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BizTalk: namespaces

- by Leonid Ganeline

BizTalk team did a good job hiding the .NET guts from developers. Developers are working with editors and hardly with .NET code. The Orchestration editor, the Mapper, the Schema editor, the Pipeline editor, all these editors hide what is going on with artifacts created and deployed. Working with the BizTalk artifacts year after year brings us some knowledge which could help to understand more about the .NET guts. I would like to highlight the .NET namespaces. What they are, how they influence our everyday tasks in the BizTalk application development. What is it? Most of the BizTalk artifacts are compiled into the NET classes. Not all of them… but I will show you later. Classes are placed inside the namespaces. I will not describe here why we need namespaces and what is it. I assume you all know about it more then me. Here I would like to emphasize that almost each BizTalk artifact is implemented as a .NET class within a .NET namespace. Where to see the namespaces in development? The namespaces are inconsistently spread across the artifact parameters. Let’s start with namespace placement in development. Then we go with namespaces in deployment and operations. I am using pictures from the BizTalk Server 2013 Beta and the Visual Studio 2012 but there was no changes regarding the namespaces starting from the BizTalk 2006. Default namespace When a new BizTalk project is created, the default namespace is set up the same as a name of a project. This namespace would be used for all new BizTalk artifacts added to this project. Orchestrations When we select a green or a red markers (the Begin and End orchestration shapes) we will see the orchestration Properties window. We also can click anywhere on the space between Port Surfaces to see this window. Schemas The only way to see the NET namespace for map is selecting the schema file name into the Solution Explorer. Notes: We can also see the Type Name parameter. It is a name of the correspondent .NET class. We can also see the Fully Qualified Name parameter. We cannot see the schema namespace when selecting any node on the schema editor surface. Only selecting a schema file name gives us a namespace parameter. If we select a <Schema> node we can get the Target Namespace parameter of the schema. This is NOT the .NET namespace! It is an XML namespace. See this XML namespace inside the XML schema, it is shown as a special targetNamespace attribute Here this XML namespace appears inside the XML document itself. It is shown as a special xmlns attribute. Maps It is similar to the schemas. The only way to see the NET namespace for map is selecting a map file name into the Solution Explorer. Pipelines It is similar to the schemas. The only way to see the NET namespace for pipeline is selecting a pipeline file name into the Solution Explorer. z Ports, Policies and Tracking Profiles The Send and Receive Ports, the Policies and the BAM Tracking Profiles do not create the .NET classes and they do not have the associated .NET namespaces. How to copy artifacts? Since the new versions of the BizTalk Server are going to production I am spending more and more time redesigning and refactoring the BizTalk applications. It is good to know how the refactoring process copes with the .NET namespaces. Let see what is going on with the namespaces when we copy the artifacts from one project to another. Here is an example: I am going to group the artifacts under the project folders. So, I have created a Group folder, have run the Add / Existing Item.. command and have chosen all artifacts in the project root. The artifact copies were created in the Group folder: What was happened with the namespaces of the artifacts? As you can see, the folder name, the “Group”, was added to the namespace. It is great! When I added a folder, I have added one more level in the name hierarchy and the namespace change just reflexes this hierarchy change. The same namespace adjustment happens when we copy the BizTalk artifacts between the projects. But there is an issue with the namespace of an orchestration. It was not changed. The namespaces of the schemas, maps, pipelines are changed but not the orchestration namespace. I have to change the orchestration namespace manually. Now another example: I am creating a new Project folder and moving the artifacts there from the project root by drag and drop. We will mention the artifact namespaces are not changed. Another example: I am copying the artifacts from the project root by (drag and drop) + Ctrl. We will mention the artifact namespaces are changed. It works exactly as it was with the Add / Existing Item.. command. Conclusion: The namespace parameter is put inconsistently in different places for different artifacts Moving artifacts changes the namespaces of the schemas, maps, pipelines but not the orchestrations.

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I can''t figure out how to use the comboBox to remove radiobuttons

- by user3576336

import java.awt.EventQueue; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.border.EmptyBorder; import javax.swing.ButtonGroup; import javax.swing.JLabel; import javax.swing.JDesktopPane; import javax.swing.JRadioButton; import javax.swing.JComboBox; import java.awt.GridBagLayout; import java.awt.GridBagConstraints; import java.awt.Insets; import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; @SuppressWarnings("serial") public class Calendar1 extends JFrame implements ActionListener { private JPanel contentPane; String[] Months = { "January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December" }; JDesktopPane desktopPane; ButtonGroup bG = new ButtonGroup(); JRadioButton radioButton, rdbtnNewRadioButton, radioButton_1, radioButton_2, radioButton_3, radioButton_4, radioButton_5, radioButton_6, radioButton_7, radioButton_8, radioButton_9, radioButton_10, radioButton_11, radioButton_12, radioButton_13, radioButton_14, radioButton_15, radioButton_16, radioButton_17, radioButton_18, radioButton_19, radioButton_20, radioButton_21, radioButton_22, radioButton_23, radioButton_24, radioButton_25, radioButton_26, radioButton_27, radioButton_28, radioButton_29; /** * Launch the application. */ public static void main(String[] args) { EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() { public void run() { try { Calendar1 frame = new Calendar1(); frame.setVisible(true); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }); } /** * Create the frame. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") public Calendar1() { setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); setBounds(100, 100, 521, 300); contentPane = new JPanel(); contentPane.setBorder(new EmptyBorder(5, 5, 5, 5)); setContentPane(contentPane); contentPane.setLayout(null); JComboBox comboBox = new JComboBox(Months); comboBox.setBounds(28, 16, 132, 27); contentPane.add(comboBox); comboBox.setSelectedIndex(0); comboBox.addActionListener(this); JLabel label = new JLabel("2014"); label.setBounds(350, 20, 61, 16); contentPane.add(label); desktopPane = new JDesktopPane(); desktopPane.setBackground(new Color(30, 144, 255)); desktopPane.setBounds(0, 63, 495, 188); contentPane.add(desktopPane); GridBagLayout gbl_desktopPane = new GridBagLayout(); gbl_desktopPane.columnWidths = new int[] { 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 }; gbl_desktopPane.rowHeights = new int[] { 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 }; gbl_desktopPane.columnWeights = new double[] { 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, Double.MIN_VALUE }; gbl_desktopPane.rowWeights = new double[] { 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, Double.MIN_VALUE }; desktopPane.setLayout(gbl_desktopPane); // JLabel lblSun = new JLabel("Sun"); // lblSun.setForeground(Color.RED); // // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblSun = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblSun.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblSun.gridx = 2; // gbc_lblSun.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblSun, gbc_lblSun); // // JLabel lblMon = new JLabel("Mon"); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblMon = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblMon.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblMon.gridx = 4; // gbc_lblMon.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblMon, gbc_lblMon); // // JLabel lblTues = new JLabel("Tues"); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblTues = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblTues.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblTues.gridx = 6; // gbc_lblTues.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblTues, gbc_lblTues); // // JLabel lblWed = new JLabel("Wed"); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblWed = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblWed.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblWed.gridx = 8; // gbc_lblWed.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblWed, gbc_lblWed); // // JLabel lblThurs = new JLabel("Thurs"); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblThurs = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblThurs.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblThurs.gridx = 10; // gbc_lblThurs.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblThurs, gbc_lblThurs); // // JLabel lblFri = new JLabel("Friday"); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblFri = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblFri.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblFri.gridx = 12; // gbc_lblFri.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblFri, gbc_lblFri); // // JLabel lblSat = new JLabel("Sat"); // lblSat.setForeground(Color.RED); // GridBagConstraints gbc_lblSat = new GridBagConstraints(); // gbc_lblSat.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); // gbc_lblSat.gridx = 14; // gbc_lblSat.gridy = 0; // desktopPane.add(lblSat, gbc_lblSat); radioButton = new JRadioButton("1"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton.gridx = 8; gbc_radioButton.gridy = 1; desktopPane.add(radioButton, gbc_radioButton); bG.add(radioButton); rdbtnNewRadioButton = new JRadioButton("2"); GridBagConstraints gbc_rdbtnNewRadioButton = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_rdbtnNewRadioButton.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_rdbtnNewRadioButton.gridx = 10; gbc_rdbtnNewRadioButton.gridy = 1; desktopPane.add(rdbtnNewRadioButton, gbc_rdbtnNewRadioButton); bG.add(rdbtnNewRadioButton); radioButton_1 = new JRadioButton("3"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_1 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_1.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_1.gridx = 12; gbc_radioButton_1.gridy = 1; desktopPane.add(radioButton_1, gbc_radioButton_1); bG.add(radioButton_1); radioButton_2 = new JRadioButton("4"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_2 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_2.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_2.gridx = 14; gbc_radioButton_2.gridy = 1; desktopPane.add(radioButton_2, gbc_radioButton_2); bG.add(radioButton_2); radioButton_3 = new JRadioButton("5"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_3 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_3.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_3.gridx = 2; gbc_radioButton_3.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_3, gbc_radioButton_3); bG.add(radioButton_3); radioButton_4 = new JRadioButton("6"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_4 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_4.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_4.gridx = 4; gbc_radioButton_4.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_4, gbc_radioButton_4); bG.add(radioButton_4); radioButton_5 = new JRadioButton("7"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_5 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_5.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_5.gridx = 6; gbc_radioButton_5.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_5, gbc_radioButton_5); bG.add(radioButton_5); radioButton_6 = new JRadioButton("8"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_6 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_6.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_6.gridx = 8; gbc_radioButton_6.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_6, gbc_radioButton_6); bG.add(radioButton_6); radioButton_7 = new JRadioButton("9"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_7 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_7.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_7.gridx = 10; gbc_radioButton_7.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_7, gbc_radioButton_7); bG.add(radioButton_7); radioButton_8 = new JRadioButton("10"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_8 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_8.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_8.gridx = 12; gbc_radioButton_8.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_8, gbc_radioButton_8); bG.add(radioButton_8); radioButton_9 = new JRadioButton("11"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_9 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_9.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_9.gridx = 14; gbc_radioButton_9.gridy = 2; desktopPane.add(radioButton_9, gbc_radioButton_9); bG.add(radioButton_9); radioButton_10 = new JRadioButton("12"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_10 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_10.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_10.gridx = 2; gbc_radioButton_10.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_10, gbc_radioButton_10); bG.add(radioButton_10); radioButton_11 = new JRadioButton("13"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_11 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_11.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_11.gridx = 4; gbc_radioButton_11.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_11, gbc_radioButton_11); bG.add(radioButton_11); radioButton_12 = new JRadioButton("14"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_12 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_12.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_12.gridx = 6; gbc_radioButton_12.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_12, gbc_radioButton_12); bG.add(radioButton_12); radioButton_13 = new JRadioButton("15"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_13 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_13.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_13.gridx = 8; gbc_radioButton_13.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_13, gbc_radioButton_13); bG.add(radioButton_13); radioButton_14 = new JRadioButton("16"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_14 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_14.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_14.gridx = 10; gbc_radioButton_14.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_14, gbc_radioButton_14); bG.add(radioButton_14); radioButton_15 = new JRadioButton("17"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_15 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_15.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_15.gridx = 12; gbc_radioButton_15.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_15, gbc_radioButton_15); bG.add(radioButton_15); radioButton_16 = new JRadioButton("18"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_16 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_16.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_16.gridx = 14; gbc_radioButton_16.gridy = 3; desktopPane.add(radioButton_16, gbc_radioButton_16); bG.add(radioButton_16); radioButton_17 = new JRadioButton("19"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_17 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_17.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_17.gridx = 2; gbc_radioButton_17.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_17, gbc_radioButton_17); bG.add(radioButton_17); radioButton_18 = new JRadioButton("20"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_18 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_18.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_18.gridx = 4; gbc_radioButton_18.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_18, gbc_radioButton_18); bG.add(radioButton_18); radioButton_19 = new JRadioButton("21"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_19 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_19.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_19.gridx = 6; gbc_radioButton_19.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_19, gbc_radioButton_19); bG.add(radioButton_19); radioButton_20 = new JRadioButton("22"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_20 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_20.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_20.gridx = 8; gbc_radioButton_20.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_20, gbc_radioButton_20); bG.add(radioButton_20); radioButton_21 = new JRadioButton("23"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_21 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_21.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_21.gridx = 10; gbc_radioButton_21.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_21, gbc_radioButton_21); bG.add(radioButton_21); radioButton_22 = new JRadioButton("24"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_22 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_22.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_22.gridx = 12; gbc_radioButton_22.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_22, gbc_radioButton_22); bG.add(radioButton_22); radioButton_23 = new JRadioButton("25"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_23 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_23.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_23.gridx = 14; gbc_radioButton_23.gridy = 4; desktopPane.add(radioButton_23, gbc_radioButton_23); bG.add(radioButton_23); radioButton_24 = new JRadioButton("26"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_24 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_24.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_24.gridx = 2; gbc_radioButton_24.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_24, gbc_radioButton_24); bG.add(radioButton_24); radioButton_25 = new JRadioButton("27"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_25 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_25.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_25.gridx = 4; gbc_radioButton_25.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_25, gbc_radioButton_25); bG.add(radioButton_25); radioButton_26 = new JRadioButton("28"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_26 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_26.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_26.gridx = 6; gbc_radioButton_26.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_26, gbc_radioButton_26); bG.add(radioButton_26); radioButton_27 = new JRadioButton("29"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_27 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_27.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_27.gridx = 8; gbc_radioButton_27.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_27, gbc_radioButton_27); bG.add(radioButton_27); radioButton_28 = new JRadioButton("30"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_28 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_28.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_28.gridx = 10; gbc_radioButton_28.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_28, gbc_radioButton_28); bG.add(radioButton_28); radioButton_29 = new JRadioButton("31"); GridBagConstraints gbc_radioButton_29 = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc_radioButton_29.insets = new Insets(0, 0, 5, 5); gbc_radioButton_29.gridx = 12; gbc_radioButton_29.gridy = 5; desktopPane.add(radioButton_29, gbc_radioButton_29); bG.add(radioButton_29); } @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { JComboBox cb = (JComboBox) e.getSource(); String months = (String) cb.getSelectedItem(); if (months.equals("February")) { desktopPane.remove(radioButton_28); desktopPane.revalidate(); } } } I'm trying to use the combobox to remove radiobuttons in the actionperformed, but when I run the program, nothing happens, nor can I enable new buttons in the actionperformed. Thank you so much in advance for helping me out.

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IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

- by andrewbrust

Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well. On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX. That evening I flew from New York to Seattle. On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made. Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago. On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days. But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts. While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not. HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser. Try it and see. Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production. Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident. Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic. Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft. So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources. Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good. In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out. Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform. They’re going to feel abandoned. Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers. Remember SPOT watches? Live Spaces? The original Live Mesh? Microsoft discontinued each of these products. The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy. But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions. Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer? I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it. If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment. You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control. Accountability is key. The same goes for Microsoft. If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns. People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments. The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches. It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too. When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility. That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management. Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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Constrained A* problem

- by Ragekit

I've got a little problem with an A* algorithm that I need to Constrained a little bit. Basically : I use an A* to find the shortest path between 2 randomly placed room in 3D space, and then build a corridor between them. The problem I found is that sometimes it makes chimney like corridors that are not ideal, so I constrict the A* so that if the last movement was up or down, you go sideways. Everything is fine, but in some corner cases, it fails to find a path (when there is obviously one). Like here between the blue and red dot : (i'm in unity btw, but i don't think it matters) Here is the code of the actual A* (a bit long, and some redundency) while(current != goal) { //add stair up / stair down foreach(Node<GridUnit> test in current.Neighbors) { if(!test.Data.empty && test != goal) continue; //bug at arrival; if(test == goal && penul !=null) { Vector3 currentDiff = current.Data.bounds.center - test.Data.bounds.center; if(!Mathf.Approximately(currentDiff.y,0)) { //wanna drop on the last if(!coplanar(test.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center,to.Data.bounds.center)) { continue; } else { if(Mathf.Approximately(to.Data.bounds.center.x, current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center.x) && Mathf.Approximately(to.Data.bounds.center.z, current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center.z)) { continue; } } } } if(current.Data.parentUnit != null) { Vector3 previousDiff = current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center - current.Data.bounds.center; Vector3 currentDiff = current.Data.bounds.center - test.Data.bounds.center; if(!Mathf.Approximately(previousDiff.y,0)) { if(!Mathf.Approximately(currentDiff.y,0)) { //you wanna drop now : continue; } if(current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit != null) { if(!coplanar(test.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center)) { continue; }else { if(Mathf.Approximately(test.Data.bounds.center.x, current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center.x) && Mathf.Approximately(test.Data.bounds.center.z, current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center.z)) { continue; } } } } } g = current.Data.g + HEURISTIC(current.Data,test.Data); h = HEURISTIC(test.Data,goal.Data); f = g + h; if(open.Contains(test) || closed.Contains(test)) { if(test.Data.f > f) { //found a shorter path going passing through that point test.Data.f = f; test.Data.g = g; test.Data.h = h; test.Data.parentUnit = current.Data; } } else { //jamais rencontré test.Data.f = f; test.Data.h = h; test.Data.g = g; test.Data.parentUnit = current.Data; open.Add(test); } } closed.Add (current); if(open.Count == 0) { Debug.Log("nothingfound"); //nothing more to test no path found, stay to from; List<GridUnit> r = new List<GridUnit>(); r.Add(from.Data); return r; } //sort open from small to biggest travel cost open.Sort(delegate(Node<GridUnit> x, Node<GridUnit> y) { return (int)(x.Data.f-y.Data.f); }); //get the smallest travel cost node; Node<GridUnit> smallest = open[0]; current = smallest; open.RemoveAt(0); } //build the path going backward; List<GridUnit> ret = new List<GridUnit>(); if(penul != null) { ret.Insert(0,to.Data); } GridUnit cur = goal.Data; ret.Insert(0,cur); do{ cur = cur.parentUnit; ret.Insert(0,cur); } while(cur != from.Data); return ret; You see at the start of the foreach i constrict the A* like i said. If you have any insight it would be cool. Thanks

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Deadlock Analysis in NetBeans 8

- by Geertjan

Lock contention profiling is very important in multi-core environments. Lock contention occurs when a thread tries to acquire a lock while another thread is holding it, forcing it to wait. Lock contentions result in deadlocks. Multi-core environments have even more threads to deal with, causing an increased likelihood of lock contentions. In NetBeans 8, the NetBeans Profiler has new support for displaying detailed information about lock contention, i.e., the relationship between the threads that are locked. After all, whenever there's a deadlock, in any aspect of interaction, e.g., a political deadlock, it helps to be able to point to the responsible party or, at least, the order in which events happened resulting in the deadlock. As an example, let's take the handy Deadlock sample code from the Java Tutorial and look at the tools in NetBeans IDE for identifying and analyzing the code. The description of the deadlock is nice: Alphonse and Gaston are friends, and great believers in courtesy. A strict rule of courtesy is that when you bow to a friend, you must remain bowed until your friend has a chance to return the bow. Unfortunately, this rule does not account for the possibility that two friends might bow to each other at the same time. To help identify who bowed first or, at least, the order in which bowing took place, right-click the file and choose "Profile File". In the Profile Task Manager, make the choices below: When you have clicked Run, the Threads window shows the two threads are blocked, i.e., the red "Monitor" lines tell you that the related threads are blocked while trying to enter a synchronized method or block: But which thread is holding the lock? Which one is blocked by the other? The above visualization does not answer these questions. New in NetBeans 8 is that you can analyze the deadlock in the new Lock Contention window to determine which of the threads is responsible for the lock: Here is the code that simulates the lock, very slightly tweaked at the end, where I use "setName" on the threads, so that it's even easier to analyze the threads in the relevant NetBeans tools. Also, I converted the anonymous inner Runnables to lambda expressions. package org.demo; public class Deadlock { static class Friend { private final String name; public Friend(String name) { this.name = name; } public String getName() { return this.name; } public synchronized void bow(Friend bower) { System.out.format("%s: %s" + " has bowed to me!%n", this.name, bower.getName()); bower.bowBack(this); } public synchronized void bowBack(Friend bower) { System.out.format("%s: %s" + " has bowed back to me!%n", this.name, bower.getName()); } } public static void main(String[] args) { final Friend alphonse = new Friend("Alphonse"); final Friend gaston = new Friend("Gaston"); Thread t1 = new Thread(() -> { alphonse.bow(gaston); }); t1.setName("Alphonse bows to Gaston"); t1.start(); Thread t2 = new Thread(() -> { gaston.bow(alphonse); }); t2.setName("Gaston bows to Alphonse"); t2.start(); } } In the above code, it's extremely likely that both threads will block when they attempt to invoke bowBack. Neither block will ever end, because each thread is waiting for the other to exit bow. Note: As you can see, it really helps to use "Thread.setName", everywhere, wherever you're creating a Thread in your code, since the tools in the IDE become a lot more meaningful when you've defined the name of the thread because otherwise the Profiler will be forced to use thread names like "thread-5" and "thread-6", i.e., based on the order of the threads, which is kind of meaningless. (Normally, except in a simple demo scenario like the above, you're not starting the threads in the same class, so you have no idea at all what "thread-5" and "thread-6" mean because you don't know the order in which the threads were started.) Slightly more compact: Thread t1 = new Thread(() -> { alphonse.bow(gaston); },"Alphonse bows to Gaston"); t1.start(); Thread t2 = new Thread(() -> { gaston.bow(alphonse); },"Gaston bows to Alphonse"); t2.start();

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Simple BizTalk Orchestration & Port Tutorial

- by bosuch

(This is a reference for a lunch & learn I'm giving at my company) This demo will create a BizTalk process that monitors a directory for an XML file, loads it into an orchestration, and drops it into a different directory. There’s no real processing going on (other than moving the file from one location to another), but this will introduce you to Messages, Orchestrations and Ports. To begin, create a new BizTalk Project names OrchestrationPortDemo: When the solution has been created, right-click the OrchestrationPortDemo solution name and select Add -> New Item. Add a BizTalk Orchestration named DemoOrchestration: Click Add and the orchestration will be created and displayed in the BizTalk Orchestration Designer. The designer allows you to visually create your business processes: Next, you will add a message (the basic unit of communication) to the orchestration. In the Orchestration View, right-click Messages and select New Message. In the message properties window, enter DemoMessage as the Identifier (the name), and select .NET Classes -> System.Xml.XmlDocument for Message Type. This indicates that we’ll be passing a standard Xml document in and out of the orchestration. Next, you will add Send and Receive shapes to the orchestration. From the toolbox, drag a Receive shape onto the orchestration (where it says “Drop a shape from the toolbox here”). Next, drag a Send shape directly below the Receive shape. For the properties of both shapes, select DemoMessage for Message – this indicates we’ll be passing around the message we created earlier. The Operation box will have a red exclamation mark next to it because no port has been specified. We will do this in a minute. On the Receive shape properties, you must be sure to select True for Activate. This indicates that the orchestration will be started upon receipt of a message, rather than being called by another orchestration. If you leave it set to false, when you try to build the application you’ll receive the error “You must specify at least one already-initialized correlation set for a non-activation receive that is on a non self-correlating port.” Now you’ll add ports to the orchestration. Ports specify how your orchestration will send and receive messages. Drag a port from the toolbox to the left-hand Port Surface, and the Port Configuration Wizard launches. For the first port (the receive port), enter the following information: Name: ReceivePort Select the port type to be used for this port: Create a new Port Type Port Type Name: ReceivePortType Port direction of communication: I’ll always be receiving <…> Port binding: Specify later By choosing “Specify later” you are choosing to bind the port (choose where and how it will send or receive its messages) at deployment time via the BizTalk Server Administration console. This allows you to change locations later without building and re-deploying the application. Next, drag a port to the right-hand Port Surface; this will be your send port. Configure it as follows: Name: SendPort Select the port type to be used for this port: Create a new Port Type Port Type Name: SendPortType Port direction of communication: I’ll always be sending <…> Port binding: Specify later Finally, drag the green arrow on the ReceivePort to the Receive_1 shape, and the green arrow on the SendPort to the Send_1 shape. Your orchestration should look like this: Now you have a couple final steps before building and deploying the application. In the Solution Explorer, right-click on OrchestrationPortDemo and select Properties. On the Signing tab, click “Sign the assembly”, and choose <New…> from the drop-down. Enter DemoKey as the Key file name, and deselect “Protect my key file with a password”. This will create the file DemoKey.snk in your solution. Signing the assembly gives it a strong name so that it can be deployed into the global assembly cache (GAC). Next, click the Deployment tab, and enter OrchestrationPortDemo as the Application Name. Save your solution. Click “Build OrchestrationPortDemo”. Your solution should (hopefully!) build with no errors. Click “Deploy OrchestrationPortDemo”. (Note – If you’re running Server 2008, Vista or Win7, you may get an error message. If so, close Visual Studio and run it as an administrator) That’s it! Your application is ready to be configured and fired up in the BizTalk Server Administration console, so stay tuned!

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Can't change text color in Microsoft Word 2010

- by Wesley

I have Microsoft Office 2010 32-bit running on Windows 7 32-bit. When text is highlighted and a color is selected from the mini-toolbar or the ribbon, the text does not change color. If I change the color for multiple words, and select a different color for each word, the toolbar and ribbon will reflect each of the different colors that I chose, however it is not displayed in the document. So it appears that Word is aware of the text color and not as if it is simply not applying the change. What may be causing this inability to view text colors and how might I fix it? My only troubleshooting attempt so far has been to perform a repair installation of Office. EDIT 1 I created a document, typed a word, selected it and changed the color. I then saved the document as HTML. The text did not change color. This is the HTML in the document: <html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"> <head> <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> <meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 14"> <meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 14"> <link rel=File-List href="Document_1_files/filelist.xml">  <link rel=themeData href="Document_1_files/themedata.thmx"> <link rel=colorSchemeMapping href="Document_1_files/colorschememapping.xml">  <style>  </style>  </head> <body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'> <div class=WordSection1> <p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><span style='color:red'>blah</span></span><span style='color:red'><o:p></o:p></span></p> </div> </body> </html> EDIT 2 I recorded a macro and did the following: Typed a word Selected the word Changed the color. Oddly, I had some strange issues while the macro was recorded. I could not select text with my cursor. I had to select the text with control a and then apply the color change. I then couldn't deselect the selected text. Nonetheless, the text showed that it had a different color in the toolbar, but the color did not display in the document. Here's the macro: Sub Change_Text_Color() ' ' Change_Text_Color Macro ' ' Selection.TypeText Text:="Test Text" Selection.WholeStory Selection.WholeStory End Sub EDIT 3 I opened WordPad and created some text and was able to successfully change the color. If I copy and paste the colored text into a Word 2010 document, the color is lost. However, if you place the I-beam in the text and then look at the color selection drop-down menu on the ribbon or mini-toolbar, you can see that the proper color that the text should be in is highlighted. Edit 4 I uninstalled the entire Office 2010 Suite, rebooted and then reinstalled the suite. No change in behavior. Edit 5 Text cannot be colored in Excel either.

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Using jQuery to Insert a New Database Record

- by Stephen Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to explore the easiest way of inserting a new record into a database using jQuery and .NET. I’m going to explore two approaches: using Generic Handlers and using a WCF service (In a future blog entry I’ll take a look at OData and WCF Data Services). Create the ASP.NET Project I’ll start by creating a new empty ASP.NET application with Visual Studio 2010. Select the menu option File, New Project and select the ASP.NET Empty Web Application project template. Setup the Database and Data Model I’ll use my standard MoviesDB.mdf movies database. This database contains one table named Movies that looks like this: I’ll use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to represent my database data: Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the ADO.NET Entity Data Model project item. Name the data model MoviesDB.edmx and click the Add button. In the Choose Model Contents step, select Generate from database and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Connection step, leave all of the defaults and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Objects step, select the Movies table and click the Finish button. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 cannot spell movie correctly :) You need to click on Movy and change the name of the class to Movie. In the Properties window, change the Entity Set Name to Movies. Using a Generic Handler In this section, we’ll use jQuery with an ASP.NET generic handler to insert a new record into the database. A generic handler is similar to an ASP.NET page, but it does not have any of the overhead. It consists of one method named ProcessRequest(). Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the Generic Handler project item. Name your new generic handler InsertMovie.ashx and click the Add button. Modify your handler so it looks like Listing 1: Listing 1 – InsertMovie.ashx using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { /// <summary> /// Inserts a new movie into the database /// </summary> public class InsertMovie : IHttpHandler { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; // Extract form fields var title = context.Request["title"]; var director = context.Request["director"]; // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return success context.Response.Write("success"); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } } In Listing 1, the ProcessRequest() method is used to retrieve a title and director from form parameters. Next, a new Movie is created with the form values. Finally, the new movie is saved to the database and the string “success” is returned. Using jQuery with the Generic Handler We can call the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler from jQuery by using the standard jQuery post() method. The following HTML page illustrates how you can retrieve form field values and post the values to the generic handler: Listing 2 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input name="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input name="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { $.post("InsertMovie.ashx", $("form").serialize(), insertCallback); }); function insertCallback(result) { if (result == "success") { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html> When you open the page in Listing 2 in a web browser, you get a simple HTML form: Notice that the page in Listing 2 includes the jQuery library. The jQuery library is included with the following SCRIPT tag: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The jQuery library is included on the Microsoft Ajax CDN so you can always easily include the jQuery library in your applications. You can learn more about the CDN at this website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx When you click the Add Movie button, the jQuery post() method is called to post the form data to the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler. Notice that the form values are serialized into a URL encoded string by calling the jQuery serialize() method. The serialize() method uses the name attribute of form fields and not the id attribute. Notes on this Approach This is a very low-level approach to interacting with .NET through jQuery – but it is simple and it works! And, you don’t need to use any JavaScript libraries in addition to the jQuery library to use this approach. The signature for the jQuery post() callback method looks like this: callback(data, textStatus, XmlHttpRequest) The second parameter, textStatus, returns the HTTP status code from the server. I tried returning different status codes from the generic handler with an eye towards implementing server validation by returning a status code such as 400 Bad Request when validation fails (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ). I finally figured out that the callback is not invoked when the textStatus has any value other than “success”. Using a WCF Service As an alternative to posting to a generic handler, you can create a WCF service. You create a new WCF service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the Ajax-enabled WCF Service project item. Name your WCF service InsertMovie.svc and click the Add button. Modify the WCF service so that it looks like Listing 3: Listing 3 – InsertMovie.svc using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; namespace WebApplication1 { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class MovieService { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); [OperationContract] public bool Insert(string title, string director) { // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return movie (with primary key) return true; } } } The WCF service in Listing 3 uses the Entity Framework to insert a record into the Movies database table. The service always returns the value true. Notice that the service in Listing 3 includes the following attribute: [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] You need to include this attribute if you want to get detailed error information back to the client. When you are building an application, you should always include this attribute. When you are ready to release your application, you should remove this attribute for security reasons. Using jQuery with the WCF Service Calling a WCF service from jQuery requires a little more work than calling a generic handler from jQuery. Here are some good blog posts on some of the issues with using jQuery with WCF: http://encosia.com/2008/06/05/3-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-jquery-with-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/896411.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/324917.aspx http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/tags/WCF/default.aspx The primary requirement when calling WCF from jQuery is that the request use JSON: The request must include a content-type:application/json header. Any parameters included with the request must be JSON encoded. Unfortunately, jQuery does not include a method for serializing JSON (Although, oddly, jQuery does include a parseJSON() method for deserializing JSON). Therefore, we need to use an additional library to handle the JSON serialization. The page in Listing 4 illustrates how you can call a WCF service from jQuery. Listing 4 – Default2.aspx <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Insert", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result result = result["d"]; if (result === true) { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html> There are several things to notice about Listing 4. First, notice that the page includes both the jQuery library and Douglas Crockford’s JSON2 library: <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> You need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the form values into JSON. You can download the JSON2 library from the following location: http://www.json.org/js.html When you click the button to submit the form, the form data is converted into a JavaScript object: // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; Next, the data is serialized into JSON using the JSON2 library: // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); Finally, the form data is posted to the WCF service by calling the jQuery ajax() method: // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Insert", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); You can’t use the standard jQuery post() method because you must set the content-type of the request to be application/json. Otherwise, the WCF service will reject the request for security reasons. For details, see the Scott Guthrie blog post: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx The insertCallback() method is called when the WCF service returns a response. This method looks like this: function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result result = result["d"]; if (result === true) { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } When we called the jQuery ajax() method, we set the dataType to JSON. That causes the jQuery ajax() method to deserialize the response from the WCF service from JSON into a JavaScript object automatically. The following value is passed to the insertCallback method: {"d":true} For security reasons, a WCF service always returns a response with a “d” wrapper. The following line of code removes the “d” wrapper: // unwrap result result = result["d"]; To learn more about the “d” wrapper, I recommend that you read the following blog posts: http://encosia.com/2009/02/10/a-breaking-change-between-versions-of-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2009/06/29/never-worry-about-asp-net-ajaxs-d-again/ Summary In this blog entry, I explored two methods of inserting a database record using jQuery and .NET. First, we created a generic handler and called the handler from jQuery. This is a very low-level approach. However, it is a simple approach that works. Next, we looked at how you can call a WCF service using jQuery. This approach required a little more work because you need to serialize objects into JSON. We used the JSON2 library to perform the serialization. In the next blog post, I want to explore how you can use jQuery with OData and WCF Data Services.

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Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

- by Rick Strahl

With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess) are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Adding Client Validation To DataAnnotations DataType Attribute

- by srkirkland

The System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace contains a validation attribute called DataTypeAttribute, which takes an enum specifying what data type the given property conforms to. Here are a few quick examples: public class DataTypeEntity { [DataType(DataType.Date)] public DateTime DateTime { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public string EmailAddress { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This attribute comes in handy when using ASP.NET MVC, because the type you specify will determine what “template” MVC uses. Thus, for the DateTime property if you create a partial in Views/[loc]/EditorTemplates/Date.ascx (or cshtml for razor), that view will be used to render the property when using any of the Html.EditorFor() methods. One thing that the DataType() validation attribute does not do is any actual validation. To see this, let’s take a look at the EmailAddress property above. It turns out that regardless of the value you provide, the entity will be considered valid: //valid new DataTypeEntity {EmailAddress = "Foo"}; .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Hmmm. Since DataType() doesn’t validate, that leaves us with two options: (1) Create our own attributes for each datatype to validate, like [Date], or (2) add validation into the DataType attribute directly. In this post, I will show you how to hookup client-side validation to the existing DataType() attribute for a desired type. From there adding server-side validation would be a breeze and even writing a custom validation attribute would be simple (more on that in future posts). Validation All The Way Down Our goal will be to leave our DataTypeEntity class (from above) untouched, requiring no reference to System.Web.Mvc. Then we will make an ASP.NET MVC project that allows us to create a new DataTypeEntity and hookup automatic client-side date validation using the suggested “out-of-the-box” jquery.validate bits that are included with ASP.NET MVC 3. For simplicity I’m going to focus on the only DateTime field, but the concept is generally the same for any other DataType. Building a DataTypeAttribute Adapter To start we will need to build a new validation adapter that we can register using ASP.NET MVC’s DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter() method. This method takes two Type parameters; The first is the attribute we are looking to validate with and the second is an adapter that should subclass System.Web.Mvc.ModelValidator. Since we are extending DataAnnotations we can use the subclass of ModelValidator called DataAnnotationsModelValidator<>. This takes a generic argument of type DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute, which lucky for us means the DataTypeAttribute will fit in nicely. So starting from there and implementing the required constructor, we get: public class DataTypeAttributeAdapter : DataAnnotationsModelValidator<DataTypeAttribute> { public DataTypeAttributeAdapter(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context, DataTypeAttribute attribute) : base(metadata, context, attribute) { } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now you have a full-fledged validation adapter, although it doesn’t do anything yet. There are two methods you can override to add functionality, IEnumerable<ModelValidationResult> Validate(object container) and IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules(). Adding logic to the server-side Validate() method is pretty straightforward, and for this post I’m going to focus on GetClientValidationRules(). Adding a Client Validation Rule Adding client validation is now incredibly easy because jquery.validate is very powerful and already comes with a ton of validators (including date and regular expressions for our email example). Teamed with the new unobtrusive validation javascript support we can make short work of our ModelClientValidationDateRule: public class ModelClientValidationDateRule : ModelClientValidationRule { public ModelClientValidationDateRule(string errorMessage) { ErrorMessage = errorMessage; ValidationType = "date"; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If your validation has additional parameters you can the ValidationParameters IDictionary<string,object> to include them. There is a little bit of conventions magic going on here, but the distilled version is that we are defining a “date” validation type, which will be included as html5 data-* attributes (specifically data-val-date). Then jquery.validate.unobtrusive takes this attribute and basically passes it along to jquery.validate, which knows how to handle date validation. Finishing our DataTypeAttribute Adapter Now that we have a model client validation rule, we can return it in the GetClientValidationRules() method of our DataTypeAttributeAdapter created above. Basically I want to say if DataType.Date was provided, then return the date rule with a given error message (using ValidationAttribute.FormatErrorMessage()). The entire adapter is below: public class DataTypeAttributeAdapter : DataAnnotationsModelValidator<DataTypeAttribute> { public DataTypeAttributeAdapter(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context, DataTypeAttribute attribute) : base(metadata, context, attribute) { } public override System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules() { if (Attribute.DataType == DataType.Date) { return new[] { new ModelClientValidationDateRule(Attribute.FormatErrorMessage(Metadata.GetDisplayName())) }; } return base.GetClientValidationRules(); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Putting it all together Now that we have an adapter for the DataTypeAttribute, we just need to tell ASP.NET MVC to use it. The easiest way to do this is to use the built in DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider by calling RegisterAdapter() in your global.asax startup method. DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter(typeof(DataTypeAttribute), typeof(DataTypeAttributeAdapter)); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Show and Tell Let’s see this in action using a clean ASP.NET MVC 3 project. First make sure to reference the jquery, jquery.vaidate and jquery.validate.unobtrusive scripts that you will need for client validation. Next, let’s make a model class (note we are using the same built-in DataType() attribute that comes with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations). public class DataTypeEntity { [DataType(DataType.Date, ErrorMessage = "Please enter a valid date (ex: 2/14/2011)")] public DateTime DateTime { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Then we make a create page with a strongly-typed DataTypeEntity model, the form section is shown below (notice we are just using EditorForModel): @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>Fields</legend> @Html.EditorForModel() <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The final step is to register the adapter in our global.asax file: DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter(typeof(DataTypeAttribute), typeof(DataTypeAttributeAdapter)); Now we are ready to run the page: Looking at the datetime field’s html, we see that our adapter added some data-* validation attributes: <input type="text" value="1/1/0001" name="DateTime" id="DateTime" data-val-required="The DateTime field is required." data-val-date="Please enter a valid date (ex: 2/14/2011)" data-val="true" class="text-box single-line valid"> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here data-val-required was added automatically because DateTime is non-nullable, and data-val-date was added by our validation adapter. Now if we try to add an invalid date: Our custom error message is displayed via client-side validation as soon as we tab out of the box. If we didn’t include a custom validation message, the default DataTypeAttribute “The field {0} is invalid” would have been shown (of course we can change the default as well). Note we did not specify server-side validation, but in this case we don’t have to because an invalid date will cause a server-side error during model binding. Conclusion I really like how easy it is to register new data annotations model validators, whether they are your own or, as in this post, supplements to existing validation attributes. I’m still debating about whether adding the validation directly in the DataType attribute is the correct place to put it versus creating a dedicated “Date” validation attribute, but it’s nice to know either option is available and, as we’ve seen, simple to implement. I’m also working through the nascent stages of an open source project that will create validation attribute extensions to the existing data annotations providers using similar techniques as seen above (examples: Email, Url, EqualTo, Min, Max, CreditCard, etc). Keep an eye on this blog and subscribe to my twitter feed (@srkirkland) if you are interested for announcements.

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Is your team is a high-performing team?

As a child I can remember looking out of the car window as my father drove along the Interstate in Florida while seeing prisoners wearing bright orange jump suits and prison guards keeping a watchful eye on them. The prisoners were taking part in a prison road gang. These road gangs were formed to help the state maintain the state highway infrastructure. The prisoner’s primary responsibilities are to pick up trash and debris from the roadway. This is a prime example of a work group or working group used by most prison systems in the United States. Work groups or working groups can be defined as a collection of individuals or entities working together to achieve a specific goal or accomplish a specific set of tasks. Typically these groups are only established for a short period of time and are dissolved once the desired outcome has been achieved. More often than not group members usually feel as though they are expendable to the group and some even dread that they are even in the group. "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable." (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) So how do you determine that a team is a high-performing team? This can be determined by three base line criteria that include: consistently high quality output, the promotion of personal growth and well being of all team members, and most importantly the ability to learn and grow as a unit. Initially, a team can successfully create high-performing output without meeting all three criteria, however this will erode over time because team members will feel detached from the group or that they are not growing then the quality of the output will decline. High performing teams are similar to work groups because they both utilize a collection of individuals or entities to accomplish tasks. What distinguish a high-performing team from a work group are its characteristics. High-performing teams contain five core characteristics. These characteristics are what separate a group from a team. The five characteristics of a high-performing team include: Purpose, Performance Measures, People with Tasks and Relationship Skills, Process, and Preparation and Practice. A high-performing team is much more than a work group, and typically has a life cycle that can vary from team to team. The standard team lifecycle consists of five states and is comparable to a human life cycle. The five states of a high-performing team lifecycle include: Formulating, Storming, Normalizing, Performing, and Adjourning. The Formulating State of a team is first realized when the team members are first defined and roles are assigned to all members. This initial stage is very important because it can set the tone for the team and can ultimately determine its success or failure. In addition, this stage requires the team to have a strong leader because team members are normally unclear about specific roles, specific obstacles and goals that my lay ahead of them. Finally, this stage is where most team members initially meet one another prior to working as a team unless the team members already know each other. The Storming State normally arrives directly after the formulation of a new team because there are still a lot of unknowns amongst the newly formed assembly. As a general rule most of the parties involved in the team are still getting used to the workload, pace of work, deadlines and the validity of various tasks that need to be performed by the group. In this state everything is questioned because there are so many unknowns. Items commonly questioned include the credentials of others on the team, the actual validity of a project, and the leadership abilities of the team leader. This can be exemplified by looking at the interactions between animals when they first meet. If we look at a scenario where two people are walking directly toward each other with their dogs. The dogs will automatically enter the Storming State because they do not know the other dog. Typically in this situation, they attempt to define which is more dominating via play or fighting depending on how the dogs interact with each other. Once dominance has been defined and accepted by both dogs then they will either want to play or leave depending on how the dogs interacted and other environmental variables. Once the Storming State has been realized then the Normalizing State takes over. This state is entered by a team once all the questions of the Storming State have been answered and the team has been tested by a few tasks or projects. Typically, participants in the team are filled with energy, and comradery, and a strong alliance with team goals and objectives. A high school football team is a perfect example of the Normalizing State when they start their season. The player positions have been assigned, the depth chart has been filled and everyone is focused on winning each game. All of the players encourage and expect each other to perform at the best of their abilities and are united by competition from other teams. The Performing State is achieved by a team when its history, working habits, and culture solidify the team as one working unit. In this state team members can anticipate specific behaviors, attitudes, reactions, and challenges are seen as opportunities and not problems. Additionally, each team member knows their role in the team’s success, and the roles of others. This is the most productive state of a group and is where all the time invested working together really pays off. If you look at an Olympic figure skating team skate you can easily see how the time spent working together benefits their performance. They skate as one unit even though it is comprised of two skaters. Each skater has their routine completely memorized as well as their partners. This allows them to anticipate each other’s moves on the ice makes their skating look effortless. The final state of a team is the Adjourning State. This state is where accomplishments by the team and each individual team member are recognized. Additionally, this state also allows for reflection of the interactions between team members, work accomplished and challenges that were faced. Finally, the team celebrates the challenges they have faced and overcome as a unit. Currently in the workplace teams are divided into two different types: Co-located and Distributed Teams. Co-located teams defined as the traditional group of people working together in an office, according to Andy Singleton of Assembla. This traditional type of a team has dominated business in the past due to inadequate technology, which forced workers to primarily interact with one another via face to face meetings. Team meetings are primarily lead by the person with the highest status in the company. Having personally, participated in meetings of this type, usually a select few of the team members dominate the flow of communication which reduces the input of others in group discussions. Since discussions are dominated by a select few individuals the discussions and group discussion are skewed in favor of the individuals who communicate the most in meetings. In addition, Team members might not give their full opinions on a topic of discussion in part not to offend or create controversy amongst the team and can alter decision made in meetings towards those of the opinions of the dominating team members. Distributed teams are by definition spread across an area or subdivided into separate sections. That is exactly what distributed teams when compared to a more traditional team. It is common place for distributed teams to have team members across town, in the next state, across the country and even with the advances in technology over the last 20 year across the world. These teams allow for more diversity compared to the other type of teams because they allow for more flexibility regarding location. A team could consist of a 30 year old male Italian project manager from New York, a 50 year old female Hispanic from California and a collection of programmers from India because technology allows them to communicate as if they were standing next to one another. In addition, distributed team members consult with more team members prior to making decisions compared to traditional teams, and take longer to come to decisions due to the changes in time zones and cultural events. However, team members feel more empowered to speak out when they do not agree with the team and to notify others of potential issues regarding the work that the team is doing. Virtual teams which are a subset of the distributed team type is changing organizational strategies due to the fact that a team can now in essence be working 24 hrs a day because of utilizing employees in various time zones and locations. A primary example of this is with customer services departments, a company can have multiple call centers spread across multiple time zones allowing them to appear to be open 24 hours a day while all a employees work from 9AM to 5 PM every day. Virtual teams also allow human resources departments to go after the best talent for the company regardless of where the potential employee works because they will be a part of a virtual team all that is need is the proper technology to be setup to allow everyone to communicate. In addition to allowing employees to work from home, the company can save space and resources by not having to provide a desk for every team member. In fact, those team members that randomly come into the office can actually share one desk amongst multiple people. This is definitely a cost cutting plus given the current state of the economy. One thing that can turn a team into a high-performing team is leadership. High-performing team leaders need to focus on investing in ongoing personal development, provide team members with direction, structure, and resources needed to accomplish their work, make the right interventions at the right time, and help the team manage boundaries between the team and various external parties involved in the teams work. A team leader needs to invest in ongoing personal development in order to effectively manage their team. People have said that attitude is everything; this is very true about leaders and leadership. A team takes on the attitudes and behaviors of its leaders. This can potentially harm the team and the team’s output. Leaders must concentrate on self-awareness, and understanding their team’s group dynamics to fully understand how to lead them. In addition, always learning new leadership techniques from other effective leaders is also very beneficial. Providing team members with direction, structure, and resources that they need to accomplish their work collectively sounds easy, but it is not. Leaders need to be able to effectively communicate with their team on how their work helps the company reach for its organizational vision. Conversely, the leader needs to allow his team to work autonomously within specific guidelines to turn the company’s vision into a reality. This being said the team must be appropriately staffed according to the size of the team’s tasks and their complexity. These tasks should be clear, and be meaningful to the company’s objectives and allow for feedback to be exchanged with the leader and the team member and the leader and upper management. Now if the team is properly staffed, and has a clear and full understanding of what is to be done; the company also must supply the workers with the proper tools to achieve the tasks that they are asked to do. No one should be asked to dig a hole without being given a shovel. Finally, leaders must reward their team members for accomplishments that they achieve. Awards could range from just a simple congratulatory email, a party to close the completion of a large project, or other monetary rewards. Managing boundaries is very important for team leaders because it can alter attitudes of team members and can add undue stress to the team which will force them to loose focus on the tasks at hand for the group. Team leaders should promote communication between team members so that burdens are shared amongst the team and solutions can be derived from hearing the opinions of multiple sources. This also reinforces team camaraderie and working as a unit. Team leaders must manage the type and timing of interventions as to not create an even bigger mess within the team. Poorly timed interventions can really deflate team members and make them question themselves. This could really increase further and undue interventions by the team leader. Typically, the best time for interventions is when the team is just starting to form so that all unproductive behaviors are removed from the team and that it can retain focus on its agenda. If an intervention is effectively executed the team will feel energized about the work that they are doing, promote communication and interaction amongst the group and improve moral overall. High-performing teams are very import to organizations because they consistently produce high quality output and develop a collective purpose for their work. This drive to succeed allows team members to utilize specific talents allowing for growth in these areas. In addition, these team members usually take on a sense of ownership with their projects and feel that the other team members are irreplaceable. References: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/3127/Three-ways-to-organize-your-team-co-located-outsourced-or-global.aspx Katzenbach, J.R. & Smith, D.K. (1993). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School.

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Enterprise Process Maps: A Process Picture worth a Million Words

- by raul.goycoolea

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }h1 { margin-top: 0.33in; margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(54, 95, 145); page-break-inside: avoid; }h1.western { font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-size: 14pt; }h1.cjk { font-family: "DejaVu Sans"; font-size: 14pt; }h1.ctl { font-size: 14pt; } Getting Started with Business Transformations A well-known proverb states that "A picture is worth a thousand words." In relation to Business Process Management (BPM), a credible analyst might have a few questions. What if the picture was taken from some particular angle, like directly overhead? What if it was taken from only an inch away or a mile away? What if the photographer did not focus the camera correctly? Does the value of the picture depend on who is looking at it? Enterprise Process Maps are analogous in this sense of relative value. Every BPM project (holistic BPM kick-off, enterprise system implementation, Service-oriented Architecture, business process transformation, corporate performance management, etc.) should be begin with a clear understanding of the business environment, from the biggest picture representations down to the lowest level required or desired for the particular project type, scope and objectives. The Enterprise Process Map serves as an entry point for the process architecture and is defined: the single highest level of process mapping for an organization. It is constructed and evaluated during the Strategy Phase of the Business Process Management Lifecycle. (see Figure 1) Fig. 1: Business Process Management Lifecycle Many organizations view such maps as visual abstractions, constructed for the single purpose of process categorization. This, in turn, results in a lesser focus on the inherent intricacies of the Enterprise Process view, which are explored in the course of this paper. With the main focus of a large scale process documentation effort usually underlying an ERP or other system implementation, it is common for the work to be driven by the desire to "get to the details," and to the type of modeling that will derive near-term tangible results. For instance, a project in American Pharmaceutical Company X is driven by the Director of IT. With 120+ systems in place, and a lack of standardized processes across the United States, he and the VP of IT have decided to embark on a long-term ERP implementation. At the forethought of both are questions, such as: How does my application architecture map to the business? What are each application's functionalities, and where do the business processes utilize them? Where can we retire legacy systems? Well-developed BPM methodologies prescribe numerous model types to capture such information and allow for thorough analysis in these areas. Process to application maps, Event Driven Process Chains, etc. provide this level of detail and facilitate the completion of such project-specific questions. These models and such analysis are appropriately carried out at a relatively low level of process detail. (see figure 2) Fig. 2: The Level Concept, Generic Process HierarchySome of the questions remaining are ones of documentation longevity, the continuation of BPM practice in the organization, process governance and ownership, process transparency and clarity in business process objectives and strategy. The Level Concept in Brief Figure 2 shows a generic, four-level process hierarchy depicting the breakdown of a "Process Area" into progressively more detailed process classifications. The number of levels and the names of these levels are flexible, and can be fit to the standards of the organization's chosen terminology or any other chosen reference model that makes logical sense for both short and long term process description. It is at Level 1 (in this case the Process Area level), that the Enterprise Process Map is created. This map and its contained objects become the foundation for a top-down approach to subsequent mapping, object relationship development, and analysis of the organization's processes and its supporting infrastructure. Additionally, this picture serves as a communication device, at an executive level, describing the design of the business in its service to a customer. It seems, then, imperative that the process development effort, and this map, start off on the right foot. Figuring out just what that right foot is, however, is critical and trend-setting in an evolving organization. Key Considerations Enterprise Process Maps are usually not as living and breathing as other process maps. Just as it would be an extremely difficult task to change the foundation of the Sears Tower or a city plan for the entire city of Chicago, the Enterprise Process view of an organization usually remains unchanged once developed (unless, of course, an organization is at a stage where it is capable of true, high-level process innovation). Regardless, the Enterprise Process map is a key first step, and one that must be taken in a precise way. What makes this groundwork solid depends on not only the materials used to construct it (process areas), but also the layout plan and knowledge base of what will be built (the entire process architecture). It seems reasonable that care and consideration are required to create this critical high level map... but what are the important factors? Does the process modeler need to worry about how many process areas there are? About who is looking at it? Should he only use the color pink because it's his boss' favorite color? Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, these are all valid considerations that may just require a bit of structure. Below are Three Key Factors to consider when building an Enterprise Process Map: Company Strategic Focus Process Categorization: Customer is Core End-to-end versus Functional Processes Company Strategic Focus As mentioned above, the Enterprise Process Map is created during the Strategy Phase of the Business Process Management Lifecycle. From Oracle Business Process Management methodology for business transformation, it is apparent that business processes exist for the purpose of achieving the strategic objectives of an organization. In a prescribed, top-down approach to process development, it must be ensured that each process fulfills its objectives, and in an aggregated manner, drives fulfillment of the strategic objectives of the company, whether for particular business segments or in a broader sense. This is a crucial point, as the strategic messages of the company must therefore resound in its process maps, in particular one that spans the processes of the complete business: the Enterprise Process Map. One simple example from Company X is shown below (see figure 3). Fig. 3: Company X Enterprise Process Map In reviewing Company X's Enterprise Process Map, one can immediately begin to understand the general strategic mindset of the organization. It shows that Company X is focused on its customers, defining 10 of its process areas belonging to customer-focused categories. Additionally, the organization views these end-customer-oriented process areas as part of customer-fulfilling value chains, while support process areas do not provide as much contiguous value. However, by including both support and strategic process categorizations, it becomes apparent that all processes are considered vital to the success of the customer-oriented focus processes. Below is an example from Company Y (see figure 4). Fig. 4: Company Y Enterprise Process Map Company Y, although also a customer-oriented company, sends a differently focused message with its depiction of the Enterprise Process Map. Along the top of the map is the company's product tree, overarching the process areas, which when executed deliver the products themselves. This indicates one strategic objective of excellence in product quality. Additionally, the view represents a less linear value chain, with strong overlaps of the various process areas. Marketing and quality management are seen as a key support processes, as they span the process lifecycle. Often, companies may incorporate graphics, logos and symbols representing customers and suppliers, and other objects to truly send the strategic message to the business. Other times, Enterprise Process Maps may show high level of responsibility to organizational units, or the application types that support the process areas. It is possible that hundreds of formats and focuses can be applied to an Enterprise Process Map. What is of vital importance, however, is which formats and focuses are chosen to truly represent the direction of the company, and serve as a driver for focusing the business on the strategic objectives set forth in that right. Process Categorization: Customer is Core In the previous two examples, processes were grouped using differing categories and techniques. Company X showed one support and three customer process categorizations using encompassing chevron objects; Customer Y achieved a less distinct categorization using a gradual color scheme. Either way, and in general, modeling of the process areas becomes even more valuable and easily understood within the context of business categorization, be it strategic or otherwise. But how one categorizes their processes is typically more complex than simply choosing object shapes and colors. Previously, it was stated that the ideal is a prescribed top-down approach to developing processes, to make certain linkages all the way back up to corporate strategy. But what about external influences? What forces push and pull corporate strategy? Industry maturity, product lifecycle, market profitability, competition, etc. can all drive the critical success factors of a particular business segment, or the company as a whole, in addition to previous corporate strategy. This may seem to be turning into a discussion of theory, but that is far from the case. In fact, in years of recent study and evolution of the way businesses operate, cross-industry and across the globe, one invariable has surfaced with such strength to make it undeniable in the game plan of any strategy fit for survival. That constant is the customer. Many of a company's critical success factors, in any business segment, relate to the customer: customer retention, satisfaction, loyalty, etc. Businesses serve customers, and so do a business's processes, mapped or unmapped. The most effective way to categorize processes is in a manner that visualizes convergence to what is core for a company. It is the value chain, beginning with the customer in mind, and ending with the fulfillment of that customer, that becomes the core or the centerpiece of the Enterprise Process Map. (See figure 5) Fig. 5: Company Z Enterprise Process Map Company Z has what may be viewed as several different perspectives or "cuts" baked into their Enterprise Process Map. It has divided its processes into three main categories (top, middle, and bottom) of Management Processes, the Core Value Chain and Supporting Processes. The Core category begins with Corporate Marketing (which contains the activities of beginning to engage customers) and ends with Customer Service Management. Within the value chain, this company has divided into the focus areas of their two primary business lines, Foods and Beverages. Does this mean that areas, such as Strategy, Information Management or Project Management are not as important as those in the Core category? No! In some cases, though, depending on the organization's understanding of high-level BPM concepts, use of category names, such as "Core," "Management" or "Support," can be a touchy subject. What is important to understand, is that no matter the nomenclature chosen, the Core processes are those that drive directly to customer value, Support processes are those which make the Core processes possible to execute, and Management Processes are those which steer and influence the Core. Some common terms for these three basic categorizations are Core, Customer Fulfillment, Customer Relationship Management, Governing, Controlling, Enabling, Support, etc. End-to-end versus Functional Processes Every high and low level of process: function, task, activity, process/work step (whatever an organization calls it), should add value to the flow of business in an organization. Suppose that within the process "Deliver package," there is a documented task titled "Stop for ice cream." It doesn't take a process expert to deduce the room for improvement. Though stopping for ice cream may create gain for the one person performing it, it likely benefits neither the organization nor, more importantly, the customer. In most cases, "Stop for ice cream" wouldn't make it past the first pass of To-Be process development. What would make the cut, however, would be a flow of tasks that, each having their own value add, build up to greater and greater levels of process objective. In this case, those tasks would combine to achieve a status of "package delivered." Figure 3 shows a simple example: Just as the package can only be delivered (outcome of the process) without first being retrieved, loaded, and the travel destination reached (outcomes of the process steps), some higher level of process "Play Practical Joke" (e.g., main process or process area) cannot be completed until a package is delivered. It seems that isolated or functionally separated processes, such as "Deliver Package" (shown in Figure 6), are necessary, but are always part of a bigger value chain. Each of these individual processes must be analyzed within the context of that value chain in order to ensure successful end-to-end process performance. For example, this company's "Create Joke Package" process could be operating flawlessly and efficiently, but if a joke is never developed, it cannot be created, so the end-to-end process breaks. Fig. 6: End to End Process Construction That being recognized, it is clear that processes must be viewed as end-to-end, customer-to-customer, and in the context of company strategy. But as can also be seen from the previous example, these vital end-to-end processes cannot be built without the functionally oriented building blocks. Without one, the other cannot be had, or at least not in a complete and organized fashion. As it turns out, but not discussed in depth here, the process modeling effort, BPM organizational development, and comprehensive coverage cannot be fully realized without a semi-functional, process-oriented approach. Then, an Enterprise Process Map should be concerned with both views, the building blocks, and access points to the business-critical end-to-end processes, which they construct. Without the functional building blocks, all streams of work needed for any business transformation would be lost mess of process disorganization. End-to-end views are essential for utilization in optimization in context, understanding customer impacts, base-lining all project phases and aligning objectives. Including both views on an Enterprise Process Map allows management to understand the functional orientation of the company's processes, while still providing access to end-to-end processes, which are most valuable to them. (See figures 7 and 8). Fig. 7: Simplified Enterprise Process Map with end-to-end Access Point The above examples show two unique ways to achieve a successful Enterprise Process Map. The first example is a simple map that shows a high level set of process areas and a separate section with the end-to-end processes of concern for the organization. This particular map is filtered to show just one vital end-to-end process for a project-specific focus. Fig. 8: Detailed Enterprise Process Map showing connected Functional Processes The second example shows a more complex arrangement and categorization of functional processes (the names of each process area has been removed). The end-to-end perspective is achieved at this level through the connections (interfaces at lower levels) between these functional process areas. An important point to note is that the organization of these two views of the Enterprise Process Map is dependent, in large part, on the orientation of its audience, and the complexity of the landscape at the highest level. If both are not apparent, the Enterprise Process Map is missing an opportunity to serve as a holistic, high-level view. Conclusion In the world of BPM, and specifically regarding Enterprise Process Maps, a picture can be worth as many words as the thought and effort that is put into it. Enterprise Process Maps alone cannot change an organization, but they serve more purposes than initially meet the eye, and therefore must be designed in a way that enables a BPM mindset, business process understanding and business transformation efforts. Every Enterprise Process Map will and should be different when looking across organizations. Its design will be driven by company strategy, a level of customer focus, and functional versus end-to-end orientations. This high-level description of the considerations of the Enterprise Process Maps is not a prescriptive "how to" guide. However, a company attempting to create one may not have the practical BPM experience to truly explore its options or impacts to the coming work of business process transformation. The biggest takeaway is that process modeling, at all levels, is a science and an art, and art is open to interpretation. It is critical that the modeler of the highest level of process mapping be a cognoscente of the message he is delivering and the factors at hand. Without sufficient focus on the design of the Enterprise Process Map, an entire BPM effort may suffer. For additional information please check: Oracle Business Process Management.

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Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

- by Mark Rackley

I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding? Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code. Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance… Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites. Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid. Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it. :) We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested). Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software. SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

- by Roger Hart

Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want. Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 03, 2010

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

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 22, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 22, 2013Popular ReleasesGac Library -- C++ Utilities for GPU Accelerated GUI and Script: Gaclib 0.5.2.0: Gaclib.zip contains the following content GacUIDemo Demo solution and projects Public Source GacUI library Document HTML document. Please start at reference_gacui.html Content Necessary CSS/JPG files for document. Improvements to the previous release Add 4 demos Controls.DataGrid.ChemicalElements This demo shows how to display data in a GuiVirtualDataGrid control using different styles for different cells. Controls.DataGrid.FileExplorer This demo shows how to use GuiVirtualDataGrid w...Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear for Minecraft: TDMG 1.1.0.0 for 1.5.2: CodePlex???(????????) ?????????(???1/4) ??????????? ?????????? ???????????(??????????) ??????????????????????? ↑????、?????????????????????(???????) ???、??????????、?????????????????????、????????1.5?????????? Shift+W(????)??????????????????10°、?10°(?????????)???Pizarrón Virtual: Pizarron virtual codigo fuente: Código fuenteHyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012: HyperVMPE2012: Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012 Beta ReleaseOutlook 2013 Add-In: Email appointments: This new version includes the following changes: - Ability to drag emails to the calendar to create appointments. Will gather all the recipients from all the emails and create an appointment on the day you drop the emails, with the text and subject of the last selected email (if more than one selected). - Increased maximum of numbers to display appointments to 30. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it before. Before unzipping the file...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.5.2: v1.5.2 - This is a service release. We've fixed a number of issues with Tasks and IoC. We've made some consistency improvements across platforms and fixed a number of minor bugs. See changes.txt for details. Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC); source code...CODE Framework: 4.0.30618.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.18): XrmToolbox improvement Use new connection controls (use of Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll) New display capabilities for tools (size, image and colors) Added prerequisites check Added Most Used Tools feature Tools improvementNew toolSolution Transfer Tool (v1.0.0.0) developed by DamSim Updated toolView Layout Replicator (v1.2013.6.17) Double click on source view to display its layoutXml All tools list Access Checker (v1.2013.6.17) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.6.18) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.6.1...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.570b: New* Movie - using XBMC TMDB - now renames movies if option selected. * Movie - using Xbmc Tmdb - Actor images saved from TMDb if option selected. Fixed* Movie - Checks for poster.jpg against missing poster filter * Movie - Fixed continual scraping of vob movie file (not DVD structure) * Both - Correctly display audio channels * Both - Correctly populate audio info in nfo's if multiple audio tracks. * Both - added icons and checked for DTS ES and Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. * Both - Stream d...Document.Editor: 2013.24: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.24: Improved Video Editing support Improved Link Editing support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.0: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI???? ExtJS ?????????，???? ExtJS ?。 ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthrea...BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.0: Check Version History for more information about this release.ExpressProfiler: ExpressProfiler v1.5: [+] added Start time, End time event columns [+] added SP:StmtStarting, SP:StmtCompleted events [*] fixed bug with Audit:Logout eventpatterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance Drop4 2013.06.17: Drop 4Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 4.1.1: The stable release of Kooboo CMS 4.1.0 with fixed the following issues: https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/1 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/11 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/13 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/15 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/19 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/20 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/24 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/43 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/45 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/46 https://github....VidCoder: 1.5.0 Beta: The betas have started up again! If you were previously on the beta track you will need to install this to get back on it. That's because you can now run both the Beta and Stable version of VidCoder side-by-side! Note that the OpenCL and Intel QuickSync changes being tested by HandBrake are not in the betas yet. They will appear when HandBrake integrates them into the main branch. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5590. This adds a new FDK AAC encoder. The FAAC encoder has been removed and now...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.16: Date/Time are displayed as Local Time. (Last Contact, Last Report and DeadLine) Wpp now remember the last used path for update publishing. (See 'Settings' Form for options) Add an option to allow users to publish an update even if the Framework has judged the certificate as invalid. (Attention : Using this option will NOT allow you to publish or revise an update if your certificate is really invalid). When publishing a new update, filter update files to ensure that there is not files wi...Employee Info Starter Kit: v6.0 - ASP.NET MVC Edition: Release Home - Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture EISK v6.0 – ASP.NET MVC edition bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly. User End SpecificationsCreating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee reco...OLAP PivotTable Extensions: Release 0.8.1: Use the 32-bit download for... Excel 2007 Excel 2010 32-bit (even Excel 2010 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Excel 2013 32-bit (even Excel 2013 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Use the 64-bit download for... Excel 2010 64-bit Excel 2013 64-bit Just download and run the EXE. There is no need to uninstall the previous release. If you have problems getting the add-in to work, see the Troubleshooting Installation wiki page. The new features in this release are: View #VALUE! Err...DirectXTex texture processing library: June 2013: June 15, 2013 Custom filtering implementation for Resize & GenerateMipMaps(3D) - Point, Box, Linear, Cubic, and Triangle TEX_FILTER_TRIANGLE finite low-pass triangle filter TEX_FILTER_WRAP, TEX_FILTER_MIRROR texture semantics for custom filtering TEX_FILTER_BOX alias for TEX_FILTER_FANT WIC Ordered and error diffusion dithering for non-WIC conversion sRGB gamma correct custom filtering and conversion DDS_FLAGS_EXPAND_LUMINANCE - Reader conversion option for L8, L16, and A8L8 legacy ...New Projects7tin - For Business Expansion: 7tin.net one project that every Businessman can open a shop and sale everything. It's free.AntikCompta: AntikCompta is the easiest way to share comptability beetween an antiquaire and it's account manager.Community wallpaper: share your desktop wall paper with others using People Near Me (PNM) protocolDeep.NET: This project aims at providing basic tools for developers to build learning models that can extract hierarchical representations of knowledge. DynamicAccess: DynamicAccess is a library to aid connecting DLR languages such as ironpython and ironruby to non-dynamic languages like managed C++. It also fills in some gaps in the current C# support of dynamic objects, such as member access by string and deletion of members or indexes.EntInscripcion: Este es un proyecto de inscripcionesExtensible Lightweight Framework: ELF is developed in C# .NET 4.0. It offers extensions on standard components from the .NET Framework and custom components such as MVP. Most classes implement interfaces and are resolved using IoC. Currently a single feature is available, the coming month new features will be added. WCF Service Client - Exception Handling - Retry Logic - Reusable Eye tracking with Kinect for Windows: Attempts to track eyes and calculate the pupillary distance of the user using Kinect for Windows.Hanoi: Another implementation of the popular game of Towers of Hanoi for SmartPhones with Windows Mobile 2003 or newer. But it's not only the classic Towers of Hanoi, it has some value-added features like timing, time-limited gaming, column order changing, etc. It supports from 1 disk to 8. Very geeky game.HR_project: WPF ?????????? ? ???????? ? ???? ??????. ???????? ? ?????????? ????? ??????????? ? ???? ??????.HttpUtility: HttpUtility???C#?HttpRequest（HttpWebRequest）?????。 ??HttpUtility????????? 1.??HttpRequest?Get??，?????html?? 2.??HttpRequest?Post??，?????html?? 3.??HttpRequest??IL2 Stats DB: A SQL 2008 Database Scheme to store data generated by the IL2 Log Parser.maillib: Libreria mail per l'invio di posta elettronicamgl Pluginsystem: mgl is a pluginsystem. MIBETerminal: ---Mobile FIT VUT: Školní aplikace pro zacínající studenty FIT VUT. Obsahuje potrebné informace pro studium na Vysokém ucení v Brne fakulta Informacních technologií. Aplikace obsahuje: -školní prírucku -aktuální jídelní lístkem menz -kontaktní informace na zamestnance FIT VUT -mapu fakulty FIT -aktuality -plánovac úloh Aplikace se nachází na Windows Marketplace: http://www.windowsphone.com/cs-CZ/apps/c2e8036d-970a-4ab1-8ca4-b97788a0dcb5 OMANE: OMANEPDF Unlocker Software for those who want to unlock PDF Restrictions: PDF Unlocker Software has the competence to unlock PDF restrictions. With this tool user can exclusive attribute to remove PDF security completelyPortalCemil: Portal CemilResonance: Resonance is a system to train neural networks, it allows to automate the train of a neural network, distributing the calculation on multiple machines.SauravUtil: These are some small utilities created specially by saurav sarkar. 1. Wcf Tutorial using Entity Framework 5 2. Rest Coming soonSelcukEticaretDenemesi: Test için bir çalisma yürütecegimSPWTF: "SPWTF or SharePoint well thats foolish" is a project that intends to bridge various gaps in the OOTB SharePoint apps story. Enjoy!SQL Server Integration Services Reporting: The canned SSMS Integration Services reports rewritten for deployment on Reporting Services.Swyish Chess: Chess Application built using C# and WPFThree-Dimensional Maneuver Gear for Minecraft: Minecraft?????????????。Urdu Translation: Urdu Translation Project Visual Studio Templates compliant with StyleCop Rules: This project contains the templates and instructions to make your Visual Studio 2008 create new files compliant to StyleCop rules.webapps-in-action.com: Here you'll find all the Code Samples & Solutions from my Blog http://webapps-in-action.com

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 28, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 28, 2011Popular ReleasesVFPX: VFP2C32 2.0.0.8 Release Candidate: This release includes several bugfixes, new functions and finally a CHM help file for the complete library.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.3 ALPHA: 2.3.3 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added back in a p...DB>doc for Microsoft SQL Server: 1.0.0.0: Initial release Supported output HTML WikiPlex markup Raw XML Supported objects Tables Primary Keys Foreign Keys ViewsmojoPortal: 2.3.6.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2361-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Office Web.UI: Alpha preview: This is the first alpha release. Very exciting moment... This download is just the demo application : "Contoso backoffice Web App". No source included for the moment, just the app, for testing purposes and for feedbacks !! This package includes a set of official MS Office icons (143 png 16x16 and 132 png 32x32) to really make a great app ! Please rate and give feedback ThanksParallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++: Drop 6 - Chapters 4 and 5: This is Drop 6. It includes: Drafts of the Preface, Introduction, Chapters 2-7, Appendix B & C and the glossary Sample code for chapters 2-7 and Appendix A & B. The new material we'd like feedback on is: Chapter 4 - Parallel Aggregation Chapter 5 - Futures The source code requires Visual Studio 2010 in order to run. There is a known bug in the A-Dash sample when the user attempts to cancel a parallel calculation. We are working to fix this.Catel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.1: (+) Styles can now be changed dynamically, see Examples application for a how-to (+) ViewModelBase class now have a constructor that allows services injection (+) ViewModelBase services can now be configured by IoC (via Microsoft.Unity) (+) All ViewModelBase services now have a unit test implementation (+) Added IProcessService to run processes from a viewmodel with directly using the process class (which makes it easier to unit test view models) (*) If the HasErrors property of DataObjec...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.160: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release improves NodeXL's Twitter and Pajek features. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file in Windows Explorer and select "Extract All." Close Ex...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 CTP: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL, RavenDB and SQLCE. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder to enable...UOB & ME: UOB ME 2.6: UOB ME 2.6????: ???? V1.0: ???? V1.0 ??Password Generator: 2.2: Parallel password generation Password strength calculation ( Same method used by Microsoft here : https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx ) Minor code refactoringVisual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance: Spanish - Architecture Guidance: Francisco Fagas http://geeks.ms/blogs/ffagas, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities, based on http://vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/47828. Release Notes The guidance is available in a xps-only (default) or complete package. The complete package contains the files in xps, pdf and Office 2007 formats. 2011-01-24 Publish version 1.0 of the Spanish localized bits.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager the html generation has been optimized, the html page size is much smaller nowFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.6: new Facebook Graph objects: Application, Page, Post, Comment Improved Intellisense documentation new Graph Api connections: albums, photos, posts, feed, home, friends JSON Toolkit upgraded to version 0.9 (beta release) with bug fixes and new features bug fixed: error when handling empty JSON arrays bug fixed: error when handling JSON array with square or large brackets in the message bug fixed: error when handling JSON obejcts with double quotation in the message bug fixed: erro...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-01-23: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (3): Instructions for installation: http://www.galasoft.ch/mvvm/installing/manually/ Includes the hotfix templates for Windows Phone 7 development. This is only relevant if you didn't already install the hotfix described at http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/07/22/mvvm-light-hotfix-for-windows-phone-7-developer-tools-beta.aspx.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...New ProjectsAgilErp: AgilErp is a .NET OpenSource ERP - System developed in C# using WPF, WCF ,Entity Framework, MS-SQL-Server and MVVM. Angel Eye: 3d Game for the new generation AWWWE Browser: AWWWE Browser. (Pronounced "awe".) Aural World Wide Web Everywhere. 1) An aural browser. It talks and listens to you and you talk and listen to it. 2) A VUI for normal HTML web sites. It lets regular web sites talk and listen to you while you talk and listen to them.BitLocker Wrapper Library: The BDE Wrapper library allows .NET Developers to quickly use the WMI BitLocker provider without having to learn the complex methods and operation of the WMI classes.CRM8000: CRM8000????????????????DSM Hub for WP7: Implements a light version of the DSM tools for WP7. Currently, most of the effort is on the audio station.File Downloader: This application checks a Gmail account regularly for mail containing URLs. Once a URL is found, its content is downloaded and sent as a reply message with the file as an attachment. Intended usage: - Download IEEE articles as PDF when you're not in a authenticated network.Folder Space Quota: This component return Quotas Disk Space used for each folders and subfolders in a given directory. Results are returned with a graphic percent bar. Another Tab give access to this directory tree, indicating the size of each file and allows previewing them in a "LightBox" window. IDK: Every other month, IDK asks people to come up with awesome ideas for new programs and webpages. After the end of the month, IDKs developers have another month to create one of the top rated websites or applications. Got a great idea for a new app? Let IDK build it for you.Interop 2: Microformats for Azure Cloud with OData-InterfacejSPoint - JavaScript Library for SharePoint: JavaScript for SharePoint (jSPoint) is a library that help SharePoint developers to create rich,dynamic, & powerfull pages for SharePoint sites.MVVM T4: T4 Templates for generating view models, and views for WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone using T4 Toolbox and MVVM LightNumericUpDown Control for WPF: A basic NumericUpDown Control for WPF that mirrors all the most used functions of the WinForms NumericUpDown Control and looks similar to itOData for IQToolkit: OData for IQToolkit, converts OData expressions into a usable expressions for IQToolkit providers.PLATO: PALTO is micro plate processing pipeline and supports enzymes and metabolites. PLATO was developed at INRA-Bordeaux and is an evolution of the EnzymeLaborTool developed at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology.Purdue CS 490: Model-based testing of ADO.NET: Five students from Purdue University will develop model-based tests for an aspect of ADO.NET during the Spring 2011 semester. We'll be using C# and Spec Explorer, among other tools.Replace in multiple Office 2010 documents: This program replaces a text string in multiple office 2010 documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). It is developed in VB.NET and new code for additional products is welcome. SearchEngine: A Website Search Engine and Crawler.Set Custom Currency Symbol: This utility enables you to set/register custom currency symbols for the .NET FrameworkSimple C# Email Templates: A really simple, really easy to use class for sending email templates. Reads any file from disk (think ".txt" or ".html") and matches custom tokens with the values you supply, in both the message body and the subject line. Supports multiple CC and BCC addresses.SimpleBasicAuthentication: SimpleBasicAuthentication makes it easier for developers to build a website with basic authentication using the credentials from just a text file. You'll no longer have to create new users on the system just to let them log in to the website or service. It's developed in C# 4.0.SpecsFor - Yet Another BDD Framework For .NET: SpecsFor is another Behavior-Driven Development framework that focuses on ease of use for *developers* by minimizing testing friction. Square: Custom SharePoint MyProfile PageSynchrolist workflow: Sharepoint workflow whitch perform automatic synchronisation between two lists in the same collection. Usefull for automatic translation.TFS Aggregator: This server side plugin for TFS 2010 enables dynamic calculation of field values in TFS. (For example: Dev work + Test Work = Total Work) Supports same work item and parent-child links. Also has support for aggregating string values (ie Children are Done so the parent is Done)Tinchant: My nice projectZebra_Image, a lightweight image manipulation library written in PHP: This is a compact (one-file only), lightweight, object-oriented image manipulation library written in and for PHP, that provides methods for performing several types of image manipulation operations. It doesn’t require any external libraries other than the GD2 extension.Zebra_Pagination, a generic pagination class written in PHP: A generic pagination class that automatically generates navigation links given the total number of items and the number of items per page.Zebra_Session, a wrapper for PHP’s default session handler, using MySQL: Zebra_Session is a PHP class that acts as a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions but instead of storing session data in flat files it stores them in a MySQL database, thus providing both better security and better performance.

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Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr

- by dwahlin

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies such as canvas and web sockets bring a lot of useful new features to the table that can take Web applications to the next level. These new technologies allow applications to be built using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allowing them to be viewed on a variety of form factors including tablets and phones. Although HTML5 features offer a lot of promise, it’s not realistic to develop applications using the latest technologies without worrying about supporting older browsers in the process. If history has taught us anything it’s that old browsers stick around for years and years which means developers have to deal with backward compatibility issues. This is especially true when deploying applications to the Internet that target the general public. This begs the question, “How do you move forward with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies while gracefully handling unsupported features in older browsers?” Although you can write code by hand to detect different HTML5 and CSS3 features, it’s not always straightforward. For example, to check for canvas support you need to write code similar to the following: <script> window.onload = function () { if (canvasSupported()) { alert('canvas supported'); } }; function canvasSupported() { var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); return (canvas.getContext && canvas.getContext('2d')); } </script> If you want to check for local storage support the following check can be made. It’s more involved than it should be due to a bug in older versions of Firefox. <script> window.onload = function () { if (localStorageSupported()) { alert('local storage supported'); } }; function localStorageSupported() { try { return ('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] != null); } catch(e) {} return false; } </script> Looking through the previous examples you can see that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to checking browsers for HTML5 and CSS3 features. It takes a lot of work to test every possible scenario and every version of a given browser. Fortunately, you don’t have to resort to writing custom code to test what HTML5/CSS3 features a given browser supports. By using a script library called Modernizr you can add checks for different HTML5/CSS3 features into your pages with a minimal amount of code on your part. Let’s take a look at some of the key features Modernizr offers. Getting Started with Modernizr The first time I heard the name “Modernizr” I thought it “modernized” older browsers by added missing functionality. In reality, Modernizr doesn’t actually handle adding missing features or “modernizing” older browsers. The Modernizr website states, “The name Modernizr actually stems from the goal of modernizing our development practices (and ourselves)”. Because it relies on feature detection rather than browser sniffing (a common technique used in the past – that never worked that great), Modernizr definitely provides a more modern way to test features that a browser supports and can even handle loading additional scripts called shims or polyfills that fill in holes that older browsers may have. It’s a great tool to have in your arsenal if you’re a web developer. Modernizr is available at http://modernizr.com. Two different types of scripts are available including a development script and custom production script. To generate a production script, the site provides a custom script generation tool rather than providing a single script that has everything under the sun for HTML5/CSS3 feature detection. Using the script generation tool you can pick the specific test functionality that you need and ignore everything that you don’t need. That way the script is kept as small as possible. An example of the custom script download screen is shown next. Notice that specific CSS3, HTML5, and related feature tests can be selected. Once you’ve downloaded your custom script you can add it into your web page using the standard <script> element and you’re ready to start using Modernizr. <script src="Scripts/Modernizr.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Modernizr and the HTML Element Once you’ve add a script reference to Modernizr in a page it’ll go to work for you immediately. In fact, by adding the script several different CSS classes will be added to the page’s <html> element at runtime. These classes define what features the browser supports and what features it doesn’t support. Features that aren’t supported get a class name of “no-FeatureName”, for example “no-flexbox”. Features that are supported get a CSS class name based on the feature such as “canvas” or “websockets”. An example of classes added when running a page in Chrome is shown next: <html class=" js flexbox canvas canvastext webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage websqldatabase indexeddb hashchange history draganddrop websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize borderimage borderradius boxshadow textshadow opacity cssanimations csscolumns cssgradients cssreflections csstransforms csstransforms3d csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage webworkers applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> Here’s an example of what the <html> element looks like at runtime with Internet Explorer 9: <html class=" js no-flexbox canvas canvastext no-webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage no-websqldatabase no-indexeddb hashchange no-history draganddrop no-websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize no-borderimage borderradius boxshadow no-textshadow opacity no-cssanimations no-csscolumns no-cssgradients no-cssreflections csstransforms no-csstransforms3d no-csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage no-webworkers no-applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> When using Modernizr it’s a common practice to define an <html> element in your page with a no-js class added as shown next: <html class="no-js"> You’ll see starter projects such as HTML5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com) or Initializr (http://initializr.com) follow this approach (see my previous post for more information on HTML5 Boilerplate). By adding the no-js class it’s easy to tell if a browser has JavaScript enabled or not. If JavaScript is disabled then no-js will stay on the <html> element. If JavaScript is enabled, no-js will be removed by Modernizr and a js class will be added along with other classes that define supported/unsupported features. Working with HTML5 and CSS3 Features You can use the CSS classes added to the <html> element directly in your CSS files to determine what style properties to use based upon the features supported by a given browser. For example, the following CSS can be used to render a box shadow for browsers that support that feature and a simple border for browsers that don’t support the feature: .boxshadow #MyContainer { border: none; -webkit-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; -moz-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; } .no-boxshadow #MyContainer { border: 2px solid black; } If a browser supports box-shadows the boxshadow CSS class will be added to the <html> element by Modernizr. It can then be associated with a given element. This example associates the boxshadow class with a div with an id of MyContainer. If the browser doesn’t support box shadows then the no-boxshadow class will be added to the <html> element and it can be used to render a standard border around the div. This provides a great way to leverage new CSS3 features in supported browsers while providing a graceful fallback for older browsers. In addition to using the CSS classes that Modernizr provides on the <html> element, you also use a global Modernizr object that’s created. This object exposes different properties that can be used to detect the availability of specific HTML5 or CSS3 features. For example, the following code can be used to detect canvas and local storage support. You can see that the code is much simpler than the code shown at the beginning of this post. It also has the added benefit of being tested by a large community of web developers around the world running a variety of browsers. $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.canvas) { //Add canvas code } if (Modernizr.localstorage) { //Add local storage code } }); The global Modernizr object can also be used to test for the presence of CSS3 features. The following code shows how to test support for border-radius and CSS transforms: $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.borderradius) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('borderRadiusStyle'); } if (Modernizr.csstransforms) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('transformsStyle'); } }); Several other CSS3 feature tests can be performed such as support for opacity, rgba, text-shadow, CSS animations, CSS transitions, multiple backgrounds, and more. A complete list of supported HTML5 and CSS3 tests that Modernizr supports can be found at http://www.modernizr.com/docs. Loading Scripts using Modernizr In cases where a browser doesn’t support a specific feature you can either provide a graceful fallback or load a shim/polyfill script to fill in missing functionality where appropriate (more information about shims/polyfills can be found at https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills). Modernizr has a built-in script loader that can be used to test for a feature and then load a script if the feature isn’t available. The script loader is built-into Modernizr and is also available as a standalone yepnope script (http://yepnopejs.com). It’s extremely easy to get started using the script loader and it can really simplify the process of loading scripts based on the availability of a particular browser feature. To load scripts dynamically you can use Modernizr’s load() function which accepts properties defining the feature to test (test property), the script to load if the test succeeds (yep property), the script to load if the test fails (nope property), and a script to load regardless of if the test succeeds or fails (both property). An example of using load() with these properties is show next: Modernizr.load({ test: Modernizr.canvas, yep: 'html5CanvasAvailable.js’, nope: 'excanvas.js’, both: 'myCustomScript.js' }); In this example Modernizr is used to not only load scripts but also to test for the presence of the canvas feature. If the target browser supports the HTML5 canvas then the html5CanvasAvailable.js script will be loaded along with the myCustomScript.js script (use of the yep property in this example is a bit contrived – it was added simply to demonstrate how the property can be used in the load() function). Otherwise, a polyfill script named excanvas.js will be loaded to add missing canvas functionality for Internet Explorer versions prior to 9. Once excanvas.js is loaded the myCustomScript.js script will be loaded. Because Modernizr handles loading scripts, you can also use it in creative ways. For example, you can use it to load local scripts when a 3rd party Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as one provided by Google or Microsoft is unavailable for whatever reason. The Modernizr documentation provides the following example that demonstrates the process for providing a local fallback for jQuery when a CDN is down: Modernizr.load([ { load: '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.js', complete: function () { if (!window.jQuery) { Modernizr.load('js/libs/jquery-1.6.4.min.js'); } } }, { // This will wait for the fallback to load and // execute if it needs to. load: 'needs-jQuery.js' } ]); This code attempts to load jQuery from the Google CDN first. Once the script is downloaded (or if it fails) the function associated with complete will be called. The function checks to make sure that the jQuery object is available and if it’s not Modernizr is used to load a local jQuery script. After all of that occurs a script named needs-jQuery.js will be loaded. Conclusion If you’re building applications that use some of the latest and greatest features available in HTML5 and CSS3 then Modernizr is an essential tool. By using it you can reduce the amount of custom code required to test for browser features and provide graceful fallbacks or even load shim/polyfill scripts for older browsers to help fill in missing functionality.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014Popular ReleasesGoogle .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????（???-5929）。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????（LZOM-5932）。 -BodyPadding???????，??“5”“5 10”，???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????，??????????????（Jango_Jing-5450）。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????（yygy-6002）。 -????????????????????????（Gnid-6018）。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????，??????????????????（yygy-6008）。 -?FState???????????????，????????????????（????-5925）。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????（FineU...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.020 Release 1: Updated Mod support. On startup, only stock items will appear in the Components list. Upon selecting and loading a saved world, the mods for that world only will then be loaded, and only from the local drive. If a mod has not been downloaded in Space Engineers, it will not download it for you. If you are developing a Mod, hitting "Reload" will also reload the mods as well as the saved world. If SEToolbox is crashing when loading a saved world containing mods, it is most likely because one ...Gum UI Tool: Gum 0.6.09: Fixed bug which would not allow plugins to be loaded when the app was distributed. Added animation plugin7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.9.8 Stable: Do you like this piece of software ? It took some time and effort to develop. Please consider helping me with a donation Feat : Lock file now holds process ID and RootDir. On subsequent launches script checks if previous process is still alive. In case it is not it will clean up orphaned junction root directory. Ensure no orphaned rootdirs are on disk and no lockfiles in %temp% directory before running this releaseDNN CMS Platform: 07.03.02: Major Highlights Fixed backwards compatibility issue with 3rd party control panels Fixed issue in the drag and drop functionality of the File Uploader in IE 11 and Safari Fixed issue where users were able to create pages with the same name Fixed issue that affected older versions of DNN that do not include the maxAllowedContentLength during upgrade Fixed issue that stopped some skins from being upgraded to newer versions Fixed issue that randomly showed an unexpected error during us...WordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140814 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -force switch parameter correctly Fixed New-HPOVUplinkSet and New-HPOVNetwork Fixed Download-File where HTTP stream compression was not handled, resulting in incorrectly writt...NeoLua (Lua for .net dynamic language runtime): NeoLua-0.8.17: Fix: table.insert Fix: table auto convert Fix: Runtime-functions were defined as private it should be internal. Fix: min,max MichaelSenko release.MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeOooPlayer: 1.1: Added: Support for speex, TAK and OptimFrog files Added: An option to not to load cover art Added: Smaller package size Fixed: Unable to drag&drop audio files to playlist Updated: FLAC, WacPack and Opus playback libraries Updated: ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag librariesEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Fluffy: Fluffy 0.3.35.4: Change log: Text editorSKGL - Serial Key Generating Library: SKGL Extension Methods 4 (1.0.5.1): This library contains methods for: Time change check (make sure the time has not been changed on the client computer) Key Validation (this will use http://serialkeymanager.com/ to validate keys against the database) Key Activation (this will, depending on the settings, activate a key with a specific machine code) Key Activation Trial (allows you to update a key if it is a trial key) Get Machine Code (calculates a machine code given any hash function) Get Eight Byte Hash (returns an...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...New Projectsapple TV: Apple TV project homepageArma 3 Battle Eye Client: Arma3BEClientASP.NET MVC AngularJS w/ Google Maps API: ASP.NET MVC sample using Google Maps API w/ AngularJS.CC-Classwork: Classwork from CoderCampsCompanyPortal: CompanyPortalcore: Building an Internet of Things (IoT, also Cloud of Things or CoT) core, drawing inspirations from the pre-existing Linus Torvalds linux kernel made from GNU/nixCRM Early Bound Class Simplifier: Simplifies the creation of a Dynamics CRM Early Bound Class. Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura: Este proyecto web se ha elaborado para la dirección desconcentrada de cultura de cajamarca a cargo de los practicantes de UPNC Sitemas computacionales.Energy Trail Site: NGO Site for designing and collaboration work.Hybrid Platform - Build anything: A Platform that built by loosely coupled architecture. You can build applications for Web, Desktop, Mobile, WCF Services - ASP.NET MVC on this concrete platformipad air: a web tool to sim display same as ipad airipad apps: A serices to support Ipad HD devise to request CURD for codeplex.comiphone 6: iphone6iphone air: Opend API lists for IPhone 6(iphone air)iphone apps: Bus API for iphoneiwatch: A priview version for iwtach API Named Colors in Silverlight: This project is a Silverlight dll to add the missing named colors from System.Windows.Media.Color. Once added as a reference, it makes using named colors easy!OOP_2113110295: Name: Nguyen Trung Thao ID 2113110295 Truong Cao Dang Cong Thuong Mon: OOPPagepark: PageparkProjektRepository: Eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung (VFU) um Forschungsdaten und Artefakte zu sammeln, gemeinsam zu nutzen, erschließen und mit Metadaten anreichern zu könnenRamonaSniffer: This will be the repository to host the zigbee snifferseawol: A Blog system base on node.jsSonar settings for TFS Build: Sample of configurations for Sonar to work with TFS for copy/pasteSon's Homework and learning to code: Just a collection of coding projects to learn from.SunBurn Terrain Editor: A fully functional standalone WYSWYG terrain (height map and color map) editor. Built upon the SunBurn Platform Framework allowing scope for Linux and Mac ports????.????????: 1) ??????? ???????? ?? 2) C# ?????????? (??????) ??? ???????? ?????? ???? (? ??????? *.dbf) ? ????? ???? 3) WinForms-?????????? ??? ???????????? ?????? ????

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Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr

- by dwahlin

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies such as canvas and web sockets bring a lot of useful new features to the table that can take Web applications to the next level. These new technologies allow applications to be built using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allowing them to be viewed on a variety of form factors including tablets and phones. Although HTML5 features offer a lot of promise, it’s not realistic to develop applications using the latest technologies without worrying about supporting older browsers in the process. If history has taught us anything it’s that old browsers stick around for years and years which means developers have to deal with backward compatibility issues. This is especially true when deploying applications to the Internet that target the general public. This begs the question, “How do you move forward with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies while gracefully handling unsupported features in older browsers?” Although you can write code by hand to detect different HTML5 and CSS3 features, it’s not always straightforward. For example, to check for canvas support you need to write code similar to the following: <script> window.onload = function () { if (canvasSupported()) { alert('canvas supported'); } }; function canvasSupported() { var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); return (canvas.getContext && canvas.getContext('2d')); } </script> If you want to check for local storage support the following check can be made. It’s more involved than it should be due to a bug in older versions of Firefox. <script> window.onload = function () { if (localStorageSupported()) { alert('local storage supported'); } }; function localStorageSupported() { try { return ('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] != null); } catch(e) {} return false; } </script> Looking through the previous examples you can see that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to checking browsers for HTML5 and CSS3 features. It takes a lot of work to test every possible scenario and every version of a given browser. Fortunately, you don’t have to resort to writing custom code to test what HTML5/CSS3 features a given browser supports. By using a script library called Modernizr you can add checks for different HTML5/CSS3 features into your pages with a minimal amount of code on your part. Let’s take a look at some of the key features Modernizr offers. Getting Started with Modernizr The first time I heard the name “Modernizr” I thought it “modernized” older browsers by added missing functionality. In reality, Modernizr doesn’t actually handle adding missing features or “modernizing” older browsers. The Modernizr website states, “The name Modernizr actually stems from the goal of modernizing our development practices (and ourselves)”. Because it relies on feature detection rather than browser sniffing (a common technique used in the past – that never worked that great), Modernizr definitely provides a more modern way to test features that a browser supports and can even handle loading additional scripts called shims or polyfills that fill in holes that older browsers may have. It’s a great tool to have in your arsenal if you’re a web developer. Modernizr is available at http://modernizr.com. Two different types of scripts are available including a development script and custom production script. To generate a production script, the site provides a custom script generation tool rather than providing a single script that has everything under the sun for HTML5/CSS3 feature detection. Using the script generation tool you can pick the specific test functionality that you need and ignore everything that you don’t need. That way the script is kept as small as possible. An example of the custom script download screen is shown next. Notice that specific CSS3, HTML5, and related feature tests can be selected. Once you’ve downloaded your custom script you can add it into your web page using the standard <script> element and you’re ready to start using Modernizr. <script src="Scripts/Modernizr.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Modernizr and the HTML Element Once you’ve add a script reference to Modernizr in a page it’ll go to work for you immediately. In fact, by adding the script several different CSS classes will be added to the page’s <html> element at runtime. These classes define what features the browser supports and what features it doesn’t support. Features that aren’t supported get a class name of “no-FeatureName”, for example “no-flexbox”. Features that are supported get a CSS class name based on the feature such as “canvas” or “websockets”. An example of classes added when running a page in Chrome is shown next: <html class=" js flexbox canvas canvastext webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage websqldatabase indexeddb hashchange history draganddrop websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize borderimage borderradius boxshadow textshadow opacity cssanimations csscolumns cssgradients cssreflections csstransforms csstransforms3d csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage webworkers applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> Here’s an example of what the <html> element looks like at runtime with Internet Explorer 9: <html class=" js no-flexbox canvas canvastext no-webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage no-websqldatabase no-indexeddb hashchange no-history draganddrop no-websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize no-borderimage borderradius boxshadow no-textshadow opacity no-cssanimations no-csscolumns no-cssgradients no-cssreflections csstransforms no-csstransforms3d no-csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage no-webworkers no-applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> When using Modernizr it’s a common practice to define an <html> element in your page with a no-js class added as shown next: <html class="no-js"> You’ll see starter projects such as HTML5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com) or Initializr (http://initializr.com) follow this approach (see my previous post for more information on HTML5 Boilerplate). By adding the no-js class it’s easy to tell if a browser has JavaScript enabled or not. If JavaScript is disabled then no-js will stay on the <html> element. If JavaScript is enabled, no-js will be removed by Modernizr and a js class will be added along with other classes that define supported/unsupported features. Working with HTML5 and CSS3 Features You can use the CSS classes added to the <html> element directly in your CSS files to determine what style properties to use based upon the features supported by a given browser. For example, the following CSS can be used to render a box shadow for browsers that support that feature and a simple border for browsers that don’t support the feature: .boxshadow #MyContainer { border: none; -webkit-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; -moz-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; } .no-boxshadow #MyContainer { border: 2px solid black; } If a browser supports box-shadows the boxshadow CSS class will be added to the <html> element by Modernizr. It can then be associated with a given element. This example associates the boxshadow class with a div with an id of MyContainer. If the browser doesn’t support box shadows then the no-boxshadow class will be added to the <html> element and it can be used to render a standard border around the div. This provides a great way to leverage new CSS3 features in supported browsers while providing a graceful fallback for older browsers. In addition to using the CSS classes that Modernizr provides on the <html> element, you also use a global Modernizr object that’s created. This object exposes different properties that can be used to detect the availability of specific HTML5 or CSS3 features. For example, the following code can be used to detect canvas and local storage support. You can see that the code is much simpler than the code shown at the beginning of this post. It also has the added benefit of being tested by a large community of web developers around the world running a variety of browsers. $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.canvas) { //Add canvas code } if (Modernizr.localstorage) { //Add local storage code } }); The global Modernizr object can also be used to test for the presence of CSS3 features. The following code shows how to test support for border-radius and CSS transforms: $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.borderradius) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('borderRadiusStyle'); } if (Modernizr.csstransforms) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('transformsStyle'); } }); Several other CSS3 feature tests can be performed such as support for opacity, rgba, text-shadow, CSS animations, CSS transitions, multiple backgrounds, and more. A complete list of supported HTML5 and CSS3 tests that Modernizr supports can be found at http://www.modernizr.com/docs. Loading Scripts using Modernizr In cases where a browser doesn’t support a specific feature you can either provide a graceful fallback or load a shim/polyfill script to fill in missing functionality where appropriate (more information about shims/polyfills can be found at https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills). Modernizr has a built-in script loader that can be used to test for a feature and then load a script if the feature isn’t available. The script loader is built-into Modernizr and is also available as a standalone yepnope script (http://yepnopejs.com). It’s extremely easy to get started using the script loader and it can really simplify the process of loading scripts based on the availability of a particular browser feature. To load scripts dynamically you can use Modernizr’s load() function which accepts properties defining the feature to test (test property), the script to load if the test succeeds (yep property), the script to load if the test fails (nope property), and a script to load regardless of if the test succeeds or fails (both property). An example of using load() with these properties is show next: Modernizr.load({ test: Modernizr.canvas, yep: 'html5CanvasAvailable.js’, nope: 'excanvas.js’, both: 'myCustomScript.js' }); In this example Modernizr is used to not only load scripts but also to test for the presence of the canvas feature. If the target browser supports the HTML5 canvas then the html5CanvasAvailable.js script will be loaded along with the myCustomScript.js script (use of the yep property in this example is a bit contrived – it was added simply to demonstrate how the property can be used in the load() function). Otherwise, a polyfill script named excanvas.js will be loaded to add missing canvas functionality for Internet Explorer versions prior to 9. Once excanvas.js is loaded the myCustomScript.js script will be loaded. Because Modernizr handles loading scripts, you can also use it in creative ways. For example, you can use it to load local scripts when a 3rd party Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as one provided by Google or Microsoft is unavailable for whatever reason. The Modernizr documentation provides the following example that demonstrates the process for providing a local fallback for jQuery when a CDN is down: Modernizr.load([ { load: '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.js', complete: function () { if (!window.jQuery) { Modernizr.load('js/libs/jquery-1.6.4.min.js'); } } }, { // This will wait for the fallback to load and // execute if it needs to. load: 'needs-jQuery.js' } ]); This code attempts to load jQuery from the Google CDN first. Once the script is downloaded (or if it fails) the function associated with complete will be called. The function checks to make sure that the jQuery object is available and if it’s not Modernizr is used to load a local jQuery script. After all of that occurs a script named needs-jQuery.js will be loaded. Conclusion If you’re building applications that use some of the latest and greatest features available in HTML5 and CSS3 then Modernizr is an essential tool. By using it you can reduce the amount of custom code required to test for browser features and provide graceful fallbacks or even load shim/polyfill scripts for older browsers to help fill in missing functionality.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 11, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 11, 2012Popular ReleasesOstrivDB: OstrivDB 0.1: - Storage configuration: objects serialization (Xml, Json), storage file compressing, data block size. - Caching for Select queries. - Indexing. - Batch of queries. - No special query language (LINQ used). - Integrated sorting and paging. - Multithreaded data processing.Mido: Mido v0.7: Mido is the simplest utility that helps to make watermarks on images and resize them. It has a very thin installer. The program has beta mark but it is able to draw watermark text, watermark images, resize pictures. Change list: + Opacity option + Stroke option + Bold, italic, underline options + Show progress during loading of images + Allow rotate watermart + Allow write multiline text as watermark + Add text aligment if text contains several lines + Add button 'clear custom position' + A...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.4: Fixed a bug where the server ip was not logged properly in the stats file.Captcha MVC: Captcha Mvc 2.1.2: v 2.1.2: Fixed problem with serialization. Made all classes from a namespace Jetbrains.Annotaions as the internal. Added autocomplete attribute and autocorrect attribute for captcha input element. Minor changes. v 2.1.1: Fixed problem with serialization. Minor changes. v 2.1: Added support for storing captcha in the session or cookie. See the updated example. Updated example. Minor changes. v 2.0.1: Added support for a partial captcha. Now you can easily customize the layout, s...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the module printing function was only visible to administrators Fixed issue where pane level skinning was being assigned to a default container for any content pane Fixed issue when using password aging and FB / Google authentication Fixed issue that was causing the DateEditControl to not load the assigned value Fixed issue that stopped additional profile properties to be displayed in the member directory after modifying the template Fixed er...Advanced DataGridView with Excel-like auto filter: 1.0.0.0: ?????? ??????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.69: Fix for issue #18766: build task should not build the output if it's newer than all the input files. Fix for Issue #18764: build taks -res switch not working. update build task to concatenate input source and then minify, rather than minify and then concatenate. include resource string-replacement root name in the assumed globals list. Stop replacing new Date().getTime() with +new Date -- the latter is smaller, but turns out it executes up to 45% slower. add CSS support for single-...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: 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 Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...VidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.5.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release supports the Sandcastle October 2012 Release (v2.7.1.0). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release suppor...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.68.0: ClosedXML now resolves formulas! Yes it finally happened. If you call cell.Value and it has a formula the library will try to evaluate the formula and give you the result. For example: var wb = new XLWorkbook(); var ws = wb.AddWorksheet("Sheet1"); ws.Cell("A1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("B1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("C1").FormulaA1 = "\"The total value is: \" & SUM(A1:B2)"; var...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 10: New feature - Added Portable build to NuGet package New feature - Added GetValue and TryGetValue with StringComparison to JObject Change - Improved duplicate object reference id error message Fix - Fixed error when comparing empty JObjects Fix - Fixed SecAnnotate warnings Fix - Fixed error when comparing DateTime JValue with a DateTimeOffset JValue Fix - Fixed serializer sometimes not using DateParseHandling setting Fix - Fixed error in JsonWriter.WriteToken when writing a DateT...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.2: Changes: Tested against KeePass 2.20.1 Tested under Ubuntu 12.10 (and KeePass 2.20) Added GenerateAsUtf8 method returning the encrypted passphrase as a UTF8 byte array.TelerikMvcGridCustomBindingHelper: Version 1.0.15.279-RC3: TelerikMvcGridCustomBindingHelper 1.0.15.279 RC3 Release notes: This is a RC version (hopefully the last one), please test and report any error or problem you encounter. Configurable null handling when filtering (AcceptNullValuesWhenFiltering, NullSubstitutes and NullAliases) Internal DynamicWhereClause improvments GridGridCustomBindingHelper.UseProjections method now acept ProjectionsOptions parameter for easely determine which properties should be projected Isolate and hide some are...JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.2: 1.4.2patterns & practices: Prism: Prism for .NET 4.5: This is a release does not include any functionality changes over Prism 4.1 Desktop. These assemblies target .NET 4.5. These assemblies also were compiled against updated dependencies: Unity 3.0 and Common Service Locator (Portable Class Library).Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.8.0: Snoop 2.8.0Announcing Snoop 2.8.0! It's been exactly six months since the last release, and this one has a bunch of goodies in it. In particular, there is now a PowerShell scripting tab, compliments of Bailey Ling. With this tab, the possibilities are limitless. It basically lets you automate/script the application that you are Snooping. Bailey has a couple blog posts (one and two) on his tab already, and I am sure more is to come. Please note that if you do not have PowerShell installed, y...Z3: Z3 4.1.2: Minor fixes. Now, z3 compiles with gcc 4.7.x.NET Micro Framework: .NET MF 4.3 (Beta): This is the 4.3 Beta version of the .NET Micro Framework. Feature List for v4.3 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (including the Windows Desktop Express version) All v4.2 QFEs features and bug fixes (PWM enhancements, lwIP and network driver reliability improvements, Analog Output, WinUSB and latest GCC support) Improved diagnostic information for deployment Decreased boot time Bug fixes Work Item 1736 - Create link for MFDeploy under start menu Work Item 1504 - Customizing lwIP o...New Projects.NET 4.0 Object/Function DLL interface: A Visual Basic .NET 4.0 Object / Function interface for quick and easy updating.AzureDirectory Library for Lucene.Net: This project allows you to create Lucene Indexes via a Lucene Directory object which uses Windows Azure BlobStorage for persistent storage.Building Modern Mobile Web Apps: This project provides guidance on building mobile web experiences using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Developing web apps for mobile browsers can be less forgiviC# Singleton Base-Class: C# Singleton Base Class is a single, simple C# class used to implement the Singleton pattern through inheritance.C++ Unit Test Library for Windows Store apps with Async Helper: This Visual Studio extension will install a project template for C++ Unit Test Library for Windows Store apps that contains async helper.Citrix Mobile Application SDK Samples: This site contains our latest prototype samples for the Citrix Mobile Application SDK for you to play with.eBrain Engine: eBrain Engine is a software to administer neuropsychological tests by means of advanced I/F devices like BCI P300 and eye-tracking systemsFairycake: A game about a little witch. Java. FedEx Connector for AbleCommerce Gold: This plugin provides FedEx rating and tracking services for the AbleCommerce shopping cart.Free - Simple Phone Book (SimPB): An alternative to backup your telephone contacts. Portable, easy to use, multilingual.GPXLocalTime2UTC: Time Format Converter, from Local to UTC, for GPX Files A small utility made to open GPX files (XML), search for the "time" tag, then transform the local time Grid Solutions Framework: Core classes to manage, analyze, and visualize real-time and historical data. This project combines the time-series framework and TVA code library projects.HireMe: HireMe is a HR application that works in conjunction with the HiremeMagazine.com website. The app will run in Android, iOS and WebOS.my-sim-asdf: my greate toolOdeToFoodMvc4: Source code for "Building Applications with ASP.NET MVC 4"OrgCharts for SharePoint: Months of planning, design, development and testing have gone into a truly phenomenal Org Chart experiencePDC BW2: A pkm editor application that tries to make easier legal pkm Packed with Legality Analysis, Event downloader and more...PI Payroll system: This is a payroll system for People Index, LLC.Project13251011: fsdQuickWick.NET - Agile Pproject Management: QuickWick.NET is a simple and effective web-based solution for agile project management.SharePoint 2010 Top Nav: This project was created when a project I was on required a Navigation scheme to manage site collections. SisGAC: Sistema de Gerenciamento de Artigos para CongressosTriDes_project_3AO: encryptohideVB6Doc: Visual Basic 6 Documentor (VB6 Doc)VideoChat: Simple VideoChat web-application on ASP.NET MVC4, SignalR, Wowza Media Server/Windows Updater Open: This is an alternative to the Windows Update software on all versions of Windows OS and the WSUS provided for corporations to update multiple machines.WOWAddonsUpdater: WPF App to update lua addons for the Blizzard World of warcraft gameyygua: email:huliang@yahoo.cnZJUDTS2: ????Silverlight?????????

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Windows 7 Samba issue

- by abduls85

We have a strange samba issue affecting only one user. Our samba setup is as follow : Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga) - Samba Server Samba version 3.0.33-3.14.el5 - Samba version Domain Controller WIN2008R2 Standard - Windows DC Windows 7 64 bit - Client PCs User mentioned that he faced this problem after he force shutdown his PC few weeks ago. By right, for all users when we access \\sambaservername in windows it will show all the shares in the samba server but for this user once he startup his PC he will not be able to access \\sambaservername, Error message Windows cannot access \\sambaservername Current workaround to solve the problem : Try to access one share in \\sambaservername for instance \\sambaservername\sharedfolder1. But even when doing so, it will first prompt an error in the beginning, error message is as follows Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. user need to enter the credentials again and he can access the share. Thereafter, he will be able to access \\sambaservername without any issues. But once he reboots his computer the problem will persists. Troubleshooting done so far: Ensure the following settings: Go to: Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Local Security Policy Select: Local Policies → Security Options "Network security: LAN Manager authentication level" → Send LM & NTLM responses "Minimum session security for NTLM SSP" → uncheck: Require 128-bit encryption Advise user to reset his password and try again but problem still persists Tried my account on users' PC, there is no issues. Tried user account on serveral other Windows 7 PC including mine but problem still persists. Windows XP does not have this problem. Ensure that there is no stored crendentials on the windows 7 PC. Checked the credentials manager in Control Panel as well as typing this command rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr Restart winbindd daemon on samba server but to no avail. I suspect this is due to some caching issue but not sure where is the issue. Whenever the user has error accessing \\sambaservername, the following errors will be logged in the samba server : [2012/10/10 17:10:26, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! [2012/10/10 17:10:27, 1] smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(316) Failed to verify incoming ticket with error NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE! But after workaround, there will be no more errors. I suspect after reading the article listed below some amendments need to be made to the \var\samba\cache directory : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/getent-passwd-dont-show-ad-groups-and-users-745829/ http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/tdb.html http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2010-May/155521.html http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2011-March/161912.html http://lzeit.blogspot.sg/2009/10/samba-shares-inaccessible-after-power.html There are several users using the samba server and i would like to solve this problem without any impacts. I saw the following article : http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/smb.conf.5.html#WINBINDCACHETIME "winbind offline logon (G) This parameter is designed to control whether Winbind should allow to login with the pam_winbind module using Cached Credentials. If enabled, winbindd will store user credentials from successful logins encrypted in a local cache. Default: winbind offline logon = false Example: winbind offline logon = true " Any idea on how to delete the entry for one user in the local cache ?

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Why can't I build Deluge?

- by hugemeow

Deluge is a BitTorrent Client. I am trying to build it from source, since I don't have privilege to install it as root. I am using python setup.py build. But, it failed following message, why? copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/slider/slider-v-thumb.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/slider/slider-thumb.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/panel/top-bottom.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/panel copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/tabs/tab-strip-bg.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/gray/tabs copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window/right-corners.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window/left-corners.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window/left-right.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window/top-bottom.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/window creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider/slider-v-thumb.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider/slider-thumb.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider/slider-bg.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider/slider-v-bg.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/slider copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/panel/top-bottom.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/panel copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/grid/hmenu-lock.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/grid copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/grid/hmenu-unlock.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/grid copying deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/tabs/tab-strip-bg.png -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/ui/web/themes/images/yourtheme/tabs running build_ext building 'libtorrent' extension gcc -pthread -shared -L/usr/lib64 -L/opt/local/lib -lboost_filesystem -lboost_date_time -lboost_iostreams -lboost_python -lboost_thread -lpthread -lssl -lz -o build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.4/deluge/libtorrent.so /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lboost_filesystem collect2: ld returned 1 exit status error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1 [mirror@innov deluge-1.3.5]$ echo $? 1 Edit 1: gcc version and os information $(which gcc) --version gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-52) Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. cat /etc/issue CentOS release 5.7 (Final) Kernel \r on an \m Edit 2: boost is referenced by setup.py in deluge 114 if OS == "linux": 115 if os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 116 'libboost_filesystem-mt.so')): 117 boost_filesystem = "boost_filesystem-mt" 118 elif os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 119 'libboost_filesystem.so')): 120 boost_filesystem = "boost_filesystem" 121 if os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 122 'libboost_date_time-mt.so')): 123 boost_date_time = "boost_date_time-mt" 124 elif os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 125 'libboost_date_time.so')): 126 boost_date_time = "boost_date_time" 127 if os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 128 'libboost_thread-mt.so')): 129 boost_thread = "boost_thread-mt" 130 elif os.path.exists(os.path.join(sysconfig.get_config_vars()['LIBDIR'], \ 131 'libboost_thread.so')): 132 boost_thread = "boost_thread" 133 134 if 'boost_filesystem' not in vars(): 135 boost_filesystem = "boost_filesystem-mt" 136 if 'boost_date_time' not in vars(): 137 boost_date_time = "boost_date_time-mt" 138 if 'boost_thread' not in vars(): 139 boost_thread = "boost_thread-mt" 140 141 elif OS == "freebsd": 142 boost_filesystem = "boost_filesystem" 143 boost_date_time = "boost_date_time" 144 boost_thread = "boost_thread" 145 else: 146 boost_filesystem = "boost_filesystem-mt" 147 boost_date_time = "boost_date_time-mt" 148 boost_thread = "boost_thread-mt" 149 150 librariestype = [boost_filesystem, boost_date_time, 151 boost_thread, 'z', 'pthread', 'ssl', 'crypto']

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How do I achieve lossless JPEG joining without truncation of partial MCUs?

- by Karan

I am working on a project for which I need to join thousands of JPEG images losslessly (I'm not talking about the Lossless JPEG/JPEG 2000/JPEG-LS formats here). Aforementioned images have varying levels of chroma subsampling (1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2), resulting in varying MCU sizes (8x8, 8x16, 16x8, 16x16 px). However, in any given set of images to be joined together, each image has identical characteristics. For now, let's assume I only have 2 images. Image #1 (I1) is 256x256px in size and #2 (I2) is 239x256px in size. 2x2 subsampling is used such that MCU size is 16x16px. I2 thus obviously has partial MCUs at the right edge, since its width is not evenly divisible by 16. (I've read that so-called 'partial' MCUs actually contain the data for a complete MCU, but the image dimensions instruct the renderer to only display the relevant pixels and ignore/hide the extra ones.) Looking around for tools that could help me accomplish this, I came across a modified version of JpegTran, that contains an experimental lossless crop 'n' drop (cut & paste) feature. All the other apps I encountered that support lossless JPEG editing seem to utilise IJG's (JpegTran) code, so this seemed to be the logical choice. Also, given the sheer number of images, I wanted something that could preferably be run from the command-line so that I could automate the process with a script. Unfortunately, while everything else worked fine, it seems JpegTran truncates the partial MCUs instead of retaining them. Thus in the example above, the final joined image contains all of I1, but only 224x256px of I2. Why 224? because 239 = 14x16+15, which means there are 14 full MCUs along the width, and 1 partial MCU (just 1px short of the complete 16px). The last 15px is what is getting blanked, leading to a 495x256px image with 15px of blank (grey) pixels at the right edge. See images below (shame that imgur re-compresses them): (left )+ (right) = As you can clearly see, the red portion (15px) of I2 has been truncated by JpegTran. If the MCUs were 8px in width, the lost portion would have been the right-most 7px of I2. Similarly, joining I3 (256x239px) *below * I1 would cause the loss of 7 or 15px, depending on the MCU height of course: (top) + (bottom) = If this is better suited to some other StackExchange (or even non-SE) site/forum where JPEG/image encoding experts hang out, do let me know. Can what I am attempting even be done, or is the so-called 'lossless' JPEG crop 'n' drop only valid for images with no partial MCUs? (Maybe that is why the feature is still in an "experimental state" more than a decade after being introduced...) Until I know for sure that it is impossible, I am not interested in suggestions for lossy joining. Avoiding any generational loss whatsoever is the sole reason why I'm breaking my head over this, else I'd have had this done and dusted ages ago. Also, I am not interested in suggestions related to switching image formats. I do not control the source of the images. If it can be done, how? Please keep in mind that any alternate apps suggested must ideally be capable of automation, given the requirements stated above. (But given how it's unlikely I'm even going to receive a useful answer given the constraints, I would be happy with any app suggestion just as long as it actually works. I can always look into an AutoIT/AHK script or something later to automate it.) I understand that an odd-sized final image might cause issues, so I am fully prepared to accept any solution, even if it results in blank (preferably black) padding pixels to the right/bottom. What I mean is, I don't care if I1 + I2 is 496x256px (1px padding) or even 512x256px (17px padding) in size, as long as the final image contains all the actual image data from both source images, and the entire process is lossless. Obviously the lesser the padding (if any), the better, but at this point any solution will do. A Windows-based solution would be perfect, but a Linux-based one would be entirely acceptable.

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Nagios: NRPE: Unable to read output, Can't find the reason, can you?

- by Itai Ganot

I have a Nagios server and a monitored server. On the monitored server: [root@Monitored ~]# netstat -an |grep :5666 tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:5666 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN [root@Monitored ~]# locate check_kvm /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm -H localhost hosts:3 OK:3 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - ab2c7:running alpweb5:running istaweb5:running [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost -c check_kvm NRPE: Unable to read output [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost NRPE v2.14 [root@Monitored ~]# ps -ef |grep nrpe nagios 21178 1 0 16:11 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/nrpe -c /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg -d [root@Monitored ~]# On the Nagios server: [root@Nagios ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.159 -c check_kvm NRPE: Unable to read output [root@Nagios ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.159 NRPE v2.14 [root@Nagios ~]# When I check another server in the network using the same command it works: [root@Nagios ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.80 -c check_kvm hosts:4 OK:4 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - karmisoft:running ab2c4:running kidumim1:running travel2gether1:running [root@Nagios ~]# Running the check locally using Nagios account: [root@Monitored ~]# su - nagios -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm hosts:3 OK:3 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - ab2c7:running alpweb5:running istaweb5:running -bash-4.1$ Running the check remotely from the Nagios server using Nagios account: -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.159 -c check_kvm NRPE: Unable to read output -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.159 NRPE v2.14 -bash-4.1$ Running the same check_kvm against a different server in the network using Nagios account: -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H 1.1.1.80 -c check_kvm hosts:4 OK:4 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - karmisoft:running ab2c4:running kidumim1:running travel2gether1:running -bash-4.1$ Permissions: -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 4684 2013-10-14 17:14 nrpe.cfg (aka /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg) drwxrwxr-x. 3 nagios nagios 4096 2013-10-15 03:38 plugins (aka /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins) /etc/sudoers: [root@Monitored ~]# grep -i requiretty /etc/sudoers #Defaults requiretty iptables/selinux: [root@Monitored xinetd.d]# service iptables status iptables: Firewall is not running. [root@Monitored xinetd.d]# service ip6tables status ip6tables: Firewall is not running. [root@Monitored xinetd.d]# grep disable /etc/selinux/config # disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded. SELINUX=disabled [root@Monitored xinetd.d]# The command in /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg is: [root@Monitored ~]# grep kvm /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg command[check_kvm]=sudo /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm and the nagios user is added on /etc/sudoers: nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe The check_kvm is a shell script, looks like that: #!/bin/sh LIST=$(virsh list --all | sed '1,2d' | sed '/^$/d'| awk '{print $2":"$3}') if [ ! "$LIST" ]; then EXITVAL=3 #Status 3 = UNKNOWN (orange) echo "Unknown guests" exit $EXITVAL fi OK=0 WARN=0 CRIT=0 NUM=0 for host in $(echo $LIST) do name=$(echo $host | awk -F: '{print $1}') state=$(echo $host | awk -F: '{print $2}') NUM=$(expr $NUM + 1) case "$state" in running|blocked) OK=$(expr $OK + 1) ;; paused) WARN=$(expr $WARN + 1) ;; shutdown|shut*|crashed) CRIT=$(expr $CRIT + 1) ;; *) CRIT=$(expr $CRIT + 1) ;; esac done if [ "$NUM" -eq "$OK" ]; then EXITVAL=0 #Status 0 = OK (green) fi if [ "$WARN" -gt 0 ]; then EXITVAL=1 #Status 1 = WARNING (yellow) fi if [ "$CRIT" -gt 0 ]; then EXITVAL=2 #Status 2 = CRITICAL (red) fi echo hosts:$NUM OK:$OK WARN:$WARN CRIT:$CRIT - $LIST exit $EXITVAL Edit (10/22/13): Following all that, I am now able to get some response from the script: [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost -c check_kvm Unknown guests [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost NRPE v2.14 [root@Monitored ~]# /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm hosts:3 OK:3 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - ab2c7:running alpweb5:running istaweb5:running [root@Monitored ~]# su - nagios -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_kvm hosts:3 OK:3 WARN:0 CRIT:0 - ab2c7:running alpweb5:running istaweb5:running -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost -c check_kvm Unknown guests -bash-4.1$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H localhost NRPE v2.14 It seems like the problem is some how related to the check_nrpe command or something which is related to the nrpe installation on the server.

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