT t VALUES (1,'20100810'),(2,'20100810'),(3,'20100810') Column c2 defines the StartTime of the event on the source and as you can see the values in all 3 rows of data is the same. If we read Ciprian’s articles we know that we can define how Ctis get injected into the stream in 3 different places The Stream Definition The Input Factory The Input Adapter I personally have always been a fan of enqueing Ctis through the factory. Below is code typical of what I would use to do this On the class itself I do some inheriting public class SimpleInputFactory : ITypedInputAdapterFactory<SimpleInputConfig>, ITypedDeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<SimpleInputConfig> And then I implement the following function public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.FromTicks(-1)), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } The configInfo .CtiFrequency property is a value I pass through to define after how many events I want a Cti to be injected and this in turn will flush through the stream of data. I usually pass a value of 1 for this setting. The second parameter determines the CTI timestamp in terms of a delay relative to the events. -1 ticks in the past results in 1 tick in the future, i.e., ahead of the event. The problem with this method though is that if consecutive events have the same StartTime then only one of those events will be enqueued. In this example I use the following to define how I assign the StartTime of my events currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; If I go ahead and run my StreamInsight process with this configuration i can see on the output adapter that two events have been removed To see this in a little more depth I can use the StreamInsight Debugger and see what happens internally. What is happening here is that the first event arrives and a Cti is injected with a time of 1 tick after the StartTime of that event (Also the EndTime of the event). The second event arrives and it has a StartTime of before the Cti and even though we specified AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust on the factory we know that a point event can never be adjusted like this and the event is dropped. The same happens for the third event as well (The second and third events get trumped by the Cti). For a more detailed discussion of why this happens look here http://www.sqlis.com/sqlis/post/AdvanceTimePolicy-and-Point-Event-Streams-In-StreamInsight.aspx We end up with a single event being pushed into the output adapter and our result now makes sense. The next way I tried to solve this problem by changing the value of the second parameter to TimeSpan.Zero Here is how my factory code now looks public AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings DeclareAdvanceTimeProperties<TPayload>(SimpleInputConfig configInfo, EventShape eventShape) { return new AdapterAdvanceTimeSettings( new AdvanceTimeGenerationSettings(configInfo.CtiFrequency, TimeSpan.Zero), AdvanceTimePolicy.Adjust); } What I am doing here is declaring a policy that says inject a Cti together with every event and stamp it with a StartTime that is equal to the start time of the event itself (TimeSpan.Zero). This method has plus points as well as a downside. The upside is that no events will be lost by having the same StartTime as previous events. The Downside is that because the Cti is declared with the StartTime of the event itself then it does not actually flush that particular event because in the StreamInsight algebra, a Cti commits only those events that occurred strictly before them. To flush the events we need a Cti to be enqueued with a greater StartTime than the events themselves. Here is what happened when I ran this configuration As you can see all we got through was the Cti and none of the events. The debugger output shows the stamps on the Cti and the events themselves. Because the Cti issued has the same timestamp (StartTime) as the events then none of the events get flushed. I was nearly there but not quite. Because my stream was bursty it was possible that the next event would not come along for a few seconds and this was far too long for an event to be enqueued and not be flushed to the output adapter. I needed another solution. Two possible solutions crossed my mind although only one of them made sense when I explored it some more. Where multiple events have the same StartTime I could add 1 tick to the first event, two to the second, three to third etc thereby giving them unique StartTime values. Add a timer to manually inject Ctis The problem with the first implementation is that I would be giving the events a new StartTime. This would cause me the following problems If I want to define windows over the stream then some events may not be captured in the right windows and therefore any calculations on those windows I did would be wrong What would happen if we had 10,000 events with the same StartTime? I would enqueue them with StartTime + n ticks. Along comes a genuine event with a StartTime of the very first event + 1 tick. It is now too far in the past as far as my stream is concerned and it would be dropped. Not what I would want to do at all. I decided then to look at the Timer based solution I created a timer on my input adapter that elapsed every 200ms. private Timer tmr; public SimpleInputAdapter(SimpleInputConfig configInfo) { ctx = new SimpleTimeExtractDataContext(configInfo.ConnectionString); this.configInfo = configInfo; tmr = new Timer(200); tmr.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(t_Elapsed); tmr.Enabled = true; } void t_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { ts = DateTime.Now - dtCtiIssued; if (ts.TotalMilliseconds >= 200 && TimerIssuedCti == false) { EnqueueCtiEvent(System.DateTime.Now.AddTicks(-100)); TimerIssuedCti = true; } }   In the t_Elapsed event handler I find out the difference in time between now and when the last event was processed (dtCtiIssued). I then check to see if that is greater than or equal to 200ms and if the last issuing of a Cti was done by the timer or by a genuine event (TimerIssuedCti). If I didn’t do this check then I would enqueue a Cti every time the timer elapsed which is not something I wanted. If the difference between the two times is greater than or equal to 500ms and the last event enqueued was by a real event then I issue a Cti through the timer to flush the event Queue, otherwise I do nothing. When I enqueue the Ctis into my stream in my ProduceEvents method I also set the values of dtCtiIssued and TimerIssuedCti   currEvent = CreateInsertEvent(); currEvent.StartTime = (DateTimeOffset)dt.c2; TimerIssuedCti = false; dtCtiIssued = currEvent.StartTime; If I go ahead and run this configuration I see the following in my output. As we can see the first Cti gets enqueued as before but then another is enqueued by the timer and because this has a later timestamp it flushes the enqueued events through the engine. Conclusion Hopefully this has shown how the enqueuing of Ctis can have a dramatic effect on the responsiveness of your output in StreamInsight. Understanding the temporal nature of the product is for me one of the most important things you can learn. I have attached my solution for the demos. It is all in one project and testing each variation is a simple matter of commenting and un-commenting the parts in the code we have been dealing with here.

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• Node.js Adventure - Node.js on Windows

  - by Shaun

  Two weeks ago I had had a talk with Wang Tao, a C# MVP in China who is currently running his startup company and product named worktile. He asked me to figure out a synchronization solution which helps his product in the future. And he preferred me implementing the service in Node.js, since his worktile is written in Node.js. Even though I have some experience in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think I’m an expert of JavaScript. In fact I’m very new to it. So it scared me a bit when he asked me to use Node.js. But after about one week investigate I have to say Node.js is very easy to learn, use and deploy, even if you have very limited JavaScript skill. And I think I became love Node.js. Hence I decided to have a series named “Node.js Adventure”, where I will demonstrate my story of learning and using Node.js in Windows and Windows Azure. And this is the first one.   (Brief) Introduction of Node.js I don’t want to have a fully detailed introduction of Node.js. There are many resource on the internet we can find. But the best one is its homepage. Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl, sponsored by Joyent. It’s consist of about 80% C/C++ for core and 20% JavaScript for API. It utilizes CommonJS as the module system which we will explain later. The official definition of Node.js is Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. First of all, Node.js utilizes JavaScript as its development language and runs on top of V8 engine, which is being used by Chrome. It brings JavaScript, a client-side language into the backend service world. So many people said, even though not that actually, “Node.js is a server side JavaScript”. Additionally, Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model. This means in Node.js there’s no way to block currently working thread. Every operation in Node.js executed asynchronously. This is a huge benefit especially if our code needs IO operations such as reading disks, connect to database, consuming web service, etc.. Unlike IIS or Apache, Node.js doesn’t utilize the multi-thread model. In Node.js there’s only one working thread serves all users requests and resources response, as the ST star in the figure below. And there is a POSIX async threads pool in Node.js which contains many async threads (AT stars) for IO operations. When a user have an IO request, the ST serves it but it will not do the IO operation. Instead the ST will go to the POSIX async threads pool to pick up an AT, pass this operation to it, and then back to serve any other requests. The AT will actually do the IO operation asynchronously. Assuming before the AT complete the IO operation there is another user comes. The ST will serve this new user request, pick up another AT from the POSIX and then back. If the previous AT finished the IO operation it will take the result back and wait for the ST to serve. ST will take the response and return the AT to POSIX, and then response to the user. And if the second AT finished its job, the ST will response back to the second user in the same way. As you can see, in Node.js there’s only one thread serve clients’ requests and POSIX results. This thread looping between the users and POSIX and pass the data back and forth. The async jobs will be handled by POSIX. This is the event-driven non-blocking IO model. The performance of is model is much better than the multi-threaded blocking model. For example, Apache is built in multi-threaded blocking model while Nginx is in event-driven non-blocking mode. Below is the performance comparison between them. And below is the memory usage comparison between them. These charts are captured from the video NodeJS Basics: An Introductory Training, which presented at Cloud Foundry Developer Advocate.   Node.js on Windows To execute Node.js application on windows is very simple. First of you we need to download the latest Node.js platform from its website. After installed, it will register its folder into system path variant so that we can execute Node.js at anywhere. To confirm the Node.js installation, just open up a command windows and type “node”, then it will show the Node.js console. As you can see this is a JavaScript interactive console. We can type some simple JavaScript code and command here. To run a Node.js JavaScript application, just specify the source code file name as the argument of the “node” command. For example, let’s create a Node.js source code file named “helloworld.js”. Then copy a sample code from Node.js website. 1: var http = require("http"); 2:  3: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 4: res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"}); 5: res.end("Hello World\n"); 6: }).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1"); 7:  8: console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/"); This code will create a web server, listening on 1337 port and return “Hello World” when any requests come. Run it in the command windows. Then open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:1337/. As you can see, when using Node.js we are not creating a web application. In fact we are likely creating a web server. We need to deal with request, response and the related headers, status code, etc.. And this is one of the benefit of using Node.js, lightweight and straightforward. But creating a website from scratch again and again is not acceptable. The good news is that, Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system, so that we can leverage some modules to simplify our job. And furthermore, there are about ten thousand of modules available n the internet, which covers almost all areas in server side application development.   NPM and Node.js Modules Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system. A module is a set of JavaScript files. In Node.js if we have an entry file named “index.js”, then all modules it needs will be located at the “node_modules” folder. And in the “index.js” we can import modules by specifying the module name. For example, in the code we’ve just created, we imported a module named “http”, which is a build-in module installed alone with Node.js. So that we can use the code in this “http” module. Besides the build-in modules there are many modules available at the NPM website. Thousands of developers are contributing and downloading modules at this website. Hence this is another benefit of using Node.js. There are many modules we can use, and the numbers of modules increased very fast, and also we can publish our modules to the community. When I wrote this post, there are totally 14,608 modules at NPN and about 10 thousand downloads per day. Install a module is very simple. Let’s back to our command windows and input the command “npm install express”. This command will install a module named “express”, which is a MVC framework on top of Node.js. And let’s create another JavaScript file named “helloweb.js” and copy the code below in it. I imported the “express” module. And then when the user browse the home page it will response a text. If the incoming URL matches “/Echo/:value” which the “value” is what the user specified, it will pass it back with the current date time in JSON format. And finally my website was listening at 12345 port. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: app.get("/Echo/:value", function(req, res) { 9: var value = req.params.value; 10: res.json({ 11: "Value" : value, 12: "Time" : new Date() 13: }); 14: }); 15:  16: console.log("Web application opened."); 17: app.listen(12345); For more information and API about the “express”, please have a look here. Start our application from the command window by command “node helloweb.js”, and then navigate to the home page we can see the response in the browser. And if we go to, for example http://localhost:12345/Echo/Hello Shaun, we can see the JSON result. The “express” module is very populate in NPM. It makes the job simple when we need to build a MVC website. There are many modules very useful in NPM. - underscore: A utility module covers many common functionalities such as for each, map, reduce, select, etc.. - request: A very simple HTT request client. - async: Library for coordinate async operations. - wind: Library which enable us to control flow with plain JavaScript for asynchronous programming (and more) without additional pre-compiling steps.   Node.js and IIS I demonstrated how to run the Node.js application from console. Since we are in Windows another common requirement would be, “can I host Node.js in IIS?” The answer is “Yes”. Tomasz Janczuk created a project IISNode at his GitHub space we can find here. And Scott Hanselman had published a blog post introduced about it.   Summary In this post I provided a very brief introduction of Node.js, includes it official definition, architecture and how it implement the event-driven non-blocking model. And then I described how to install and run a Node.js application on windows console. I also described the Node.js module system and NPM command. At the end I referred some links about IISNode, an IIS extension that allows Node.js application runs on IIS. Node.js became a very popular server side application platform especially in this year. By leveraging its non-blocking IO model and async feature it’s very useful for us to build a highly scalable, asynchronously service. I think Node.js will be used widely in the cloud application development in the near future.   In the next post I will explain how to use SQL Server from Node.js.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Ada and 'The Book'

  - by Phil Factor

  The long friendship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace created one of the most exciting and mysterious of collaborations ever to have resulted in a technological breakthrough. The fireworks that created by the collision of two prodigious mathematical and creative talents resulted in an invention, the Analytical Engine, which went on to change society fundamentally. However, beyond that, we just don't know what the bulk of their collaborative work was about:;  it was done in strictest secrecy. Even the known outcome of their friendship, the first programmable computer, was shrouded in mystery. At the time, nobody, except close friends and family, had any idea of Ada Byron's contribution to the invention of the ‘Engine’, and how to program it. Her great insight was published in August 1843, under the initials AAL, standing for Ada Augusta Lovelace, her title then being the Countess of Lovelace. It was contained in a lengthy ‘note’ to her translation of a publication that remains the best description of Babbage's amazing Analytical Engine. The secret identity of the person behind those enigmatic initials was finally revealed by Prince de Polignac who, seventy years later, wrote to Ada's daughter to seek confirmation that her mother had, indeed, been the author of the brilliant sentences that described so accurately how Babbage's mechanical computer could be programmed with punch-cards. L.F. Menabrea's paper on the Analytical Engine first appeared in the 'Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve' in October 1842, and Ada translated it anonymously for Taylor's 'Scientific Memoirs'. Charles Babbage was surprised that she had not written an original paper as she already knew a surprising amount about the way the machine worked. He persuaded her to at least write some explanatory notes. These notes ended up extending to four times the length of the original article and represented the first published account of how a machine could be programmed to perform any calculation. Her example of programming the Bernoulli sequence would have worked on the Analytical engine had the device’s construction been completed, and gave Ada an unassailable claim to have invented the art of programming. What was the reason for Ada's secrecy? She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, who was probably the best known celebrity of the age, so she was already famous. She was a senior aristocrat, with titles, a fortune in money and vast estates in the Midlands. She had political influence, and was the cousin of Lord Melbourne, who was the Prime Minister at that time. She was friendly with the young Queen Victoria. Her mathematical activities were a pastime, and not one that would be considered by others to be in keeping with her roles and responsibilities. You wouldn't dare to dream up a fictional heroine like Ada. She was dazzlingly beautiful and talented. She could speak several languages fluently, and play some musical instruments with professional skill. Contemporary accounts refer to her being 'accomplished in science, art and literature'. On top of that, she was a brilliant mathematician, a talent inherited from her mother, Annabella Milbanke. In her mother's circle of literary and scientific friends was Charles Babbage, and Ada's friendship with him dates from her teenage zest for Mathematics. She was one of the first people he'd ever met who understood what he had attempted to achieve with the 'Difference Engine', and with whom he could converse as intellectual equals. He arranged for her to have an education from the most talented academics in the country. Ada melted the heart of the cantankerous genius to the point that he became a faithful and loyal father-figure to her. She was one of the very few who could grasp the principles of the later, and very different, ‘Analytical Engine’ which was designed from the start to tackle a variety of tasks. Sadly, Ada Byron's life ended less than a decade after completing the work that assured her long-term fame, in November 1852. She was dying of cancer, her gambling habits had caused her to run up huge debts, she'd had more than one affairs, and she was being blackmailed. Her brilliant but unempathic mother was nursing her in her final illness, destroying her personal letters and records, and repaying her debts. Her husband was distraught but helpless. Charles Babbage, however, maintained his steadfast paternalistic friendship to the end. She appointed her loyal friend to be her executor. For years, she and Babbage had been working together on a secret project, known only as 'The Book'. We have a clue to what it was in a letter written by her nine years earlier, on 11th August 1843. It was a joint project by herself and Lord Lovelace, her husband, and was intended to involve Babbage's 'undivided energies'. It involved 'consulting your Engine' (it required Babbage’s computer). The letter gives no hint about the project except for the high-minded nature of its purpose, and its highly mathematical nature.  From then on, the surviving correspondence between the two gives only veiled references to 'The Book'. There isn't much, since Babbage later destroyed any letters that could have damaged her reputation within the Establishment. 'I cannot spare the book today, which I am very sorry for. At the moment I want it for constant reference, but I think you can have it tomorrow' (Oct 1844)  And 'I will send you the book directly, and you can say, when you receive it, how long you will want to keep it'. (Nov 1844)  The two of them were obviously intent on the work: She writes, four years later, 'I have an engagement for Wednesday which will prevent me from attending to your wishes about the book' (Dec 1848). This was something that they both needed to work on, but could not do in parallel: 'I will send the book on Tuesday, and it can be left with you till Friday' (11 Feb 1849). After six years work, it had been so well-handled that it was beginning to fall apart: 'Don't forget the new cover you promised for the book. The poor book is very shabby and wants one' (20 Sept 1849). So what was going on? The word 'book' was not a code-word: it was a real book, probably a 'printer's blank', plain paper, but properly bound so printers and publishers could show off how the published work might look. The hints from the correspondence are of advanced mathematics. It is obvious that the book was travelling between them, back and forth, each one working on it for less than a week before passing it back. Ada and her husband were certainly involved in gambling large sums of money on the horses, and so most biographers have concluded that the three of them were trying to calculate the mathematical odds on the horses. This theory has three large problems. Firstly, Ada's original letter proposing the project refers to its high-minded nature. Babbage was temperamentally opposed to gambling and would scarcely have given so much time to the project, even though he was devoted to Ada. Secondly, Babbage would have very soon have realized the hopelessness of trying to beat the bookies. This sort of betting never attracts his type of intellectual background. The third problem is that any work on calculating the odds on horses would not need a well-thumbed book to pass back and forth between them; they would have not had to work in series. The original project was instigated by Ada, along with her husband, William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace. Charles Babbage was invited to join the project after the couple had come up with the idea. What could William have contributed? One might assume that William was a Bertie Wooster character, addicted only to the joys of the turf, but this was far from the truth. He was a scientist, a Cambridge graduate who was later elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. After Eton, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. On graduation, he entered the diplomatic service and acted as secretary under Lord Nugent, who was Lord Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. William was very friendly with Babbage too, able to discuss scientific matters on equal terms. He was a capable engineer who invented a process for bending large timbers by the application of steam heat. He delivered a paper to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1849, and received praise from the great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As well as being Lord Lieutenant of the County of Surrey for most of Victoria's reign, he had time for a string of scientific and engineering achievements. Whatever the project was, it is unlikely that William was a junior partner. After Ada's death, the project disappeared. Then, two years later, Babbage, through one of his occasional outbursts of temper, demonstrated that he was able to decrypt one of the most powerful of secret codes, Vigenère's autokey cipher.  All contemporary diplomatic and military messages used a variant of this cipher. Babbage had made three important discoveries, namely, the mathematical law of this cipher, the principle of the key periodicity, and the technique of the symmetry of position. The technique is now known as the Kasiski examination, also called the Kasiski test, but Babbage got there first. At one time, he listed amongst his future projects, the writing of a book 'The Philosophy of Decyphering', but it never came to anything. This discovery was going to change the course of history, since it was used to decipher the Russians’ military dispatches in the Crimean war. Babbage himself played a role during the Crimean War as a cryptographical adviser to his friend, Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort of the Admiralty. This is as much as we can be certain about in trying to make sense of the bulk of the time that Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace worked together. Nine years of intensive work, involving the 'Engine' and a great deal of mathematics and research seems to have been lost: or has it? I've argued in the past http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archive/2008/06/13/59614.aspx that the cracking of the Vigenère autokey cipher, was a fundamental motive behind the British Government's support and funding of the 'Difference Engine'. The Duke of Wellington, whose understanding of the military significance of being able to read enemy dispatches, was the most steadfast advocate of the project. If the three friends were actually doing the work of cracking codes by mathematical techniques that used the techniques of key periodicity, and symmetry of position (the use of a book being passed quickly to and fro is very suggestive), intending to then use the 'Engine' to do the routine cracking of each dispatch, then this is a rather different story. The project was Ada and William's idea. (William had served in the diplomatic service and would be familiar with the use of codes). This makes Ada Lovelace the initiator of a project which, by giving both Britain, and probably the USA, a diplomatic and military advantage in the second part of the Nineteenth century, changed world history. Ada would never have wanted any credit for cracking the cipher, and developing the method that rendered all contemporary military and diplomatic ciphering techniques nugatory; quite the reverse. And it is clear from the gaps in the record of the letters between the collaborators that the evidence was destroyed, probably on her request by her irascible but intensely honorable executor, Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage toyed with the idea of going public, but the Crimean war put an end to that. The British Government had a valuable secret, and intended to keep it that way. Ada and Charles had quite often discussed possible moneymaking projects that would fund the development of the Analytic Engine, the first programmable computer, but their secret work was never in the running as a potential cash cow. I suspect that the British Government was, even then, working on the concealment of a discovery whose value to the nation depended on it remaining so. The success of code-breaking in the Crimean war, and the American Civil war, led to the British and Americans  subsequently giving much more weight and funding to the science of decryption. Paradoxically, this makes Ada's contribution even closer to the creation of Colossus, the first digital computer, at Bletchley Park, specifically to crack the Nazi’s secret codes.

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• Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on HTML5 Canvas Programming

  - by dwahlin

    In the latest installment of Pluralsight’s Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion and I talk about my new course, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals.  In the interview I describe different canvas technologies covered throughout the course and a sample application at the end of the course that covers how to build a custom business chart from start to finish. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals   Transcript [Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today with Dan Wahlin to talk about his new course HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals. Dan founded the Wahlin Group, which you can find at thewahlingroup.com, which specializes in ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, and SharePoint consulting. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP for ASP.NET, Connected Systems, and Silverlight. Dan is on the INETA Bureau’s — Speaker’s Bureau, speaks at conferences and user groups around the world, and has written several books on .NET. Thanks for talking to me today, Dan. [Dan] Always good to talk with you, Fritz. [Fritz] So this new course of yours, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals, I have to say that most of the really snazzy demos I’ve seen with HTML5 have involved Canvas, so I thought it would be a good starting point to chat with you about why we decided to create a course dedicated just to Canvas. If you want to kind of give us that perspective. [Dan] Sure. So, you know, there’s quite a bit of material out there on HTML5 in general, and as people that have done a lot with HTML5 are probably aware, a lot of HTML5 is actually JavaScript centric. You know, a lot of people when they first learn it, think it’s tags, but most of it’s actually JavaScript, and it just so happens that the HTML5 Canvas is one of those things. And so it’s not just, you know, a tag you add and it just magically draws all these things. You mentioned there’s a lot of cool things you can do from games to there’s some really cool multimedia applications out there where they integrate video and audio and all kinds of things into the Canvas, to more business scenarios such as charting and things along those lines. So the reason we made a course specifically on it is, a lot of the material out there touches on it but the Canvas is actually a pretty deep topic. You can do some pretty advanced stuff or easy stuff depending on what your application requirements are, and the API itself, you know, there’s over 30 functions just in the Canvas API and then a whole set of properties that actually go with that as well. So it’s a pretty big topic, and that’s why we created a course specifically tailored towards just the Canvas. [Fritz] Right. And let’s — let me just review the outline briefly here for everyone. So you start off with an introduction to getting started with Canvas, drawing with the HTML5 Canvas, then you talk about manipulating pixels, and you finish up with building a custom data chart. So I really like your example flow here. I think it will appeal to even business developers, right. Even if you’re not into HTML5 for the games or the media capabilities, there’s still something here for everyone I think working with the Canvas. Which leads me to another question, which is, where do you see the Canvas fitting in to kind of your day-to-day developer, people that are working business applications and maybe vanilla websites that aren’t doing kind of cutting edge stuff with interactivity with users? Is there a still a place for the Canvas in those scenarios? [Dan] Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of us — and I include myself here — over the last few years, the focus has generally been, especially if you’re, let’s say, a PHP or ASP.NET or Java type of developer, we’re kind of accustomed to working on the server side, and, you know, we kind of relied on Flash or Silverlight or these other plug-ins for the client side stuff when it was kind of fancy, like charts and graphs and things along those lines. With the what I call massive shift of applications, you know, mainly because of mobile, to more of client side, one of the big benefits I think from a maybe corporate standard way of thinking of things, since we do a lot of work with different corporations, is that, number one, rather than having to have the plug-in, which of course isn’t going to work on iPad and some of these other devices out there that are pretty popular, you can now use a built-in technology that all the modern browsers support, and that includes things like Safari on the iPad and iPhone and the Android tablets and things like that with their browsers, and actually render some really sophisticated charts. Whether you do it by scratch or from scratch or, you know, get a third party type of library involved, it’s just JavaScript. So it downloads fast so it’s good from a performance perspective; and when it comes to what you can render, it’s extremely robust. You can do everything from, you know, your basic circles to polygons or polylines to really advanced gradients as well and even provide some interactivity and animations, and that’s some of the stuff I touch upon in the class. In fact, you mentioned the last part of the outline there is building a custom data chart and that’s kind of gears towards more of the, what I’d call enterprise or corporate type developer. [Fritz] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s, you know, a lot of the demos I’ve seen with HTML5 focus on more the interactivity and kind of game side of things, but the Canvas is such a diverse element within HTML5 that I can see it being applicable pretty much anywhere. So why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the specifics of what you cover? You talk about drawing and then manipulating pixels. You want to kind of give us the different ways of working with the Canvas and what some of those APIs provide for you? [Dan] Sure. So going all the way back to the start of the outline, we actually started off by showing different demonstrations of the Canvas in action, and we show some fun stuff — multimedia apps and games and things like that — and then also some more business scenarios; and then once you see that, hopefully it kinds of piques your interest and you go, oh, wow, this is actually pretty phenomenal what you can do. So then we start you off with, so how to you actually draw things. Now, there are some libraries out there that will draw things like graphs, but if you want to customize those or just build something you have from scratch, you need to know the basics, such as, you know, how do you draw circles and lines and arcs and Bezier curves and all those fancy types of shapes that a given chart may have on it or that a game may have in it for that matter. So we start off by covering what I call the core API functions; how do you, for instance, fill a rectangle or convert that to a square by setting the height and the width; how do you draw arcs or different types of curves and there’s different types supported such as I mentioned Bezier curves or quadratic curves; and then we also talk about how do you integrate text into it. You might have some images already that are just regular bitmap type images that you want to integrate, you can do that with a Canvas. And you can even sync video into the Canvas, which actually opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for both business and I think just general multimedia apps. Once you kind of get those core functions down for the basic shapes that you need to be able to draw on any type of Canvas, then we go a little deeper into what are the pixels that are there to manipulate. And that’s one of the important things to understand about the HTML5 Canvas, scalable vector graphics is another thing you can use now in the modern browsers; it’s vector based. Canvas is pixel based. And so we talk about how to do gradients, how can you do transforms, you know, how do you scale things or rotate things, which is extremely useful for charts ’cause you might have text that, you know, flips up on its side for a y-axis or something like that. And you can even do direct pixel manipulation. So it’s really, really powerful. If you want to get down to the RGBA level, you can do that, and I show how to do that in the course, and then kind of wrap that section up with some animation fundamentals. [Fritz] Great. Yeah, that’s really powerful stuff for programmatically rendering data to clients and responding to user inputs. Look forward to seeing what everyone’s going to come up with building this stuff. So great. That’s — that’s HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals with Dan Wahlin. Thanks very much, Dan. [Dan] Thanks again. I appreciate it.

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• Summary of Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Webcasts and Training

  - by BillSawyer

  Last Updated: November 16, 2011We're glad to hear that you've been finding our ATG Live Webcast series to be useful.  If you missed a webcast, you can download the presentation materials and listen to the recordings below. We're collecting other learning-related materials right now.  We'll update this summary with pointers to new training resources on an ongoing basis.  ATG Live Webcast Replays All of the ATG Live Webcasts are hosted by the Oracle University Knowledge Center.  In order to access the replays, you will need a free Oracle.com account. You can register for an Oracle.com account here.If you are a first-time OUKC user, you will have to accept the Terms of Use. Sign-in with your Oracle.com account, or if you don't already have one, use the link provided on the sign-in screen to create an account. After signing in, accept the Terms of Use. Upon completion of these steps, you will be directed to the replay. You only need to accept the Terms of Use once. Your acceptance will be noted on your account for all future OUKC replays and event registrations. 1. E-Business Suite R12 Oracle Application Framework (OAF) Rich User Interface Enhancements (Presentation) Prabodh Ambale (Senior Manager, ATG Development) and Gustavo Jiminez (Development Manager, ATG Development) offer a comprehensive review of the latest user interface enhancements and updates to OA Framework in EBS 12.  The webcast provides a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, including new capabilities for personalization and extensions, and features that support the use of dashboards and web services. (January 2011) 2. E-Business Suite R12 Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) Using the E-Business Suite Adapter (Presentation, Viewlet) Neeraj Chauhan (Product Manager, ATG Development) reviews the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capabilities within E-Business Suite 12, focussing on using the E-Business Suite Adapter to integrate EBS with third-party applications via web services, and orchestrate services and distributed transactions across disparate applications. (February 2011) 3. Deploying Oracle VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications Ivo Dujmovic (Director, ATG Development) reviews the latest capabilities for using Oracle VM to deploy virtualized EBS database and application tier instances using prebuilt EBS templates, wire those virtualized instances together using the EBS virtualization kit, and take advantage of live migration of user sessions between failing application tier nodes.  (February 2011) 4. How to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Using Oracle E-Business Suite Management Packs (Presentation) Angelo Rosado (Product Manager, ATG Development) provides an overview of how EBS sysadmins can make their lives easier with the Management Packs for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.  This session highlights key features in Application Management Pack (AMP) and Application Change Management Pack) that can automate or streamline system configurations, monitor EBS performance and uptime, keep multiple EBS environments in sync with patches and configurations, and create patches for your own EBS customizations and apply them with Oracle's own patching tools.  (June 2011) 5. Upgrading E-Business Suite 11i Customizations to R12 (Presentation) Sara Woodhull (Principal Product Manager, ATG Development) provides an overview of how E-Business Suite developers can manage and upgrade existing EBS 11i customizations to R12.  Sara covers methods for comparing customizations between Release 11i and 12, managing common customization types, managing deprecated technologies, and more. (July 2011) 6. Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite (Part 1 of 3) (Presentation) Lester Gutierrez, Senior Architect, and Deepak Bhatnagar, Senior Manager, from the E-Business Suite Application Performance team, lead Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite (Part 1 of 3). This webcast provides an overview of how Oracle E-Business Suite system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers can improve E-Business Suite performance by following a performance tuning framework. Part 1 focuses on the performance triage approach, tuning applications modules, upgrade performance best practices, and tuning the database tier. This ATG Live Webcast is an expansion of the performance sessions at conferences that are perennial favourites with hardcore Apps DBAs. (August 2011)  7. Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System Administration (Presentation) Max Arderius, Manager Applications Technology Group, and Ivo Dujmovic, Director Applications Technology group, lead Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System Administration covering important changes in E-Business Suite R12.2. The changes discussed in this presentation include Oracle E-Business Suite architecture, installation, upgrade, WebLogic Server integration, online patching, and cloning. This webcast provides an overview of how Oracle E-Business Suite system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers can prepare themselves for these changes in R12.2 of Oracle E-Business Suite. (October 2011) Oracle University Courses For a general listing of all Oracle University courses related to E-Business Suite Technology, use the Oracle University E-Business Suite Technology course catalog link. Oracle University E-Business Suite Technology Course Catalog 1. R12 Oracle Applications System Administrator Fundamentals In this course students learn concepts and functions that are critical to the System Administrator role in implementing and managing the Oracle E-Business Suite. Topics covered include configuring security and user management, configuring flexfields, managing concurrent processing, and setting up other essential features such as profile options and printing. In addition, configuration and maintenance of an Oracle E-Business Suite through Oracle Applications Manager is discussed. Students also learn the fundamentals of Oracle Workflow including its setup. The System Administrator Fundamentals course provides the foundation needed to effectively control security and ensure smooth operations for an E-Business Suite installation. Demonstrations and hands-on practice reinforce the fundamental concepts of configuring an Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as handling day-to-day system administrator tasks. 2. R12.x Install/Patch/Maintain Oracle E-Business Suite This course will be applicable for customers who have implemented Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 or Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. This course explains how to go about installing and maintaining an Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.x system. Both Standard and Express installation types are covered in detail. Maintenance topics include a detailed examination of the standard tools and utilities, and an in-depth look at patching an Oracle E-Business Suite system. After this course, students will be able to make informed decisions about how to install an Oracle E-Business Suite system that meets their specific requirements, and how to maintain the system afterwards. The extensive hands-on practices include performing an installation on a Linux system, navigating the file system to locate key files, running the standard maintenance tools and utilities, applying patches, and carrying out cloning operations. 3. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: Building OA Framework Applications This class is a hands-on lab-intensive course that will keep the student busy and active for the duration of the course. While the course covers the fundamentals that support OA Framework-based applications, the course is really an exercise in J2EE programming. Over the duration of the course, the student will create an OA Framework-based application that selects, inserts, updates, and deletes data from a R12 Oracle Applications instance. 4. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: Customizing OA Framework Applications This course has been significantly changed from the prior version to include additional deployments. The course doesn't teach the specifics of configuration of each product. That is left to the product-specific courses. What the course does cover is the general methods of building, personalizing, and extending OA Framework-based pages within the E-Business Suite. Additionally, the course covers the methods to deploy those types of customizations. The course doesn't include discussion of the Oracle Forms-based pages within the E-Business Suite. 5. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: OA Framework Personalizations Personalization is the ability within an E-Business Suite instance to make changes to the look and behavior of OA Framework-based pages without programming. And, personalizations are likely to survive patches and upgrades, increasing their utility. This course will systematically walk you through the myriad of personalization options, starting with simple examples and increasing in complexity from there. 6. E-Business Suite: BI Publisher 5.6.3 for Developers Starting with the basic concepts, architecture, and underlying standards of Oracle XML Publisher, this course will lead a student through a progress of exercises building their expertise. By the end of the course, the student should be able to create Oracle XML Publisher RTF templates and data templates. They should also be able to deploy and maintain a BI Publisher report in an E-Business Suite instance. Students will also be introduced to Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise. 7. R12.x Implement Oracle Workflow This course provides an overview of the architecture and features of Oracle Workflow and the benefits of using Oracle Workflow in an e-business environment. You can learn how to design workflow processes to automate and streamline business processes, and how to define event subscriptions to perform processing triggered by business events. Students also learn how to respond to workflow notifications, how to administer and monitor workflow processes, and what setup steps are required for Oracle Workflow. Demonstrations and hands-on practice reinforce the fundamental concepts. 8. R12.x Oracle E-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Oracle R12.1 E-Business Essentials for Implementers is a course that provides a functional foundation for any E-Business Suite Fundamentals course.

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• SQL – NuoDB and Third Party Explorer – SQuirreL SQL Client, SQL Workbench/J and DbVisualizer

  - by Pinal Dave

  I recently wrote a four-part series on how I started to learn about and begin my journey with NuoDB. Big Data is indeed a big world and the learning of the Big Data is like spaghetti – no one knows in reality where to start, so I decided to learn it with the help of NuoDB. You can download NuoDB and continue your journey with me as well. Part 1 – Install NuoDB in 90 Seconds Part 2 – Manage NuoDB Installation Part 3 – Explore NuoDB Database Part 4 – Migrate from SQL Server to NuoDB …and in this blog post we will try to answer the most asked question about NuoDB. “I like the NuoDB Explorer but can I connect to NuoDB from my preferred Graphical User Interface?” Honestly, I did not expect this question to be asked of me so many times but from the question it is clear that we developers absolutely want to learn new things and along with that we do want to continue to use our most efficient developer tools. Now here is the answer to the question: “Absolutely, you can continue to use any of the following most popular SQL clients.” NuoDB supports the three most popular 3rd-party SQL clients. In all the leading development environments there are always more than one database installed and managing each of them with a different tool is often a very difficult task. Developers like to use one tool, which can control most of the databases. Once developers are familiar with one database tool it is very difficult for them to switch to another tool. This is particularly difficult when we developers find that tool to be the key reason for our efficiency. Let us see how to install each of the NuoDB supported 3rd party tools along with a quick tutorial on how to go about using them. SQuirreL SQL Client First download SQuirreL Universal SQL client. On the Windows platform you can double-click on the file and it will install the SQuirrel client. Once it is installed, open the application and it will bring up the following screen. Now go to the Drivers tab on the left side and scroll it down. You will find NuoDB mentioned there. Now right click over it and click on Modify Driver. Now here is where you need to make sure that you make proper entries or your client will not work with the database. Enter following values: Name: NuoDB Example URL: jdbc:com:nuodb://localhost:48004/test Website URL: http://www.nuodb.com Now click on the Extra Class Path tab and Add the location of the nuodbjdbc.jar file. If you are following my blog posts and have installed NuoDB in the default location, you will find the default path as C:\Program Files\NuoDB\jar\nuodbjdbc.jar. The class name of the driver is automatically populated. Once you click OK you will see that there is a small icon displayed to the left of NuoDB, which shows that you have successfully configured and installed the NuoDB driver. Now click on the tab of Alias tab and you can notice that it is empty. Now click on the big Plus icon and it will open screen of adding an alias. “Alias” means nothing more than adding a database to your system. The database name of the original installation can be anything and, if you wish, you can register the database with any other alternative name. Here are the details you should fill into the Alias screen below. Name: Test (or your preferred alias) Driver: NuoDB URL: jdbc:com:nuodb://localhost:48004/test (This is for test database) User Name: dba (This is the username which I entered for test Database) Password: goalie (This is the password which I entered for test Database) Check Auto Logon and Connect at Startup and click on OK. That’s it! You are done. On the right side you will see a table name and on the left side you will see various tabs with all the relevant details from respective table. You can see various metadata, schemas, data types and other information in the table. In addition, you can also generate script and do various important tasks related to database. You can see how easy it is to configure NuoDB with the SQuirreL Client and get going with it immediately. SQL Workbench/J This is another wonderful client tool, which works very well with NuoDB. The best part is that in the Driver dropdown you will see NuoDB being mentioned there. Click here to download  SQL Workbench/J Universal SQL client. The download process is straight forward and the installation is a very easy process for SQL Workbench/J. As soon as you open the client, you will notice on following screen the NuoDB driver when selecting a New Connection Profile. Select NuoDB from the drop down and click on OK. In the driver information, enter following details: Driver: NuoDB (com.nuodb.jdbc.Driver) URL: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost/test Username: dba Password: goalie While clicking on OK, it will bring up the following pop-up. Click Yes to edit the driver information. Click on OK and it will bring you to following screen. This is the screen where you can perform various tasks. You can write any SQL query you want and it will instantly show you the results. Now click on the database icon, which you see right on the left side of the word User=dba.  Once you click on Database Explorer, you can perform various database related tasks. As a developer, one of my favorite tasks is to look at the source of the table as it gives me a proper view of the structure of the database. I find SQL Workbench/J very efficient in doing the same. DbVisualizer DBVisualizer is another great tool, which helps you to connect to NuoDB and retrieve database information in your desired format. A developer who is familiar with DBVisualizer will find this client to be very easy to work with. The installation of the DBVisualizer is very pretty straight forward. When we open the client, it will bring us to the following screen. As a first step we need to set up the driver. Go to Tools >> Driver Manager. It will bring up following screen where we set up the diver. Click on Create Driver and it will open up the driver settings on the right side. On the right side of the area where it displays Driver Settings please enter the following values- Name: NuoDB URL Format: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost:48004/test Now under the driver path, click on the folder icon and it will ask for the location of the jar file. Provide the path as a C:\Program Files\NuoDB\jar\nuodbjdbc.jar and click OK. You will notice there is a green button displayed at the bottom right corner. This means the driver is configured properly. Once driver is configured properly, we can go to Create Database Connection and create a database. If the pop up show up for the Wizard. Click on No Wizard and continue to enter the settings manually. Here is the Database Connection screen. This screen can be bit tricky. Here are the settings you need to remember to enter. Name: NuoDB Database Type: Generic Driver: NuoDB Database URL: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost:48004/test Database Userid: dba Database Password: goalie Once you enter the values, click on Connect. Once Connect is pressed, it will change the button value to Reconnect if the connection is successfully established and it will show the connection details on lthe eft side. When we further explore the NuoDB, we can see various tables created in our test application. We can further click on the right side screen and see various details on the table. If you click on the Data Tab, it will display the entire data of the table. The Tools menu also has some very interesting and cool features like Driver Manager, Data Monitor and SQL History. Summary Well, this was a relatively long post but I find it is extremely essential to cover all the three important clients, which we developers use in our daily database development. Here is my question to you? Which one of the following is your favorite NuoDB 3rd-Party Database Client? (Pick One) SQuirreL SQL Client SQL Workbench/J DbVisualizer I will be very much eager to read your experience about NuoDB. You can download NuoDB from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

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• PASS Summit Feedback

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go? Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking. Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style.  Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it. Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...  I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk. Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list.  In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor.  I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well.  Tell me about your scores. Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials. Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides.  Did they rate your thong? Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score. Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites.  Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM.  As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck.  So how did you rank so low? Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable). Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then? Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.” Brent: Extemporaneous, eh? Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt. Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits.  As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material.  It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is.  People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun. Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound. Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way?  It seems so simple and logical."  Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept.  I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes. Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened. Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right?  From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen. Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me. My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe. I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess). Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory.  It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service.  I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting.  Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures.  On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that.  It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you? Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still. Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food. Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone? Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different. Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir.  Where can we see you next? Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example. Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation. Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 29, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 29, 2012Popular ReleasesSupporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Supporting Media: Welcome to the Release Candidate (RC) release of the ALM Rangers Readiness supporting edia As this is a RC release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these RC artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs Practical Ruck training workshop not yet includedDesigning Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML: Chapters 1 - 7 Release Preview: Source code for all examples from Chapters 1 - 7 for the Release PreviewDataBooster - Extension to ADO.NET Data Provider: DataBooster Library for Oracle + SQL Server Beta2: This is a derivative library of dbParallel project http://dbparallel.codeplex.com. All above binaries releases require .NET Framework 4.0 or later. SQL Server support is always build-in (can't be unplugged). The first download (DLL) also requires ODP.NET to connect Oracle; The second download (DLL) also requires DataDirect(3.5) to connect Oracle; The third download (DLL) doesn't support Oracle. Please download the source code if the provider need to be replaced by others. For example ODP.NE...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.57: Fix for issue #18284: evaluating literal expressions in the pattern c1 * (x / c2) where c1/c2 is an integer value (as opposed to c2/c1 being the integer) caused the expression to be destroyed.Visual Studio ALM Quick Reference Guidance: v2 - Visual Studio 2010 (Japanese): Rex Tang (?? ??) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2011/12/08/introducing-the-visual-studio-alm-rangers-rex-tang.aspx, Takaho Yamaguchi (?? ??), Masashi Fujiwara (?? ??), localized and reviewed the Quick Reference Guidance for the Japanese communities, based on http://vsarquickguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/52402. The Japanese guidance is available in AllGuides and Everything packages. The AllGuides package contains guidances in PDF file format, while the Everything packag...Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v1 - Visual Studio 2010 (Japanese): Rex Tang (?? ??) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2011/12/08/introducing-the-visual-studio-alm-rangers-rex-tang.aspx, Takaho Yamaguchi (?? ??), Hirokazu Higashino (?? ??), localized and reviewed the Branching Guidance for the Japanese communities, based on http://vsarbranchingguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/38849. The Japanese guidance is available in AllGuides and Everything packages. The AllGuides package contains guidances in PDF file format, while the Everything packag...SQL Server FineBuild: Version 3.1.0: Top SQL Server FineBuild Version 3.1.0This is the stable version of FineBuild for SQL Server 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005 Documentation FineBuild Wiki containing details of the FineBuild process Known Issues Limitations with this release FineBuild V3.1.0 Release Contents List of changes included in this release Please DonateFineBuild is free, but please donate what you think FineBuild is worth as everything goes to charity. Tearfund is one of the UK's leading relief and de...EasySL: RapidSL V2: Rewrite RapidSL UI Framework, Using Silverlight 5.0 EF4.1 Code First Ria Service SP2 + Lastest Silverlight Toolkit.NETDeob0: NETDeob 0.1.1: http://i.imgur.com/54C78.pngSOLID by example: All examples: All solid examplesSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.1726.406): Use of new version of connection controls for a full support of OSDP authentication mechanism for CRM Online.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.2: Development on Umbraco v5 discontinued After much discussion and consultation with leaders from the Umbraco community it was decided that work on the v5 branch would be discontinued with efforts being refocused on the stable and feature rich v4 branch. For full details as to why this decision was made please watch the CodeGarden 12 Keynote. What about all that hard work?!?? We are not binning everything and it does not mean that all work done on 5 is lost! we are taking all of the best and m...CodeGenerate: CodeGenerate Alpha: The Project can auto generate C# code. Include BLL Layer、Domain Layer、IDAL Layer、DAL Layer. Support SqlServer And Oracle This is a alpha program,but which can run and generate code. Generate database table info into MS WordXDA ROM HUB: XDA ROM HUB v0.9: Kernel listing added -- Thanks to iONEx Added scripts installer button. Added "Nandroid On The Go" -- Perform a Nandroid backup without a PC! Added official Android app!ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.8.2: +2012-06-24 v3.1.8 +????Grid???????（???????ExpandUnusedSpace????????）（??）。 -????MinColumnWidth（??????）。 -????AutoExpandColumn，???????????????（ColumnID）（?????ForceFitFirstTime??ForceFitAllTime，??????）。 -????AutoExpandColumnMax?AutoExpandColumnMin。 -????ForceFitFirstTime，????????????，??????????（????????????）。 -????ForceFitAllTime，????????????，??????????（??????????????????）。 -????VerticalScrollWidth，????????（??????????，0?????????????）。 -????grid/grid_forcefit.aspx。 -???????????En...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2012 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2012 Release Version 60623June 2012 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found here: 11121. - Pages using ...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.5: Version: 2.5.0.5 (Milestone 5): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Add IsInDesignMode property to the WafConfiguration class. WAF: Introduce the IModuleController interface. WAF: Add ...Windows 8 Metro RSS Reader: Metro RSS Reader.v7: Updated for Windows 8 Release Preview Changed background and foreground colors Used VariableSizeGrid layout to wrap blog posts with images Sort items with Images first, text-only last Enabled Caching to improve navigation between framesConfuser: Confuser 1.9: Change log: * Stable output (i.e. given the same seed & input assemblies, you'll get the same output assemblies) + Generate debug symbols, now it is possible to debug the output under a debugger! (Of course without enabling anti debug) + Generating obfuscation database, most of the obfuscation data in stored in it. + Two tools utilizing the obfuscation database (Database viewer & Stack trace decoder) * Change the protection scheme -----Please read Bug Report before you report a bug-----...XDesigner.Development: First release: First releaseNew ProjectsArcGIS Server Rest Catalog: jquery widget that display all MapServer service of ESRI ArcGIS Server in accordion control. Require jQuery and JsRender. BugsBox.Lib: BugsBoxlibCodeStudy: The project includes all my code written for .NET studyCommunity Tfs Team Tools: Community TFS Team Tools is a community project based on the example code from ALM Rangers - Quick Response Sample Command line utility to manage TFS TeamsDiveBaseManager: DiveBaseManagerEclipse App: Aplicacion para android para el envio de coordenaads a un servidorJQMdotNET: JQMdotNet is an early attempt to make a series of MVC HTML helpers to quickly render JQuery Mobile pages.MathBuilderFramework: Math Builder FX is a framework for math problems. The idea of this framework is to create real exercises of mathematics throught base classes.MDS MODELING WORKBOOK: MDS Modeling Workbook is a modeling tool and a solution accelerator for Microsoft Master Data Services. Minesweeper: a clean old minesweeperMultithreaded Port Scanner Utility: Mulithreaded Port Scanner Utility is a very simple port scanner that take advantage of the new System.Threading.Task namespace in .Net 4.0Nonocast.Data: Nonocast.Data is a free, open source developer focused object persistence for small and medium software.On{X} Scripts: This project is to share scripts I create or modify from available free/opensource scripts (off-course with due mentions & links to original developer).PCS MAP: ladPowerShell Module for Mayhem: A module for Mayhem with a reaction which executes a PowerShell script.PunkBuster™ Screenshot Viewer: PunkBuster™ Screenshot Viewer shows screenshots of all games protected with PunkBuster™.Random reminder: Objective: To create a simple Windows application that can schedule and automatically reschedule a random timer that falls within a defined interval.Remembrall: Some useful stuff (at least for me) ! Javascript plugins jQuery plugins C# utilities ASP.NET MVC helper extensionsrepotfs: Repositório de exemplosSharepoint Designer: Sharepoint ExplororSPFluid: Simple modularity and data access framework.SPManager: Helper classSQL Server : xp_fixeddrives2: C++ Extended Stored Procedure Get volumes InfoSWORD Extensions for Sharepoint: Push documents in and out of Sharepoint using the SWORD protocol. ***incomplete***Test projects: My testing projecttestdd06282012git01: xzc testdd06282012git1: sadtestdd06282012tfs01: xzctestddhg06282012: xctestddtfs062820121: ,lm;.testhg06282012dd1: zxTlrk: NATotal_Mayhem: Add-on for Mayhem ( http://mayhem.codeplex.com/ ) that includes networking events, power reactions, and more.WallSwitch: An application to cycle your desktop wallpaper.??????: ????????

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 22, 2010New ProjectsAllegiance Modulus: - Display a list of all mods (installed/not installed/downloadable) - Allow user to install a mod - Allow a user to uninstall a mod - Keep backups ...Chatterbot JBot: PL: Program sieciowy JBot jest chatterbotem. EN: Network program JBot is chatterbot.Composite WPF Extensions: Extensions to Composite Client Application Library for WPFDwarrowdelf: Game concept in progressEntourage FrameG: Entourage lets users quickly and easily edit and create text . You will no longer have to download and install huge files and Entourage is 0% overw...FMon: file monGeckoBrowser: GeckoBrowser is a plugin for the great HTPC software MediaPortal. GeckoBrowser is a integrated WebBrowser for MediaPortal. It uses the Firefox (Gec...General Watcher: Watches things from the config file.GeoUtility Library: GeoUtility is an easy to use coordinate conversion library. It can be used for desktop/web development in CLI implementations like .NET, MONO. Supp...HidLib C++/CLR: HibLib is a USB Hid Communications Library written in C++/CLR IJW for the closest library you can get to a native USB Hid library. The project curr...HTML Shot: Server side component that generates a png/jpg image from arbitrary html code sent from the browser. Provides a quick way to enable printing arbit...MetaTagger: Core: MetaTagger: Core is a core set of meta data tagging libraries for use with .Net applicationsMUD--: MUD-- is a remake of MUD++ which never left devolution. MUD-- is a OOP oriented C++ MUD library, it is still in the planning stage. OpenLigaDB-Databrowser: A Silverlight 4-based Databrowser for the Community-Sportsdata-Webservice www.OpenLigaDB.deReduce Image to Specified Black Pixel Count: Takes in a picure path and an int n, and saves a white bitmap with the darkest n pixels from the image black. Posting this so that I can referen...Salient.MachineKeyUtils: Wraps encryption and password related functions from MachineKey, CookieProtectionHelper and MembershipProvider for use in other scenarios.Silverlight WebRequestHelper: WebRequestHelper is a very simple helper project, created for using HttWebRequest in Silverlight in a very simple and easiest way.Splinger FrameXi: Splinger FrameXi makes spelling a doddle with a huge and getting larger directory with LOADS of people contributing to make it the best in its field!SQL Server and SQL Azure Performance Testing: Enzo SQL Baseline: Run SQL statements in SQL Azure (or SQL Server) and capture performance metrics of your SQL statements (reads, writes, CPU...) against multiple dat...Sql Utils: A series of Java-based SQL import/export utilsSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: Suggested Resources is a proof of concept in aggregation of online content inside Visual Studio and analysis of a developers work, in order to sugg...SupportRoot: SupportRoot is a minimal helpdesk ticketing system focusing on speed and efficiency.Translate !t: Translate !t translates Image/Text containing English, German, French & Spanish to many different languages using Bing Translator. WCF Lab: To demonstrate different connectivity scenarios using WCF servicesWebAPP - Automated Perl Portal: Web portal system written in Perl. Full featured and multilingual.WIM4LAB: Laboratory Information Management System. ASP.NET C# MSSQL2005New Releases3D TagCloud for SharePoint 2010: 3D TagCloud v1.0: This realease contains the webpart itself.Bluetooth Radar: Version 2.1: Fix - "Right Click Crashes the application" bug Change OBX to push send Add current bluetooth device information + change device radiomode Ad...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3b: Contains updates and improvements to 1.8.3a. This should really be 1.8.4 given the extent of the changes, but I don't want to confuse a version nu...DotNetNuke® Store: 02.01.32 RC: What's New in this release? New Features: - A new setting 'Secure Cookie' in the Store Admin module allow to encrypt cookie values. Only the curren...Entourage FrameG: entourage frameg 1.0: Complete starter for entourageframeg.html enclosed as startentouragehtml.html and here you can find test CSS files and more! EXTRACT ALL FILES FROM...Entourage FrameG: FIMYID PRO: fimyid- find-my-id. YOU MUST download hidden.js and have the web server .pl file ready!Event Scavenger: Viewer version 3.0.1: Fixed an issue with the Viewer with highlighting not working properly (due to code rearranging from old version to new one for CodePlex). Viewer ve...FMon: First Edition: First EditionFolder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.5.6: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.5.6), with the new Quick Add feature and bug fixes. It has an installer that will create a direct...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.6: Bug fixes for bugs found in 1.0.5 and earlier. Fixes the crashing bug when a membership number of more than 6 digits is entered. Changes the dat...GeckoBrowser: GeckoBrowser v0.1 - RAR Package: GeckoBrowser Release v0.1.0.2 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.HTML Shot: Initial Source Code Release: Zip file includes a VS 2008 solution with two projects HTMLShot DLL project HTMLShot sample websiteMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi April 21: This version includes the latest bug fixes. This also includes the beginnings of some fixes that update the projection library to return NaN value...METAR.NET Decoder: Release 0.5.x (replacement of 0.4.x): Release 0.4.x was upgraded to 0.5.x due to major error issue included in previous one. Release Notes First public release. Main of the application...MongoMvc - A NoSQL Demo App with ASP.NET MVC: MongoMVC: A NoSql demo app using MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVCPanBrowser: 1.2.1: updated to FSharp 2.0.0.0PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: Chat Sample of PokeIn CS2010: C# Sample of PokeIn. You need to download the latest PokeIn Library and add to project as a reference to run this samplePokeIn Comet Ajax Library: Chat Sample VB 2010: VB.NET Sample of PokeIn. You need to download the latest PokeIn Library and add to project as a reference to run this sampleProject Santa: Project Santa v1.1: fixed some errors created from last minute adjustments. progress bar is now completely functional. added much more error checking. cleaned up some...RoTwee: RoTwee (11.0.0.1): Version for update to .NET Framework 4.0Sem.GenericTools.ProjectSettings: 2010-04-21 ProjectSettings Ex-Importer: Exports and imports project settings from/to CSV files. This release does fix the issue of missing/misordered build types in project files. Also th...Sharepoint Permissions Manager: Version 0.2: Added support of both WSS3.0 and MOSS2007Silverlight WebRequestHelper: WebRequestHelper 1.0: The usage of this project is so simple. all you need to do is following: WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://api.twitte...SilverlightFTP: SilverlightFTP Beta ENG: English version, fixed copy-paste.sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.8b (Alpha): + Added: support for version 5 (will be imported and saved as version 10) + Fixed: order of chinese week days in event section (week starts with su...Splinger FrameXi: Splinger FrameXi 1.0: DOWNLOAD ALLLL FILES and start in Splinger FrameXi.html . EXTRACT ALL FILES FROM .ZIP ARCHIVE!!!!SQL Server and SQL Azure Performance Testing: Enzo SQL Baseline: Enzo SQL Baseline 1.0: Use this download to install and deploy the sample application and its source code. The installer gives you the option to install the Windows appli...StoreManagement: v1: First (and probably final) version. Should be stable.TFS WitAdminUI: some bug fixed: When project name includes empty space, error fire. So i fix. Download zip file and unzip to TFS2010 or TFS2008. And Excute WitAdminUI.exe. Becaus...TFTP Server: TFTP Server 1.1 Installer: Release 1.1 of the Managed TFTP Server. New Features: Runs as windows service. Supports multiple TFTP servers on different endpoints, each servi...Thinktecture.IdentityModel: Thinktecture.IdentityModel v0.8: Updated version - includes the plumbing for REST/OData Services and UI authorization.Translate !t: Translate !t[Setup]: Translate !tSetupTranslate !t: Translate !t[Source Code]: Translate !tSource CodeWatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.10.02: BETA small fixesWeb Service Software Factory: Web Service Software Factory 2010 Beta: To use the Web Service Software Factory 2010, you need the following software installed on your computer: • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Ultima...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1: WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1 The Microsoft WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1 is the first community technology preview (CTP) release of ADO.NET acti...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1: WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1The Microsoft WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1 is the first community technology preview (CTP) release of a...WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.0: - Fixed non-working delete quote button. - Changed layout of quote edit page, font and colour. - Lightened background colour of settings page.WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.1: - Only display an underline under Author links if a Reference URL is present.xlVBADevTools: 0.1 Two mostly inadequate tools...: Since I was blogging about it (), it seemed appropriate to upload LOCutus, in all its 2002 "glory" (hah!) and make it available for download.XP-More: 0.9.5: Added support for saved state files (.vsv) Added version updates check Added a check to make sure the assumed VM folder exists (this will be do...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineDotNetZip LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcelGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterEsferatec.Text.RegularExpressions

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 26, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 26, 2010New Projects.NET settings class generator T4 templates: A couple of T4 templates to generate a Settings class for your .NET project. Allows you to define your application settings in an XML file and have...AlphaPagedList: AlphaPagedList makes it easier for .Net developers to write paging code. Based on PagedList it allows you to take any List<T> and split it based on...C# Projects: C# ProjectsChitme: Aenean feugiat pharetra enim rhoncus viverra. In at nunc nec sem varius bibendum. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam fringilla facilisis massa et eleife...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: Cloudcache makes it easier for you to manage and deploy a distributed caching tier to Windows Azure. Included is a web-dashboard in MVC 2.0, Memcac...Composer: Composer is an extensible Compositional Architecture framework, providing a set of functionality such as Inversion of Control container (IoC), Depe...Data Connection Suite: Data Connection Suite is a set of easy to use data connection string builder dialogs & controls ready to be integrated in any .NET application.DatabaseHandler: Database HandlerEPiServer Blog Page Provider: A example page provider implementation for EPiServer that supports external blog sources for pages, Blogger and WordPress supported out of the box ...Extended MessageBox: ExtendedMessageBox makes it easier to display messages from your Windows applications. Based on the built-in .NET MessageBox class functionality, i...FluentPath: FluentPath implements a modern wrapper around System.IO, using modern patterns such as fluent APIs and Lambdas. By using FluentPath instead of Syst...Halcyone : Silverlight without pain: Halcyone is application framework for Silverlight that should make live of developers easier =)IlluminaRT: Real-time renderingme2: Mista Engine 2MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: This is really simple lib project for use RTL in MessegeBox class. This just for short code and default option for RTL.MS Word Automation Service: A MS Word Automation service that comsumes a Word template and combines with XML to produce a word document. Currently in production. Must add some...SharePoint - Site Request InfoPath Form Template: This template allow portal user to enter initial information for requesting of creating a new SharePoint site. TextFlow - Text Editor: TextFlow is a fast and light text editor that simplifies day-to-day tasks. You can create letters and documents through TextFlow. It also includes ...TiledLib: A library for using Tiled (http://mapeditor.org) levels in XNA Game Studio projects. Includes a content pipeline extension and runtime library.wcf learning 2010: myWCFprojectsNew Releases.NET settings class generator T4 templates: Example 1: An example project containing the T4 templates and associated files. SingleSite - generate settings for a single site MultiSite - generate setting...AccessibilityChecker: Accessibility Checker V0.1: SharePoint Accessibility Checker V0.1AlphaPagedList: AlphaPagedList v0.9: Initial release of AlphaPagedListASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.1 Beta: New XHTML compliant version with alternative content support if no plugin installed.Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices: R 00: You may find out here the structured on my own materials from from Luxoft ReqLabs 2009 + short presentation about System Analysis and Modelling. Th...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: v1.0.0.0: First release! More information at http://blog.shutupandcode.net/?p=935CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.39: implemented client side functions on remainder of account pagesDevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 3d: Alpha 3d is a general bug fix -tweaking pagination, navigation, packaging, file system storage, page validation, security, locals, and linked views.Digital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.01: Supports opening files through Windows Explorer or by drag and drop.Extended MessageBox: ExtendedMessageBox Runtime Version 1.2: Initial releaseExtended MessageBox: SourceCode for Version 1.2: Initial SourceCodeFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml, debug and release version) Showcase Application Samples Foundation (T...FluentPath: FluentPath Beta: The Beta release of FluentPath.HaterAide ORM: HaterAide ORM 1.5: This version is a, more or less, rewrite of the code base. Also many new features have been added in this release: 1) Foreign keys are now added to...iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3735 Beta: V1.2 allows you to synchronize one or more iTunes playlists to a USB MP3 player. This continues the evolution yet maintains the minimalistic appro...LogWin-Logging Your Computer Activities: LogWin-Logging your computer activities: This program is logging your computer activities and display them as table and pie chart. It is made by native C , HTML Dialog and Google Chart API.MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: MessegeBoxRTL-1.0.0.0_BIN: My First upload.. This is binary release only. Have fun.MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: MessegeBoxRTL-1.0.0.0_SRC: My first upload.. This is source code with binary. Have fun.MS Word Automation Service: Alpha: In production already, but who cares. It works.MultiMenu ASP.NET Cascading Menu WebControl: MultiMenu 2.6 ASP.NET Menu: Fixed problems that prevented the menu from working with the XHTML DocTypes Added support for IE 7-8 Added XmlLoading and XmlLoaded events Ad...netgod: LanyoWebBrowser: Lanyo ERP ClientnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.: nopCommerce 1.50: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/ReleaseNotes.aspx).Open NFe: Open NFe v1.9.7: Fontes do DANFe 1.9.7 Trim na conversão TXT para XMLpatterns & practices - Smart Client Guidance: Smart Client Software Factory 2010 Beta Source: The Smart Client Software Factory 2010 provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite smart cl...Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer: PhysicsHelper 3.0.0.5 Alpha: This release supports Windows Phone 7 Series Development, along with the Silverlight 3 and WPF support. 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IMPORTANT NOTE: You must close all applications before launching this build ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30325.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF Metal: WCFMetal 0.3.0.0: WCFMetal 0.3.0.0Copyright © 2010 John Leitch Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Summary By utilizing LINQ to SQL gene...Web Log Analyzer: Release Indihiang 1.0: For installation and how to use, please read Indihiang portal: http://wiki.indihiang.com What's New in Indihiang 1.0 ? check http://geeks.netindone...異世界の新着動画: Ver. 10-03-25: ニコ生仕様に対応Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineFacebook Developer ToolkitLINQ to TwitterFluent Ribbon Control SuiteTable2ClassNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcel

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• Special thanks to everyone that helped me in 2010.

  - by mbcrump

  2010 has been a very good year for me and I wanted to create a list and thank everyone for what they have done for me.  I also wanted to thank everyone for reading and subscribing to my blog. It is hard to believe that people actually want to read what I write. I feel like I owe a huge thanks to everyone listed below. Looking back upon 2010, I feel that I’ve grown as a developer and you are part of that reason. Sometimes we get caught up in day to day work and forget to give thanks to those that helped us along the way. The list below is mine, it includes people and companies. This list is obviously not going to include everyone that has helped, just those that have stood out in my mind. When I think back upon 2010, their names keep popping up in my head. So here goes, in no particular order.  People Dave Campbell – For everything he has done for the Silverlight Community with his Silverlight Cream blog. I can’t think of a better person to get recognition at the Silverlight FireStarter event. I also wanted to thank him for spending several hours of his time helping me track down a bug in my feedburner account. Victor Gaudioso – For his large collection of video tutorials on his blog and the passion and enthusiasm he has for Silverlight. We have talked on the phone and I’ve never met anyone so fired up for Silverlight. Kunal Chowdhury – Kunal has always been available for me to bounce ideas off of. Kunal has also answered a lot of questions that stumped me. His blog and CodeProject article have green a great help to me and the Silverlight Community. Glen Gordon – I was looking frantically for a Windows Phone 7 several months before release and Glen found one for me. This allowed me to start a blog series on the Windows Phone 7 hardware and developing an application from start to finish that Scott Guthrie retweeted.  Jeff Blankenburg – For listening to my complaints in the early stages of Windows Phone 7. Jeff was always very polite and gave me his cell phone number to talk it over. He also walked me through several problems that I was having early on. Pete Brown – For writing Silverlight 4 in Action. This book is definitely a labor of love. I followed Pete on Twitter as he was writing it and he spent a lot of late nights and weekends working on it. I felt a lot smarter after reading it the first time. The second time was even better. John Papa – For all of his work on the Silverlight Firestarter and the Silverlight community in general. He has also helped me on a personal level with several things. Daniel Heisler – For putting up with me the past year while we worked on many .NET projects together in 2010. Alvin Ashcraft – For publishing a daily blog post on the best of .NET links. He has linked to my site many times and I really appreciate what he does for the community. Chris Alcock – For publishing the Morning Brew every weekday. I remember when I first appeared on his site, I started getting hundreds of hits on my site and wondered if I was getting a DOS attack or something. It was great to find out that Chris had linked to one of my articles. Joel Cochran – For spending a week teaching “Blend-O-Rama”. This was my one of my favorite sessions of this year. I learned a lot about Expression Blend from it and the best part was that it was free and during lunchtime. Jeremy Likness – Jeremy is smart – very smart. I have learned a lot from Jeremy over the past year. He is also involved in the Silverlight community in every way possible, from forums to blog post to screencast to open source. It goes on and on. The people that I met at VSLive Orlando 2010. I had a great time chatting with Walt Ritscher, Wallace McClure, Tim Huckabee and David Platt. Also a special thanks to all of my friends on Twitter like @wilhil, @DBVaughan, @DataArtist, @wbm, @DirkStrauss and @rsringeri and many many more. Software Companies / Events / May of gave me FREE stuff. =) Microsoft (3) – I was sent a free coupon code by Microsoft to take the Silverlight 4 Beta Exam. I jumped on the offer and took the exam. It was great being selected to try out the exam before it goes public even though Microsoft eventually published a universal coupon code for everyone. I am still waiting to find out if I passed the exam. My fingers are crossed. Microsoft reaching out to me with some questions regarding the .NET Community. I’ve never had a company contact me with such interest in the community. Having a contest where 75 people could win a $100 gift certificate and a T-Shirt for submitting a Windows Phone 7 app. I submitted my app and won. All of the free launch events this year (Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC). Wintellect – For providing an awesome day of free technical training called T.E.N. Where else can you get free training from some of the best programmers in the world? I also won a contest from them that included a NETAdvantage Ultimate License from Infragistics. VSLive – I attended the Orlando 2010 Conference and it was the best developer’s conference that I have ever attended. I got to know a lot of people at this conference and hang out with many wonderful speakers. I live tweeted the event and while it may have annoyed some, the organizers of VSLive loved it. I won the contest on Twitter and they invited me back to the 2011 session of my choice. This is a very nice gift and I really appreciate the generosity. BarcodeLib.com – For providing free barcode generating tools for a Non-Profit ASP.NET project that I was working on. Their third party controls really made this a breeze compared to my existing solution. NDepend – It is absolutely the best tool to improve code quality. The product is extremely large and I would recommend heading over to their site to check it out. Silverlight Spy – I was writing a blog post on Silverlight Spy and Koen Zwikstra provided a FREE license to me. If you ever wanted to peek inside of a Silverlight Application then this is the tool for you. He is also working on a version that will support OOB and Windows Phone 7. I would recommend checking out his site. Birmingham .NET Users Group / Silverlight Nights User Group – It takes a lot of time to put together a user group meeting every month yet it always seems to happen. I don’t want to name names for fear of leaving someone out but both of these User Groups are excellent if you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Publishing Companies Manning Publishing – For giving me early access to Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. It was really nice to be able to read this awesome book while Pete was writing it. I was also one of the first people to publish a review of the book. Sams Publishing and DZone – For providing a copy of Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion for me to review for their site. The review is coming in January 2011. Special Shoutout to the following 3rd Party Silverlight Controls It has been a great pleasure to work with the following companies on 3rd Party Control Giveaways every month. It always amazes me how every 3rd Party Control company is so eager to help out the community. I’ve never been turned down by any of these companies! These giveaways have sparked a lot of interest in Silverlight and hopefully I can continue giving away a new set every month. If you are a 3rd Party Control company and are interested in participating in these giveaways then please email me at mbcrump29[at]gmail[d0t].com. The companies below have already participated in my giveaways: Infragistics (December 2010) - Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!  Mindscape (November 2010) - Mindscape Silverlight Controls + Free Mega Pack Contest Telerik (October 2010) - Win Telerik RadControls for Silverlight! ($799 Value) Again, I just wanted to say Thanks to everyone for helping me grow as a developer.  Subscribe to my feed

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler&lt;TEventArgs&gt; delegates

  - 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. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates that can be used to eliminate the need for defining custom delegates when creating events: the EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates. Events and delegates Before we begin, let’s quickly consider events in .NET.  According to the MSDN: An event in C# is a way for a class to provide notifications to clients of that class when some interesting thing happens to an object. So, basically, you can create an event in a type so that users of that type can subscribe to notifications of things of interest.  How is this different than some of the delegate programming that we talked about in the last two weeks?  Well, you can think of an event as a special access modifier on a delegate.  Some differences between the two are: Events are a special access case of delegates They behave much like delegates instances inside the type they are declared in, but outside of that type they can only be (un)subscribed to. Events can specify add/remove behavior explicitly If you want to do additional work when someone subscribes or unsubscribes to an event, you can specify the add and remove actions explicitly. Events have access modifiers, but these only specify the access level of those who can (un)subscribe A public event, for example, means anyone can (un)subscribe, but it does not mean that anyone can raise (invoke) the event directly.  Events can only be raised by the type that contains them In contrast, if a delegate is visible, it can be invoked outside of the object (not even in a sub-class!). Events tend to be for notifications only, and should be treated as optional Semantically speaking, events typically don’t perform work on the the class directly, but tend to just notify subscribers when something of note occurs. My basic rule-of-thumb is that if you are just wanting to notify any listeners (who may or may not care) that something has happened, use an event.  However, if you want the caller to provide some function to perform to direct the class about how it should perform work, make it a delegate. Declaring events using custom delegates To declare an event in a type, we simply use the event keyword and specify its delegate type.  For example, let’s say you wanted to create a new TimeOfDayTimer that triggers at a given time of the day (as opposed to on an interval).  We could write something like this: 1: public delegate void TimeOfDayHandler(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e); 2:  3: // A timer that will fire at time of day each day. 4: public class TimeOfDayTimer : IDisposable 5: { 6: // Event that is triggered at time of day. 7: public event TimeOfDayHandler Elapsed; 8:  9: // ... 10: } The first thing to note is that the event is a delegate type, which tells us what types of methods may subscribe to it.  The second thing to note is the signature of the event handler delegate, according to the MSDN: The standard signature of an event handler delegate defines a method that does not return a value, whose first parameter is of type Object and refers to the instance that raises the event, and whose second parameter is derived from type EventArgs and holds the event data. If the event does not generate event data, the second parameter is simply an instance of EventArgs. Otherwise, the second parameter is a custom type derived from EventArgs and supplies any fields or properties needed to hold the event data. So, in a nutshell, the event handler delegates should return void and take two parameters: An object reference to the object that raised the event. An EventArgs (or a subclass of EventArgs) reference to event specific information. Even if your event has no additional information to provide, you are still expected to provide an EventArgs instance.  In this case, feel free to pass the EventArgs.Empty singleton instead of creating new instances of EventArgs (to avoid generating unneeded memory garbage). The EventHandler delegate Because many events have no additional information to pass, and thus do not require custom EventArgs, the signature of the delegates for subscribing to these events is typically: 1: // always takes an object and an EventArgs reference 2: public delegate void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) It would be insane to recreate this delegate for every class that had a basic event with no additional event data, so there already exists a delegate for you called EventHandler that has this very definition!  Feel free to use it to define any events which supply no additional event information: 1: public class Cache 2: { 3: // event that is raised whenever the cache performs a cleanup 4: public event EventHandler OnCleanup; 5:  6: // ... 7: } This will handle any event with the standard EventArgs (no additional information).  But what of events that do need to supply additional information?  Does that mean we’re out of luck for subclasses of EventArgs?  That’s where the generic for of EventHandler comes into play… The generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegate Starting with the introduction of generics in .NET 2.0, we have a generic delegate called EventHandler<TEventArgs>.  Its signature is as follows: 1: public delegate void EventHandler<TEventArgs>(object sender, TEventArgs e) 2: where TEventArgs : EventArgs This is similar to EventHandler except it has been made generic to support the more general case.  Thus, it will work for any delegate where the first argument is an object (the sender) and the second argument is a class derived from EventArgs (the event data). For example, let’s say we wanted to create a message receiver, and we wanted it to have a few events such as OnConnected that will tell us when a connection is established (probably with no additional information) and OnMessageReceived that will tell us when a new message arrives (probably with a string for the new message text). So for OnMessageReceived, our MessageReceivedEventArgs might look like this: 1: public sealed class MessageReceivedEventArgs : EventArgs 2: { 3: public string Message { get; set; } 4: } And since OnConnected needs no event argument type defined, our class might look something like this: 1: public class MessageReceiver 2: { 3: // event that is called when the receiver connects with sender 4: public event EventHandler OnConnected; 5:  6: // event that is called when a new message is received. 7: public event EventHandler<MessageReceivedEventArgs> OnMessageReceived; 8:  9: // ... 10: } Notice, nowhere did we have to define a delegate to fit our event definition, the EventHandler and generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates fit almost anything we’d need to do with events. Sidebar: Thread-safety and raising an event When the time comes to raise an event, we should always check to make sure there are subscribers, and then only raise the event if anyone is subscribed.  This is important because if no one is subscribed to the event, then the instance will be null and we will get a NullReferenceException if we attempt to raise the event. 1: // This protects against NullReferenceException... or does it? 2: if (OnMessageReceived != null) 3: { 4: OnMessageReceived(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 5: } The above code seems to handle the null reference if no one is subscribed, but there’s a problem if this is being used in multi-threaded environments.  For example, assume we have thread A which is about to raise the event, and it checks and clears the null check and is about to raise the event.  However, before it can do that thread B unsubscribes to the event, which sets the delegate to null.  Now, when thread A attempts to raise the event, this causes the NullReferenceException that we were hoping to avoid! To counter this, the simplest best-practice method is to copy the event (just a multicast delegate) to a temporary local variable just before we raise it.  Since we are inside the class where this event is being raised, we can copy it to a local variable like this, and it will protect us from multi-threading since multicast delegates are immutable and assignments are atomic: 1: // always make copy of the event multi-cast delegate before checking 2: // for null to avoid race-condition between the null-check and raising it. 3: var handler = OnMessageReceived; 4: 5: if (handler != null) 6: { 7: handler(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 8: } The very slight trade-off is that it’s possible a class may get an event after it unsubscribes in a multi-threaded environment, but this is a small risk and classes should be prepared for this possibility anyway.  For a more detailed discussion on this, check out this excellent Eric Lippert blog post on Events and Races. Summary Generic delegates give us a lot of power to make generic algorithms and classes, and the EventHandler delegate family gives us the flexibility to create events easily, without needing to redefine delegates over and over.  Use them whenever you need to define events with or without specialized EventArgs.   Tweet Technorati Tags: .NET, C#, CSharp, Little Wonders, Generics, Delegates, EventHandler

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• JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c18_3{vertical-align:top;width:487.3pt;border-style:solid;background-color:#f3f3f3;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c20_3{vertical-align:top;width:487.3pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#ffffff;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c19_3{background-color:#ffffff} .c17_3{list-style-type:circle;margin:0;padding:0} .c12_3{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c6_3{font-style:italic;font-weight:bold} .c10_3{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c1_3{font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c2_3{line-height:1.0;direction:ltr} .c9_3{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:72pt} .c15_3{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c3_3{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c5_3{height:11pt} .c14_3{border-collapse:collapse} .c7_3{font-family:"Courier New"} .c0_3{background-color:#ffff00} .c16_3{font-size:18pt} .c8_3{font-weight:bold} .c11_3{font-size:24pt} .c13_3{font-style:italic} .c4_3{direction:ltr} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt}.subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. In the first post, JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g we looked at how to create a JMS queue and its dependent objects in WebLogic Server. In the previous post, JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue I showed how to write a message to that JMS queue using the QueueSend.java sample program. In this article, we will use a similar sample, the QueueReceive.java program to read the message from that queue. Please review the previous posts if you have not already done so, as they contain prerequisites for executing the sample in this article. 1. Source code The following java code will be used to read the message(s) from the JMS queue. As with the previous example, it is based on a sample program shipped with the WebLogic Server installation. The sample is not installed by default, but needs to be installed manually using the WebLogic Server Custom Installation option, together with many, other useful samples. You can either copy-paste the following code into your editor, or install all the samples. The knowledge base article in My Oracle Support: How To Install WebLogic Server and JMS Samples in WLS 10.3.x (Doc ID 1499719.1) describes how to install the samples. QueueReceive.java package examples.jms.queue; import java.util.Hashtable; import javax.jms.*; import javax.naming.Context; import javax.naming.InitialContext; import javax.naming.NamingException; /** * This example shows how to establish a connection to * and receive messages from a JMS queue. The classes in this * package operate on the same JMS queue. Run the classes together to * witness messages being sent and received, and to browse the queue * for messages. This class is used to receive and remove messages * from the queue. * * @author Copyright (c) 1999-2005 by BEA Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. */ public class QueueReceive implements MessageListener { // Defines the JNDI context factory. public final static String JNDI_FACTORY="weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory"; // Defines the JMS connection factory for the queue. public final static String JMS_FACTORY="jms/TestConnectionFactory"; // Defines the queue. public final static String QUEUE="jms/TestJMSQueue"; private QueueConnectionFactory qconFactory; private QueueConnection qcon; private QueueSession qsession; private QueueReceiver qreceiver; private Queue queue; private boolean quit = false; /** * Message listener interface. * @param msg message */ public void onMessage(Message msg) { try { String msgText; if (msg instanceof TextMessage) { msgText = ((TextMessage)msg).getText(); } else { msgText = msg.toString(); } System.out.println("Message Received: "+ msgText ); if (msgText.equalsIgnoreCase("quit")) { synchronized(this) { quit = true; this.notifyAll(); // Notify main thread to quit } } } catch (JMSException jmse) { System.err.println("An exception occurred: "+jmse.getMessage()); } } /** * Creates all the necessary objects for receiving * messages from a JMS queue. * * @param ctx JNDI initial context * @param queueName name of queue * @exception NamingException if operation cannot be performed * @exception JMSException if JMS fails to initialize due to internal error */ public void init(Context ctx, String queueName) throws NamingException, JMSException { qconFactory = (QueueConnectionFactory) ctx.lookup(JMS_FACTORY); qcon = qconFactory.createQueueConnection(); qsession = qcon.createQueueSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE); queue = (Queue) ctx.lookup(queueName); qreceiver = qsession.createReceiver(queue); qreceiver.setMessageListener(this); qcon.start(); } /** * Closes JMS objects. * @exception JMSException if JMS fails to close objects due to internal error */ public void close()throws JMSException { qreceiver.close(); qsession.close(); qcon.close(); } /** * main() method. * * @param args WebLogic Server URL * @exception Exception if execution fails */ public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { if (args.length != 1) { System.out.println("Usage: java examples.jms.queue.QueueReceive WebLogicURL"); return; } InitialContext ic = getInitialContext(args[0]); QueueReceive qr = new QueueReceive(); qr.init(ic, QUEUE); System.out.println( "JMS Ready To Receive Messages (To quit, send a \"quit\" message)."); // Wait until a "quit" message has been received. synchronized(qr) { while (! qr.quit) { try { qr.wait(); } catch (InterruptedException ie) {} } } qr.close(); } private static InitialContext getInitialContext(String url) throws NamingException { Hashtable env = new Hashtable(); env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, JNDI_FACTORY); env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, url); return new InitialContext(env); } } 2. How to Use This Class 2.1 From the file system on Linux This section describes how to use the class from the file system of a WebLogic Server installation. Log in to a machine with a WebLogic Server installation and create a directory to contain the source and code matching the package name, e.g. span$HOME/examples/jms/queue. Copy the above QueueReceive.java file to this directory. Set the CLASSPATH and environment to match the WebLogic server environment. Go to $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin  and execute . ./setDomainEnv.sh Collect the following information required to run the script: The JNDI name of the JMS queue to use In the WebLogic server console > Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > Module name, (e.g. TestJMSModule) > JMS queue name, (e.g. TestJMSQueue) select the queue and note its JNDI name, e.g. jms/TestJMSQueue The JNDI name of the connection factory to use to connect to the queue Follow the same path as above to get the connection factory for the above queue, e.g. TestConnectionFactory and its JNDI name e.g. jms/TestConnectionFactory The URL and port of the WebLogic server running the above queue Check the JMS server for the above queue and the managed server it is targeted to, for example soa_server1. Now find the port this managed server is listening on, by looking at its entry under Environment > Servers in the WLS console, e.g. 8001 The URL for the server to be passed to the QueueReceive program will therefore be t3://host.domain:8001 e.g. t3://jbevans-lx.de.oracle.com:8001 Edit Queue Receive .java and enter the above queue name and connection factory respectively under ... public final static String JMS_FACTORY="jms/TestConnectionFactory"; ... public final static String QUEUE="jms/TestJMSQueue"; ... Compile Queue Receive .java using javac Queue Receive .java Go to the source’s top-level directory and execute it using java examples.jms.queue.Queue Receive   t3://jbevans-lx.de.oracle.com:8001 This will print a message that it is ready to receive messages or to send a “quit” message to end. The program will read all messages in the queue and print them to the standard output until it receives a message with the payload “quit”. 2.2 From JDeveloper The steps from JDeveloper are the same as those used for the previous program QueueSend.java, which is used to send a message to the queue. So we won't repeat them here. Please see the previous blog post at JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue and apply the same steps in that example to the QueueReceive.java program. This concludes the example. In the following post we will create a BPEL process which writes a message based on an XML schema to the queue.

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• Clustering Basics and Challenges

  - by Karoly Vegh

  For upcoming posts it seemed to be a good idea to dedicate some time for cluster basic concepts and theory. This post misses a lot of details that would explode the articlesize, should you have questions, do not hesitate to ask them in the comments.  The goal here is to get some concepts straight. I can't promise to give you an overall complete definitions of cluster, cluster agent, quorum, voting, fencing, split brain condition, so the following is more of an explanation. Here we go. -------- Cluster, HA, failover, switchover, scalability -------- An attempted definition of a Cluster: A cluster is a set (2+) server nodes dedicated to keep application services alive, communicating through the cluster software/framework with eachother, test and probe health status of servernodes/services and with quorum based decisions and with switchover/failover techniques keep the application services running on them available. That is, should a node that runs a service unexpectedly lose functionality/connection, the other ones would take over the and run the services, so that availability is guaranteed. To provide availability while strictly sticking to a consistent clusterconfiguration is the main goal of a cluster.  At this point we have to add that this defines a HA-cluster, a High-Availability cluster, where the clusternodes are planned to run the services in an active-standby, or failover fashion. An example could be a single instance database. Some applications can be run in a distributed or scalable fashion. In the latter case instances of the application run actively on separate clusternodes serving servicerequests simultaneously. An example for this version could be a webserver that forwards connection requests to many backend servers in a round-robin way. Or a database running in active-active RAC setup.  -------- Cluster arhitecture, interconnect, topologies -------- Now, what is a cluster made of? Servers, right. These servers (the clusternodes) need to communicate. This of course happens over the network, usually over dedicated network interfaces interconnecting all the clusternodes. These connection are called interconnects.How many clusternodes are in a cluster? There are different cluster topologies. The most simple one is a clustered pair topology, involving only two clusternodes:  There are several more topologies, clicking the image above will take you to the relevant documentation. Also, to answer the question Solaris Cluster allows you to run up to 16 servers in a cluster. Where shall these clusternodes be placed? A very important question. The right answer is: It depends on what you plan to achieve with the cluster. Do you plan to avoid only a server outage? Then you can place them right next to eachother in the datacenter. Do you need to avoid DataCenter outage? In that case of course you should place them at least in different fire zones. Or in two geographically distant DataCenters to avoid disasters like floods, large-scale fires or power outages. We call this a stretched- or campus cluster, the clusternodes being several kilometers away from eachother. To cover really large distances, you probably need to move to a GeoCluster, which is a different kind of animal.  What is a geocluster? A Geographic Cluster in Solaris Cluster terms is actually a metacluster between two, separate (locally-HA) clusters.  -------- Cluster resource types, agents, resources, resource groups -------- So how does the cluster manage my applications? The cluster needs to start, stop and probe your applications. If you application runs, the cluster needs to check regularly if the application state is healthy, does it respond over the network, does it have all the processes running, etc. This is called probing. If the cluster deems the application is in a faulty state, then it can try to restart it locally or decide to switch (stop on node A, start on node B) the service. Starting, stopping and probing are the three actions that a cluster agent does. There are many different kinds of agents included in Solaris Cluster, but you can build your own too. Examples are an agent that manages (mounts, moves) ZFS filesystems, or the Oracle DB HA agent that cares about the database, or an agent that moves a floating IP address between nodes. There are lots of other agents included for Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle DB, Oracle Weblogic, Zones, LDoms, NFS, DNS, etc.We also need to clarify the difference between a cluster resource and the cluster resource group.A cluster resource is something that is managed by a cluster agent. Cluster resource types are included in Solaris cluster (see above, e.g. HAStoragePlus, HA-Oracle, LogicalHost). You can group cluster resources into cluster resourcegroups, and switch these groups together from one node to another. To stick to the example above, to move an Oracle DB service from one node to another, you have to switch the group between nodes, and the agents of the cluster resources in the group will do the following:  On node A Shut down the DB Unconfigure the LogicalHost IP the DB Listener listens on unmount the filesystem   Then, on node B: mount the FS configure the IP  startup the DB -------- Voting, Quorum, Split Brain Condition, Fencing, Amnesia -------- How do the clusternodes agree upon their action? How do they decide which node runs what services? Another important question. Running a cluster is a strictly democratic thing.Every node has votes, and you need the majority of votes to have the deciding power. Now, this is usually no problem, clusternodes think very much all alike. Still, every action needs to be governed upon in a productive system, and has to be agreed upon. Agreeing is easy as long as the clusternodes all behave and talk to eachother over the interconnect. But if the interconnect is gone/down, this all gets tricky and confusing. Clusternodes think like this: "My job is to run these services. The other node does not answer my interconnect communication, it must be down. I'd better take control and run the services!". The problem is, as I have already mentioned, clusternodes very much think alike. If the interconnect is gone, they all assume the other node is down, and they all want to mount the data backend, enable the IP and run the database. Double IPs, double mounts, double DB instances - now that is trouble. Also, in a 2-node cluster they both have only 50% of the votes, that is, they themselves alone are not allowed to run a cluster.  This is where you need a quorum device. According to Wikipedia, the "requirement for a quorum is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons.". They need additional votes to run the cluster. For this requirement a 2-node cluster needs a quorum device or a quorum server. If the interconnect is gone, (this is what we call a split brain condition) both nodes start to race and try to reserve the quorum device to themselves. They do this, because the quorum device bears an additional vote, that could ensure majority (50% +1). The one that manages to lock the quorum device (e.g. if it's an FC LUN, it SCSI reserves it) wins the right to build/run a cluster, the other one - realizing he was late - panics/reboots to ensure the cluster config stays consistent.  Losing the interconnect isn't only endangering the availability of services, but it also endangers the cluster configuration consistence. Just imagine node A being down and during that the cluster configuration changes. Now node B goes down, and node A comes up. It isn't uptodate about the cluster configuration's changes so it will refuse to start a cluster, since that would lead to cluster amnesia, that is the cluster had some changes, but now runs with an older cluster configuration repository state, that is it's like it forgot about the changes.  Also, to ensure application data consistence, the clusternode that wins the race makes sure that a server that isn't part of or can't currently join the cluster can access the devices. This procedure is called fencing. This usually happens to storage LUNs via SCSI reservation.  Now, another important question: Where do I place the quorum disk?  Imagine having two sites, two separate datacenters, one in the north of the city and the other one in the south part of it. You run a stretched cluster in the clustered pair topology. Where do you place the quorum disk/server? If you put it into the north DC, and that gets hit by a meteor, you lose one clusternode, which isn't a problem, but you also lose your quorum, and the south clusternode can't keep the cluster running lacking the votes. This problem can't be solved with two sites and a campus cluster. You will need a third site to either place the quorum server to, or a third clusternode. Otherwise, lacking majority, if you lose the site that had your quorum, you lose the cluster. Okay, we covered the very basics. We haven't talked about virtualization support, CCR, ClusterFilesystems, DID devices, affinities, storage-replication, management tools, upgrade procedures - should those be interesting for you, let me know in the comments, along with any other questions. Given enough demand I'd be glad to write a followup post too. Now I really want to move on to the second part in the series: ClusterInstallation.  Oh, as for additional source of information, I recommend the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23623_01/index.html, and the OTN Oracle Solaris Cluster site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/index.html

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 03, 2012Popular ReleasesSharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.5: Version 1.5 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerZ3: Z3 4.1.1 source code: Snapshot corresponding to version 4.1.1.DirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugHome Access Plus+: v8.1: HAP+ Web v8.1.1003.000079318 Fixed: Issue with the Help Desk and updating a ticket as an admin 79319 Fixed: formatting issue with the booking system admin header 79321 Moved to using the arrow with a circle symbol on the homepage instead of the > and < 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to login page 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to home page 79541 Added: slide events for homepage 79553 Fixed: Booking System Multiple Lesson Bug 79553 Fixed: IE Error Message 79684 Fixed: jQuery issue ...System.Net.FtpClient: System.Net.FtpClient 2012.10.02: This is the first release of the new code base. It is not compatible with the old API, I repeat it is not a drop in update for projects currently using System.Net.FtpClient. New users should download this release. The old code base (Branch: System.Net.FtpClient_1) will continue to be supported while the new code matures. This release is a complete re-write of System.Net.FtpClient. The API and code are simpler than ever before. There are some new features included as well as an attempt at be...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib 2.10: See change-log for the list of new features added and bugs fixedRenameApp: RenameApp 1.0: First release of RenameAppJsonToStaticTypeGenerator: JsonToStaticTypeGenerator 0.1: This is the first alpha release of JsonToStaticTypeGenerator.XiaoKyun: XiaoKyun V1.00: https://xiaokyun.codeplex.com/CatchThatException: Release 1.12: Wow a very fast change and a much better and faster writing to the text fileNaked Objects: Naked Objects Release 5.0.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 5.0.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Major enhancementsNaked Objects 5.0 is desi...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.0: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4.1: This version will automatically save a recording session on application exit if the user didn't stop the current session.SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.18: Reccomended download Changelog for 2.2.18 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for checking if Showanalyzer has hung and cancelling it 2. New version of comskip, 0.81.48 3. Speeding up comskip 4. Fixed a build bug in 64bit 2.2.17 5. Added a new comkip.ini, better commercial detection for international channels and less aggressive. Old one has been retained as comskip_old.ini 6. Added support for Audio Offset on Conversion Task page in GUI (this overrides the profiles AudioDelay when specified)Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textNew Projects.Net Exception Reporter: A reusable and extensible exception reporter for Microsoft .NET projects.Aesha Broker: A rich client Auction House Broker application. Built upon Blizzard's new REST API. Provides a client experience which caches historical auction data to provideASP.NET Friendly URLs: A library that enables automatic resolving of extensionless URLs to ASP.NET file-based handlers, e.g. ASPX pages.Astro Power CMS: Astro Power CMS build on GraffitiCMS, a product of Telligent. GraffitiCMS stop develop, I create this project with name is Astro Power CMSaTester: Here is a good place. And now, I can upload my soruce to it. It's very good.Automacao Residencial: O Netduino é uma plataforma onde voce utiliza a linguagem C# para controlar hardware. O objetivo é criar uma estrutura de comunicaçao com o netduino.Derbster: Explore and learn about modern C# architecture and programming by implementing software to support the modern game of roller derby. Dot FPE - A free Format-preserving encryption implementation for .net: There aren't any widely available implementations of a format-preserving encryption in .NET. Thus we aim to be the first!DotNetEx: .NET Framework extended functionality for data access, working with Tasks and asynchronous programming, encryption algorithms such as SkipJack and other stuff.Elemental Development Toolchain (.NET version): A complete toolchain built around the Æthere langauge.elFinder ASP.NET Connector: The one and only .NET connector for the amazing elFinder 2.X web-based file manager. Finally you can manage your files easily right from your browser!Geosynkronisering: Prosjekt for utarbeidelse av spesifikasjoner for grensesnitt som muliggjør synkronisering av datalager med geografisk datainnhold på tvers av ulike plattformerGIII_P1: Jesli wszyscy w Ciebie zwatpili pokaz ze sie mylili !IntroduceCompany: Website gi?i thi?u doanh nghi?p - công ty.JsonToStaticTypeGenerator: This is the JsonToStaticTypeGenerator project that gives the possibility to generate c# classes out of Json data.kwerty: Coming soonMachine Learning: My machine learning project. Just to figure out things...MicroManager: MaNGOS Web-based ManagerMvcContrib3: This is the version of mvccontrib which works with ASP.Net MVC 3Oracle Destination via ODP.Net (Custom Destination Component): SSIS 2008 R2 solution (custom destination component) to write to oracle via ODP.NetOrchard Commerce History with PayPal: Project expands on Nwazet.Commerce module (and is required for this module to work). Adds a purchase history, product role associations, and PayPal.Phoenix Trans: Web Phoenix Trans v?n t?i hàng hóa trong và ngoài nu?cPowerState: PowerState is .NET application for sending Wake-On-LAN (WOL) requests to computers. It can also shutdown, log off and reboot computers using the WMI.RenameApp: RenameApp is a free and very simple to use renaming software for Windows. RenameApp allows you to easily rename files based on the specified criteria and order.Rose-Hulman User Experience Design: This project will contain labs intended for use in Rose-Hulman's Computer Science and Software Engineering department.Server d? phòng: Ðây là server d? phòng, SharePoint BCS External Connector Caching Pattern Library: Library for enabling caching on SharePoint BCS external connectors. Enables BCS .Net Assemblies to be written that are scalable and performant for search.SharpDX.WPF: This projects provides a DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 support for WPF. The assembly contains DXElement - an easy to use WPF-FrameworkElement.Simple Password Generator Library: The password generator library, written in C#, is a simple assembly which allow generation of passwords with length anywhere from 1-99.SisEagle.NET: Esse sistema foi desenvolvido pra fins de apresentação do TCC referente ao ano de 2012 na UDF-BrasiliaSWebshop: SWebshop is a PHP based webshop system which allows you to insert, edit and delete data easily and is easy to use for customers.Tabular Database Powershell Cmdlets: This project provides a sample of PowerShell Cmdlets to manage Tabular models, from Analysis Services.University timetable using java: the project is using java language to create timetable (full timetable with exam tables and labs tables) and it will be free for all users with sql databaseURLShoter: This project for shorting URL for ASP.NETWeb Input Form Control: This control allow developer to create the input form by configuring the control in html modeWeibo: rtWorkoutMemo: Project descritpion(first draft): Memorise your workout. Keep archive records of your daily trening such: - series of excercise, - quantity of each serie, - weWPF - Automate Acrobat Security Policy: This WPF Tool was created to quickly password protect batches of PDF documents, using a random generator to generate the passwords.XiaoKyun: Hello Page for Web.Z3: Z3 is a high-performance theorem prover being developed at Microsoft Research.

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• EM12c Release 4: Cloud Control to Major Tom...

  - by abulloch

  With the latest release of Enterprise Manager 12c, Release 4 (12.1.0.4) the EM development team has added new functionality to assist the EM Administrator to monitor the health of the EM infrastructure.   Taking feedback delivered from customers directly and through customer advisory boards some nice enhancements have been made to the “Manage Cloud Control” sections of the UI, commonly known in the EM community as “the MTM pages” (MTM stands for Monitor the Monitor).  This part of the EM Cloud Control UI is viewed by many as the mission control for EM Administrators. In this post we’ll highlight some of the new information that’s on display in these redesigned pages and explain how the information they present can help EM administrators identify potential bottlenecks or issues with the EM infrastructure. The first page we’ll take a look at is the newly designed Repository information page.  You can get to this from the main Setup menu, through Manage Cloud Control, then Repository.  Once this page loads you’ll see the new layout that includes 3 tabs containing more drill-down information. The Repository Tab The first tab, Repository, gives you a series of 6 panels or regions on screen that display key information that the EM Administrator needs to review from time to time to ensure that their infrastructure is in good health. Rather than go through every panel let’s call out a few and let you explore the others later yourself on your own EM site.  Firstly, we have the Repository Details panel. At a glance the EM Administrator can see the current version of the EM repository database and more critically, three important elements of information relating to availability and reliability :- Is the database in Archive Log mode ? Is the database using Flashback ? When was the last database backup taken ? In this test environment above the answers are not too worrying, however, Production environments should have at least Archivelog mode enabled, Flashback is a nice feature to enable prior to upgrades (for fast rollback) and all Production sites should have a backup.  In this case the backup information in the Control file indicates there’s been no recorded backups taken. The next region of interest to note on this page shows key information around the Repository configuration, specifically, the initialisation parameters (from the spfile). If you’re storing your EM Repository in a Cluster Database you can view the parameters on each individual instance using the Instance Name drop-down selector in the top right of the region. Additionally, you’ll note there is now a check performed on the active configuration to ensure that you’re using, at the very least, Oracle minimum recommended values.  Should the values in your EM Repository not meet these requirements it will be flagged in this table with a red X for non-compliance.  You can of-course change these values within EM by selecting the Database target and modifying the parameters in the spfile (and optionally, the run-time values if the parameter allows dynamic changes). The last region to call out on this page before moving on is the new look Repository Scheduler Job Status region. This region is an update of a similar region seen on previous releases of the MTM pages in Cloud Control but there’s some important new functionality that’s been added that customers have requested. First-up - Restarting Repository Jobs.  As you can see from the graphic, you can now optionally select a job (by selecting the row in the UI table element) and click on the Restart Job button to take care of any jobs which have stopped or stalled for any reason.  Previously this needed to be done at the command line using EMDIAG or through a PL/SQL package invocation.  You can now take care of this directly from within the UI. Next, you’ll see that a feature has been added to allow the EM administrator to customise the run-time for some of the background jobs that run in the Repository.  We heard from some customers that ensuring these jobs don’t clash with Production backups, etc is a key requirement.  This new functionality allows you to select the pencil icon to edit the schedule time for these more resource intensive background jobs and modify the schedule to avoid clashes like this. Moving onto the next tab, let’s select the Metrics tab. The Metrics Tab There’s some big changes here, this page contains new information regions that help the Administrator understand the direct impact the in-bound metric flows are having on the EM Repository.  Many customers have provided feedback that they are in the dark about the impact of adding new targets or large numbers of new hosts or new target types into EM and the impact this has on the Repository.  This page helps the EM Administrator get to grips with this.  Let’s take a quick look at two regions on this page. First-up there’s a bubble chart showing a comprehensive view of the top resource consumers of metric data, over the last 30 days, charted as the number of rows loaded against the number of collections for the metric.  The size of the bubble indicates a relative volume.  You can see from this example above that a quick glance shows that Host metrics are the largest inbound flow into the repository when measured by number of rows.  Closely following behind this though are a large number of collections for Oracle Weblogic Server and Application Deployment.  Taken together the Host Collections is around 0.7Mb of data.  The total information collection for Weblogic Server and Application Deployments is 0.38Mb and 0.37Mb respectively. If you want to get this information breakdown on the volume of data collected simply hover over the bubble in the chart and you’ll get a floating tooltip showing the information. Clicking on any bubble in the chart takes you one level deeper into a drill-down of the Metric collection. Doing this reveals the individual metric elements for these target types and again shows a representation of the relative cost - in terms of Number of Rows, Number of Collections and Storage cost of data for each Metric type. Looking at another panel on this page we can see a different view on this data. This view shows a view of the Top N metrics (the drop down allows you to select 10, 15 or 20) and sort them by volume of data.  In the case above we can see the largest metric collection (by volume) in this case (over the last 30 days) is the information about OS Registered Software on a Host target. Taken together, these two regions provide a powerful tool for the EM Administrator to understand the potential impact of any new targets that have been discovered and promoted into management by EM12c.  It’s a great tool for identifying the cause of a sudden increase in Repository storage consumption or Redo log and Archive log generation. Using the information on this page EM Administrators can take action to mitigate any load impact by deploying monitoring templates to the targets causing most load if appropriate.   The last tab we’ll look at on this page is the Schema tab. The Schema Tab Selecting this tab brings up a window onto the SYSMAN schema with a focus on Space usage in the EM Repository.  Understanding what tablespaces are growing, at what rate, is essential information for the EM Administrator to stay on top of managing space allocations for the EM Repository so that it works as efficiently as possible and performs well for the users.  Not least because ensuring storage is managed well ensures continued availability of EM for monitoring purposes. The first region to highlight here shows the trend of space usage for the tablespaces in the EM Repository over time.  You can see the upward trend here showing that storage in the EM Repository is being consumed on an upward trend over the last few days here. This is normal as this EM being used here is brand new with Agents being added daily to bring targets into monitoring.  If your Enterprise Manager configuration has reached a steady state over a period of time where the number of new inbound targets is relatively small, the metric collection settings are fairly uniform and standardised (using Templates and Template Collections) you’re likely to see a trend of space allocation that plateau’s. The table below the trend chart shows the Top 20 Tables/Indexes sorted descending by order of space consumed.  You can switch the trend view chart and corresponding detail table by choosing a different tablespace in the EM Repository using the drop-down picker on the top right of this region. The last region to highlight on this page is the region showing information about the Purge policies in effect in the EM Repository. This information is useful to illustrate to EM Administrators the default purge policies in effect for the different categories of information available in the EM Repository.  Of course, it’s also been a long requested feature to have the ability to modify these default retention periods.  You can also do this using this screen.  As there are interdependencies between some data elements you can’t modify retention policies on a feature by feature basis.  Instead, retention policies take categories of information and bundles them together in Groups.  Retention policies are modified at the Group Level.  Understanding the impact of this really deserves a blog post all on it’s own as modifying these can have a significant impact on both the EM Repository’s storage footprint and it’s performance.  For now, we’re just highlighting the features visibility on these new pages. As a user of EM12c we hope the new features you see here address some of the feedback that’s been given on these pages over the past few releases.  We’ll look out for any comments or feedback you have on these pages ! 

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• T-SQL Tuesday #53-Matt's Making Me Do This!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Hello everyone! It's that time again, time for T-SQL Tuesday, the wonderful blog series started by Adam Machanic (b|t). This month we are hosted by Matt Velic (b|t) who asks the question, "Why So Serious?", in celebration of April Fool's Day. He asks the contributors for their dirty tricks. And for some reason that escapes me, he and Jeff Verheul (b|t) seem to think I might be able to write about those. Shocked, I am! Nah, not really. They're absolutely right, this one is gonna be fun! I took some inspiration from Matt's suggestions, namely Resource Governor and Login Triggers.  I've done some interesting login trigger stuff for a presentation, but nothing yet with Resource Governor. Best way to learn it! One of my oldest pet peeves is abuse of the sa login. Don't get me wrong, I use it too, but typically only as SQL Agent job owner. It's been a while since I've been stuck with it, but back when I started using SQL Server, EVERY application needed sa to function. It was hard-coded and couldn't be changed. (welllllll, that is if you didn't use a hex editor on the EXE file, but who would do such a thing?) My standard warning applies: don't run anything on this page in production. In fact, back up whatever server you're testing this on, including the master database. Snapshotting a VM is a good idea. Also make sure you have other sysadmin level logins on that server. So here's a standard template for a logon trigger to address those pesky sa users: CREATE TRIGGER SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY ON ALL SERVER WITH ENCRYPTION, EXECUTE AS N'sa' AFTER LOGON AS IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()<>N'sa' OR APP_NAME() LIKE N'SQL Agent%' RETURN; -- interesting stuff goes here GO   What can you do for "interesting stuff"? Books Online limits itself to merely rolling back the logon, which will throw an error (and alert the person that the logon trigger fired).  That's a good use for logon triggers, but really not tricky enough for this blog.  Some of my suggestions are below: WAITFOR DELAY '23:59:59';   Or: EXEC sp_MSforeach_db 'EXEC sp_detach_db ''?'';'   Or: EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_job @job_name=N'`', @enabled=1, @start_step_id=1, @notify_level_eventlog=0, @delete_level=3; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobserver @job_name=N'`', @server_name=@@SERVERNAME; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobstep @job_name=N'`', @step_id=1, @step_name=N'`', @command=N'SHUTDOWN;'; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name=N'`';   Really, I don't want to spoil your own exploration, try it yourself!  The thing I really like about these is it lets me promote the idea that "sa is SLOW, sa is BUGGY, don't use sa!".  Before we get into Resource Governor, make sure to drop or disable that logon trigger. They don't work well in combination. (Had to redo all the following code when SSMS locked up) Resource Governor is a feature that lets you control how many resources a single session can consume. The main goal is to limit the damage from a runaway query. But we're not here to read about its main goal or normal usage! I'm trying to make people stop using sa BECAUSE IT'S SLOW! Here's how RG can do that: USE master; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY() RETURNS sysname WITH SCHEMABINDING, ENCRYPTION AS BEGIN RETURN CASE WHEN ORIGINAL_LOGIN()=N'sa' AND APP_NAME() NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' THEN N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY' ELSE N'default' END END GO CREATE RESOURCE POOL SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( MIN_CPU_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,CAP_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,AFFINITY SCHEDULER = (0) ,MIN_MEMORY_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_MEMORY_PERCENT = 1 -- ,MIN_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 ,MAX_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 -- uncomment for SQL Server 2014 ); CREATE WORKLOAD GROUP SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( IMPORTANCE = LOW ,REQUEST_MAX_MEMORY_GRANT_PERCENT = 1 ,REQUEST_MAX_CPU_TIME_SEC = 1 ,REQUEST_MEMORY_GRANT_TIMEOUT_SEC = 1 ,MAX_DOP = 1 ,GROUP_MAX_REQUESTS = 1 ) USING SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY; ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR WITH (CLASSIFIER_FUNCTION=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY); ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE;   From top to bottom: Create a classifier function to determine which pool the session should go to. More info on classifier functions. Create the pool and provide a generous helping of resources for the sa login. Create the workload group and further prioritize those resources for the sa login. Apply the classifier function and reconfigure RG to use it. I have to say this one is a bit sneakier than the logon trigger, least of all you don't get any error messages.  I heartily recommend testing it in Management Studio, and click around the UI a lot, there's some fun behavior there. And DEFINITELY try it on SQL 2014 with the IO settings included!  You'll notice I made allowances for SQL Agent jobs owned by sa, they'll go into the default workload group.  You can add your own overrides to the classifier function if needed. Some interesting ideas I didn't have time for but expect you to get to before me: Set up different pools/workgroups with different settings and randomize which one the classifier chooses Do the same but base it on time of day (Books Online example covers this)... Or, which workstation it connects from. This can be modified for certain special people in your office who either don't listen, or are attracted (and attractive) to you. And if things go wrong you can always use the following from another sysadmin or Dedicated Admin connection: ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR DISABLE;   That will let you go in and either fix (or drop) the pools, workgroups and classifier function. So now that you know these types of things are possible, and if you are tired of your team using sa when they shouldn't, I expect you'll enjoy playing with these quite a bit! Unfortunately, the aforementioned Dedicated Admin Connection kinda poops on the party here.  Books Online for both topics will tell you that the DAC will not fire either feature. So if you have a crafty user who does their research, they can still sneak in with sa and do their bidding without being hampered. Of course, you can still detect their login via various methods, like a server trace, SQL Server Audit, extended events, and enabling "Audit Successful Logins" on the server.  These all have their downsides: traces take resources, extended events and SQL Audit can't fire off actions, and enabling successful logins will bloat your error log very quickly.  SQL Audit is also limited unless you have Enterprise Edition, and Resource Governor is Enterprise-only.  And WORST OF ALL, these features are all available and visible through the SSMS UI, so even a doofus developer or manager could find them. Fortunately there are Event Notifications! Event notifications are becoming one of my favorite features of SQL Server (keep an eye out for more blogs from me about them). They are practically unknown and heinously underutilized.  They are also a great gateway drug to using Service Broker, another great but underutilized feature. Hopefully this will get you to start using them, or at least your enemies in the office will once they read this, and then you'll have to learn them in order to fix things. So here's the setup: USE msdb; GO CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act WITH ENCRYPTION AS DECLARE @x XML, @message nvarchar(max); RECEIVE @x=CAST(message_body AS XML) FROM SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q; IF @x.value('(//LoginName)[1]','sysname')=N'sa' AND @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' BEGIN -- interesting activation procedure stuff goes here END GO CREATE QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q WITH STATUS=ON, RETENTION=OFF, ACTIVATION (PROCEDURE_NAME=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act, MAX_QUEUE_READERS=1, EXECUTE AS OWNER); CREATE SERVICE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s ON QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q([http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification]); CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_en ON SERVER WITH FAN_IN FOR AUDIT_LOGIN TO SERVICE N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s', N'current database' GO   From top to bottom: Create activation procedure for event notification queue. Create queue to accept messages from event notification, and activate the procedure to process those messages when received. Create service to send messages to that queue. Create event notification on AUDIT_LOGIN events that fire the service. I placed this in msdb as it is an available system database and already has Service Broker enabled by default. You should change this to another database if you can guarantee it won't get dropped. So what to put in place for "interesting activation procedure code"?  Hmmm, so far I haven't addressed Matt's suggestion of writing a lengthy script to send an annoying message: SET @[email protected]('(//HostName)[1]','sysname') + N' tried to log in to server ' + @x.value('(//ServerName)[1]','sysname') + N' as SA at ' + @x.value('(//StartTime)[1]','sysname') + N' using the ' + @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') + N' program. That''s why you''re getting this message and the attached pornography which' + N' is bloating your inbox and violating company policy, among other things. If you know' + N' this person you can go to their desk and hit them, or use the following SQL to end their session: KILL ' + @x.value('(//SPID)[1]','sysname') + N'; Hopefully they''re in the middle of a huge query that they need to finish right away.' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients=N'[email protected]', @subject=N'SA Login Alert', @query_result_width=32767, @body=@message, @query=N'EXEC sp_readerrorlog;', @attach_query_result_as_file=1, @query_attachment_filename=N'UtterlyGrossPorn_SeriouslyDontOpenIt.jpg' I'm not sure I'd call that a lengthy script, but the attachment should get pretty big, and I'm sure the email admins will love storing multiple copies of it.  The nice thing is that this also fires on Dedicated Admin connections! You can even identify DAC connections from the event data returned, I leave that as an exercise for you. You can use that info to change the action taken by the activation procedure, and since it's a stored procedure, it can pretty much do anything! Except KILL the SPID, or SHUTDOWN the server directly.  I'm still working on those.

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• Optimizing Solaris 11 SHA-1 on Intel Processors

  - by danx

  SHA-1 is a "hash" or "digest" operation that produces a 160 bit (20 byte) checksum value on arbitrary data, such as a file. It is intended to uniquely identify text and to verify it hasn't been modified. Max Locktyukhin and others at Intel have improved the performance of the SHA-1 digest algorithm using multiple techniques. This code has been incorporated into Solaris 11 and is available in the Solaris Crypto Framework via the libmd(3LIB), the industry-standard libpkcs11(3LIB) library, and Solaris kernel module sha1. The optimized code is used automatically on systems with a x86 CPU supporting SSSE3 (Intel Supplemental SSSE3). Intel microprocessor architectures that support SSSE3 include Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge microprocessor families. Further optimizations are available for microprocessors that support AVX (such as Sandy Bridge). Although SHA-1 is considered obsolete because of weaknesses found in the SHA-1 algorithm—NIST recommends using at least SHA-256, SHA-1 is still widely used and will be with us for awhile more. Collisions (the same SHA-1 result for two different inputs) can be found with moderate effort. SHA-1 is used heavily though in SSL/TLS, for example. And SHA-1 is stronger than the older MD5 digest algorithm, another digest option defined in SSL/TLS. Optimizations Review SHA-1 operates by reading an arbitrary amount of data. The data is read in 512 bit (64 byte) blocks (the last block is padded in a specific way to ensure it's a full 64 bytes). Each 64 byte block has 80 "rounds" of calculations (consisting of a mixture of "ROTATE-LEFT", "AND", and "XOR") applied to the block. Each round produces a 32-bit intermediate result, called W[i]. Here's what each round operates: The first 16 rounds, rounds 0 to 15, read the 512 bit block 32 bits at-a-time. These 32 bits is used as input to the round. The remaining rounds, rounds 16 to 79, use the results from the previous rounds as input. Specifically for round i it XORs the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 and rotates the result left 1 bit. The remaining calculations for the round is a series of AND, XOR, and ROTATE-LEFT operators on the 32-bit input and some constants. The 32-bit result is saved as W[i] for round i. The 32-bit result of the final round, W[79], is the SHA-1 checksum. Optimization: Vectorization The first 16 rounds can be vectorized (computed in parallel) because they don't depend on the output of a previous round. As for the remaining rounds, because of step 2 above, computing round i depends on the results of round i-3, W[i-3], one can vectorize 3 rounds at-a-time. Max Locktyukhin found through simple factoring, explained in detail in his article referenced below, that the dependencies of round i on the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 can be replaced instead with dependencies on the results of rounds i-6, i-16, i-28, and i-32. That is, instead of initializing intermediate result W[i] with: W[i] = (W[i-3] XOR W[i-8] XOR W[i-14] XOR W[i-16]) ROTATE-LEFT 1 Initialize W[i] as follows: W[i] = (W[i-6] XOR W[i-16] XOR W[i-28] XOR W[i-32]) ROTATE-LEFT 2 That means that 6 rounds could be vectorized at once, with no additional calculations, instead of just 3! This optimization is independent of Intel or any other microprocessor architecture, although the microprocessor has to support vectorization to use it, and exploits one of the weaknesses of SHA-1. Optimization: SSSE3 Intel SSSE3 makes use of 16 %xmm registers, each 128 bits wide. The 4 32-bit inputs to a round, W[i-6], W[i-16], W[i-28], W[i-32], all fit in one %xmm register. The following code snippet, from Max Locktyukhin's article, converted to ATT assembly syntax, computes 4 rounds in parallel with just a dozen or so SSSE3 instructions: movdqa W_minus_04, W_TMP pxor W_minus_28, W // W equals W[i-32:i-29] before XOR // W = W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] palignr $8, W_minus_08, W_TMP // W_TMP = W[i-6:i-3], combined from // W[i-4:i-1] and W[i-8:i-5] vectors pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) movdqa W, W_TMP // 4 dwords in W are rotated left by 2 psrld $30, W // rotate left by 2 W = (W >> 30) | (W << 2) pslld $2, W_TMP por W, W_TMP movdqa W_TMP, W // four new W values W[i:i+3] are now calculated paddd (K_XMM), W_TMP // adding 4 current round's values of K movdqa W_TMP, (WK(i)) // storing for downstream GPR instructions to read A window of the 32 previous results, W[i-1] to W[i-32] is saved in memory on the stack. This is best illustrated with a chart. Without vectorization, computing the rounds is like this (each "R" represents 1 round of SHA-1 computation): RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR With vectorization, 4 rounds can be computed in parallel: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Optimization: AVX The new "Sandy Bridge" microprocessor architecture, which supports AVX, allows another interesting optimization. SSSE3 instructions have two operands, a input and an output. AVX allows three operands, two inputs and an output. In many cases two SSSE3 instructions can be combined into one AVX instruction. The difference is best illustrated with an example. Consider these two instructions from the snippet above: pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) With AVX they can be combined in one instruction: vpxor W_minus_16, W, W_TMP // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) This optimization is also in Solaris, although Sandy Bridge-based systems aren't widely available yet. As an exercise for the reader, AVX also has 256-bit media registers, %ymm0 - %ymm15 (a superset of 128-bit %xmm0 - %xmm15). Can %ymm registers be used to parallelize the code even more? Optimization: Solaris-specific In addition to using the Intel code described above, I performed other minor optimizations to the Solaris SHA-1 code: Increased the digest(1) and mac(1) command's buffer size from 4K to 64K, as previously done for decrypt(1) and encrypt(1). This size is well suited for ZFS file systems, but helps for other file systems as well. Optimized encode functions, which byte swap the input and output data, to copy/byte-swap 4 or 8 bytes at-a-time instead of 1 byte-at-a-time. Enhanced the Solaris mdb(1) and kmdb(1) debuggers to display all 16 %xmm and %ymm registers (mdb "$x" command). Previously they only displayed the first 8 that are available in 32-bit mode. Can't optimize if you can't debug :-). Changed the SHA-1 code to allow processing in "chunks" greater than 2 Gigabytes (64-bits) Performance I measured performance on a Sun Ultra 27 (which has a Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 Intel W3570 microprocessor @3.2GHz). Turbo mode is disabled for consistent performance measurement. Graphs are better than words and numbers, so here they are: The first graph shows the Solaris digest(1) command before and after the optimizations discussed here, contained in libmd(3LIB). I ran the digest command on a half GByte file in swapfs (/tmp) and execution time decreased from 1.35 seconds to 0.98 seconds. The second graph shows the the results of an internal microbenchmark that uses the Solaris libpkcs11(3LIB) library. The operations are on a 128 byte buffer with 10,000 iterations. The results show operations increased from 320,000 to 416,000 operations per second. Finally the third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. The results show for 1 kernel thread, operations increased from 410 to 600 MBytes/second. For 8 kernel threads, operations increase from 1540 to 1940 MBytes/second. Availability This code is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libmd(3LIB) library for 64-bit programs and is in the Solaris kernel. You must be running hardware that supports Intel's SSSE3 instructions (for example, Intel Nehalem, Westmere, or Sandy Bridge microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if SSSE3 is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, nehalem $ isainfo -v $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu If the output also shows "avx", the Solaris executes the even-more optimized 3-operand AVX instructions for SHA-1 mentioned above: sandybridge $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this code. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on SSSE3 or AVX-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned code for that microprocessor. Summary The Solaris 11 Crypto Framework, via the sha1 kernel module and libmd(3LIB) and libpkcs11(3LIB) libraries, incorporated a useful SHA-1 optimization from Intel for SSSE3-capable microprocessors. As with other Solaris optimizations, they come automatically "under the hood" with the current Solaris release. References "Improving the Performance of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1)" by Max Locktyukhin (Intel, March 2010). The source for these SHA-1 optimizations used in Solaris "SHA-1", Wikipedia Good overview of SHA-1 FIPS 180-1 SHA-1 standard (FIPS, 1995) NIST Comments on Cryptanalytic Attacks on SHA-1 (2005, revised 2006)

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• HPET for x86 BSP (how to build it for WCE8)

  - by Werner Willemsens

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WernerWillemsens/archive/2014/08/02/157895.aspx"I needed a timer". That is how we started a few blogs ago our series about APIC and ACPI. Well, here it is. HPET (High Precision Event Timer) was introduced by Intel in early 2000 to: Replace old style Intel 8253 (1981!) and 8254 timers Support more accurate timers that could be used for multimedia purposes. Hence Microsoft and Intel sometimes refers to HPET as Multimedia timers. An HPET chip consists of a 64-bit up-counter (main counter) counting at a frequency of at least 10 MHz, and a set of (at least three, up to 256) comparators. These comparators are 32- or 64-bit wide. The HPET is discoverable via ACPI. The HPET circuit in recent Intel platforms is integrated into the SouthBridge chip (e.g. 82801) All HPET timers should support one-shot interrupt programming, while optionally they can support periodic interrupts. In most Intel SouthBridges I worked with, there are three HPET timers. TIMER0 supports both one-shot and periodic mode, while TIMER1 and TIMER2 are one-shot only. Each HPET timer can generate interrupts, both in old-style PIC mode and in APIC mode. However in PIC mode, interrupts cannot freely be chosen. Typically IRQ11 is available and cannot be shared with any other interrupt! Which makes the HPET in PIC mode virtually unusable. In APIC mode however more IRQs are available and can be shared with other interrupt generating devices. (Check the datasheet of your SouthBridge) Because of this higher level of freedom, I created the APIC BSP (see previous posts). The HPET driver code that I present you here uses this APIC mode. Hpet.reg [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\BuiltIn\Hpet] "Dll"="Hpet.dll" "Prefix"="HPT" "Order"=dword:10 "IsrDll"="giisr.dll" "IsrHandler"="ISRHandler" "Priority256"=dword:50 Because HPET does not reside on the PCI bus, but can be found through ACPI as a memory mapped device, you don't need to specify the "Class", "SubClass", "ProgIF" and other PCI related registry keys that you typically find for PCI devices. If a driver needs to run its internal thread(s) at a certain priority level, by convention in Windows CE you add the "Priority256" registry key. Through this key you can easily play with the driver's thread priority for better response and timer accuracy. See later. Hpet.cpp (Hpet.dll) This cpp file contains the complete HPET driver code. The file is part of a folder that you typically integrate in your BSP (\src\drivers\Hpet). It is written as sample (example) code, you most likely want to change this code to your specific needs. There are two sets of #define's that I use to control how the driver works. _TRIGGER_EVENT or _TRIGGER_SEMAPHORE: _TRIGGER_EVENT will let your driver trigger a Windows CE Event when the timer expires, _TRIGGER_SEMAPHORE will trigger a Windows CE counting Semaphore. The latter guarantees that no events get lost in case your application cannot always process the triggers fast enough. _TIMER0 or _TIMER2: both timers will trigger an event or semaphore periodically. _TIMER0 will use a periodic HPET timer interrupt, while _TIMER2 will reprogram a one-shot HPET timer after each interrupt. The one-shot approach is interesting if the frequency you wish to generate is not an even multiple of the HPET main counter frequency. The sample code uses an algorithm to generate a more correct frequency over a longer period (by reducing rounding errors). _TIMER1 is not used in the sample source code. HPT_Init() will locate the HPET I/O memory space, setup the HPET counter (_TIMER0 or _TIMER2) and install the Interrupt Service Thread (IST). Upon timer expiration, the IST will run and on its turn will generate a Windows CE Event or Semaphore. In case of _TIMER2 a new one-shot comparator value is calculated and set for the timer. The IRQ of the HPET timers are programmed to IRQ22, but you can choose typically from 20-23. The TIMERn_INT_ROUT_CAP bits in the TIMn_CONF register will tell you what IRQs you can choose from. HPT_IOControl() can be used to set a new HPET counter frequency (actually you configure the counter timeout value in microseconds), start and stop the timer, and request the current HPET counter value. The latter is interesting because the Windows CE QueryPerformanceCounter() and QueryPerformanceFrequency() APIs implement the same functionality, albeit based on other counter implementations. HpetDrvIst() contains the IST code. DWORD WINAPI HpetDrvIst(LPVOID lpArg) { psHpetDeviceContext pHwContext = (psHpetDeviceContext)lpArg; DWORD mainCount = READDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, GenCapIDReg + 4); // Main Counter Tick period (fempto sec 10E-15) DWORD i = 0; while (1) { WaitForSingleObject(pHwContext->g_isrEvent, INFINITE); #if defined(_TRIGGER_SEMAPHORE) LONG p = 0; BOOL b = ReleaseSemaphore(pHwContext->g_triggerEvent, 1, &p); #elif defined(_TRIGGER_EVENT) BOOL b = SetEvent(pHwContext->g_triggerEvent); #else #pragma error("Unknown TRIGGER") #endif #if defined(_TIMER0) DWORD currentCount = READDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, MainCounterReg); DWORD comparator = READDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, Tim0_ComparatorReg + 0); SETBIT(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, GenIntStaReg, 0); // clear interrupt on HPET level InterruptDone(pHwContext->g_sysIntr); // clear interrupt on OS level _LOGMSG(ZONE_INTERRUPT, (L"%s: HpetDrvIst 0 %06d %08X %08X", pHwContext->g_id, i++, currentCount, comparator)); #elif defined(_TIMER2) DWORD currentCount = READDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, MainCounterReg); DWORD previousComparator = READDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, Tim2_ComparatorReg + 0); pHwContext->g_counter2.QuadPart += pHwContext->g_comparator.QuadPart; // increment virtual counter (higher accuracy) DWORD comparator = (DWORD)(pHwContext->g_counter2.QuadPart >> 8); // "round" to real value WRITEDWORD(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, Tim2_ComparatorReg + 0, comparator); SETBIT(pHwContext->g_hpet_va, GenIntStaReg, 2); // clear interrupt on HPET level InterruptDone(pHwContext->g_sysIntr); // clear interrupt on OS level _LOGMSG(ZONE_INTERRUPT, (L"%s: HpetDrvIst 2 %06d %08X %08X (%08X)", pHwContext->g_id, i++, currentCount, comparator, comparator - previousComparator)); #else #pragma error("Unknown TIMER") #endif } return 1; } The following figure shows how the HPET hardware interrupt via ISR -> IST is translated in a Windows CE Event or Semaphore by the HPET driver. The Event or Semaphore can be used to trigger a Windows CE application. HpetTest.cpp (HpetTest.exe)This cpp file contains sample source how to use the HPET driver from an application. The file is part of a separate (smart device) VS2013 solution. It contains code to measure the generated Event/Semaphore times by means of GetSystemTime() and QueryPerformanceCounter() and QueryPerformanceFrequency() APIs. HPET evaluation If you scan the internet about HPET, you'll find many remarks about buggy HPET implementations and bad performance. Unfortunately that is true. I tested the HPET driver on an Intel ICH7M SBC (release date 2008). When a HPET timer expires on the ICH7M, an interrupt indeed is generated, but right after you clear the interrupt, a few more unwanted interrupts (too soon!) occur as well. I tested and debugged it for a loooong time, but I couldn't get it to work. I concluded ICH7M's HPET is buggy Intel hardware. I tested the HPET driver successfully on a more recent NM10 SBC (release date 2013). With the NM10 chipset however, I am not fully convinced about the timer's frequency accuracy. In the long run - on average - all is fine, but occasionally I experienced upto 20 microseconds delays (which were immediately compensated on the next interrupt). Of course, this was all measured by software, but I still experienced the occasional delay when both the HPET driver IST thread as the application thread ran at CeSetThreadPriority(1). If it is not the hardware, only the kernel can cause this delay. But Windows CE is an RTOS and I have never experienced such long delays with previous versions of Windows CE. I tested and developed this on WCE8, I am not heavily experienced with it yet. Internet forum threads however mention inaccurate HPET timer implementations as well. At this moment I haven't figured out what is going on here. Useful references: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technical-specifications/software-developers-hpet-spec-1-0a.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer http://wiki.osdev.org/HPET Windows CE BSP source file package for HPET in MyBsp Note that this source code is "As Is". It is still under development and I cannot (and never will) guarantee the correctness of the code. Use it as a guide for your own HPET integration.

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