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• Currency Conversion in Oracle BI applications

  - by Saurabh Verma

  Authored by Vijay Aggarwal and Hichem Sellami A typical data warehouse contains Star and/or Snowflake schema, made up of Dimensions and Facts. The facts store various numerical information including amounts. Example; Order Amount, Invoice Amount etc. With the true global nature of business now-a-days, the end-users want to view the reports in their own currency or in global/common currency as defined by their business. This presents a unique opportunity in BI to provide the amounts in converted rates either by pre-storing or by doing on-the-fly conversions while displaying the reports to the users. Source Systems OBIA caters to various source systems like EBS, PSFT, Sebl, JDE, Fusion etc. Each source has its own unique and intricate ways of defining and storing currency data, doing currency conversions and presenting to the OLTP users. For example; EBS stores conversion rates between currencies which can be classified by conversion rates, like Corporate rate, Spot rate, Period rate etc. Siebel stores exchange rates by conversion rates like Daily. EBS/Fusion stores the conversion rates for each day, where as PSFT/Siebel store for a range of days. PSFT has Rate Multiplication Factor and Rate Division Factor and we need to calculate the Rate based on them, where as other Source systems store the Currency Exchange Rate directly. OBIA Design The data consolidation from various disparate source systems, poses the challenge to conform various currencies, rate types, exchange rates etc., and designing the best way to present the amounts to the users without affecting the performance. When consolidating the data for reporting in OBIA, we have designed the mechanisms in the Common Dimension, to allow users to report based on their required currencies. OBIA Facts store amounts in various currencies: Document Currency: This is the currency of the actual transaction. For a multinational company, this can be in various currencies. Local Currency: This is the base currency in which the accounting entries are recorded by the business. This is generally defined in the Ledger of the company. Global Currencies: OBIA provides five Global Currencies. Three are used across all modules. The last two are for CRM only. A Global currency is very useful when creating reports where the data is viewed enterprise-wide. Example; a US based multinational would want to see the reports in USD. The company will choose USD as one of the global currencies. OBIA allows users to define up-to five global currencies during the initial implementation. The term Currency Preference is used to designate the set of values: Document Currency, Local Currency, Global Currency 1, Global Currency 2, Global Currency 3; which are shared among all modules. There are four more currency preferences, specific to certain modules: Global Currency 4 (aka CRM Currency) and Global Currency 5 which are used in CRM; and Project Currency and Contract Currency, used in Project Analytics. When choosing Local Currency for Currency preference, the data will show in the currency of the Ledger (or Business Unit) in the prompt. So it is important to select one Ledger or Business Unit when viewing data in Local Currency. More on this can be found in the section: Toggling Currency Preferences in the Dashboard. Design Logic When extracting the fact data, the OOTB mappings extract and load the document amount, and the local amount in target tables. It also loads the exchange rates required to convert the document amount into the corresponding global amounts. If the source system only provides the document amount in the transaction, the extract mapping does a lookup to get the Local currency code, and the Local exchange rate. The Load mapping then uses the local currency code and rate to derive the local amount. The load mapping also fetches the Global Currencies and looks up the corresponding exchange rates. The lookup of exchange rates is done via the Exchange Rate Dimension provided as a Common/Conforming Dimension in OBIA. The Exchange Rate Dimension stores the exchange rates between various currencies for a date range and Rate Type. Two physical tables W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are used to provide the lookups and conversions between currencies. The data is loaded from the source system’s Ledger tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores the exchange rates between currencies with a date range. On the other hand, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G stores the currency conversions between the document currency and the pre-defined five Global Currencies for each day. Based on the requirements, the fact mappings can decide and use one or both tables to do the conversion. Currency design in OBIA also taps into the MLS and Domain architecture, thus allowing the users to map the currencies to a universal Domain during the implementation time. This is especially important for companies deploying and using OBIA with multiple source adapters. Some Gotchas to Look for It is necessary to think through the currencies during the initial implementation. 1) Identify various types of currencies that are used by your business. Understand what will be your Local (or Base) and Documentation currency. Identify various global currencies that your users will want to look at the reports. This will be based on the global nature of your business. Changes to these currencies later in the project, while permitted, but may cause Full data loads and hence lost time. 2) If the user has a multi source system make sure that the Global Currencies and Global Rate Types chosen in Configuration Manager do have the corresponding source specific counterparts. In other words, make sure for every DW specific value chosen for Currency Code or Rate Type, there is a source Domain mapping already done. Technical Section This section will briefly mention the technical scenarios employed in the OBIA adaptors to extract data from each source system. In OBIA, we have two main tables which store the Currency Rate information as explained in previous sections. W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are the two tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores all the Currency Conversions present in the source system. It captures data for a Date Range. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G has Global Currency Conversions stored at a Daily level. However the challenge here is to store all the 5 Global Currency Exchange Rates in a single record for each From Currency. Let’s voyage further into the Source System Extraction logic for each of these tables and understand the flow briefly. EBS: In EBS, we have Currency Data stored in GL_DAILY_RATES table. As the name indicates GL_DAILY_RATES EBS table has data at a daily level. However in our warehouse we store the data with a Date Range and insert a new range record only when the Exchange Rate changes for a particular From Currency, To Currency and Rate Type. Below are the main logical steps that we employ in this process. (Incremental Flow only) – Cleanup the data in W_EXCH_RATE_G. Delete the records which have Start Date > minimum conversion date Update the End Date of the existing records. Compress the daily data from GL_DAILY_RATES table into Range Records. Incremental map uses $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY as an extra parameter. Generate Previous Rate, Previous Date and Next Date for each of the Daily record from the OLTP. Filter out the records which have Conversion Rate same as Previous Rates or if the Conversion Date lies within a single day range. Mark the records as ‘Keep’ and ‘Filter’ and also get the final End Date for the single Range record (Unique Combination of From Date, To Date, Rate and Conversion Date). Filter the records marked as ‘Filter’ in the INFA map. The above steps will load W_EXCH_RATE_GS. Step 0 updates/deletes W_EXCH_RATE_G directly. SIL map will then insert/update the GS data into W_EXCH_RATE_G. These steps convert the daily records in GL_DAILY_RATES to Range records in W_EXCH_RATE_G. We do not need such special logic for loading W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. This is a table where we store data at a Daily Granular Level. However we need to pivot the data because the data present in multiple rows in source tables needs to be stored in different columns of the same row in DW. We use GROUP BY and CASE logic to achieve this. Fusion: Fusion has extraction logic very similar to EBS. The only difference is that the Cleanup logic that was mentioned in step 0 above does not use $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY parameter. In Fusion we bring all the Exchange Rates in Incremental as well and do the cleanup. The SIL then takes care of Insert/Updates accordingly. PeopleSoft:PeopleSoft does not have From Date and To Date explicitly in the Source tables. Let’s look at an example. Please note that this is achieved from PS1 onwards only. 1 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 45 31 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 46 PSFT stores records in above fashion. This means that Exchange Rate of 45 for USD to INR is applicable for 1 Jan 2010 to 30 Jan 2010. We need to store data in this fashion in DW. Also PSFT has Exchange Rate stored as RATE_MULT and RATE_DIV. We need to do a RATE_MULT/RATE_DIV to get the correct Exchange Rate. We generate From Date and To Date while extracting data from source and this has certain assumptions: If a record gets updated/inserted in the source, it will be extracted in incremental. Also if this updated/inserted record is between other dates, then we also extract the preceding and succeeding records (based on dates) of this record. This is required because we need to generate a range record and we have 3 records whose ranges have changed. Taking the same example as above, if there is a new record which gets inserted on 15 Jan 2010; the new ranges are 1 Jan to 14 Jan, 15 Jan to 30 Jan and 31 Jan to Next available date. Even though 1 Jan record and 31 Jan have not changed, we will still extract them because the range is affected. Similar logic is used for Global Exchange Rate Extraction. We create the Range records and get it into a Temporary table. Then we join to Day Dimension, create individual records and pivot the data to get the 5 Global Exchange Rates for each From Currency, Date and Rate Type. Siebel: Siebel Facts are dependent on Global Exchange Rates heavily and almost none of them really use individual Exchange Rates. In other words, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G is the main table used in Siebel from PS1 release onwards. As of January 2002, the Euro Triangulation method for converting between currencies belonging to EMU members is not needed for present and future currency exchanges. However, the method is still available in Siebel applications, as are the old currencies, so that historical data can be maintained accurately. The following description applies only to historical data needing conversion prior to the 2002 switch to the Euro for the EMU member countries. If a country is a member of the European Monetary Union (EMU), you should convert its currency to other currencies through the Euro. This is called triangulation, and it is used whenever either currency being converted has EMU Triangulation checked. Due to this, there are multiple extraction flows in SEBL ie. EUR to EMU, EUR to NonEMU, EUR to DMC and so on. We load W_EXCH_RATE_G through multiple flows with these data. This has been kept same as previous versions of OBIA. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G being a new table does not have such needs. However SEBL does not have From Date and To Date columns in the Source tables similar to PSFT. We use similar extraction logic as explained in PSFT section for SEBL as well. What if all 5 Global Currencies configured are same? As mentioned in previous sections, from PS1 onwards we store Global Exchange Rates in W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G table. The extraction logic for this table involves Pivoting data from multiple rows into a single row with 5 Global Exchange Rates in 5 columns. As mentioned in previous sections, we use CASE and GROUP BY functions to achieve this. This approach poses a unique problem when all the 5 Global Currencies Chosen are same. For example – If the user configures all 5 Global Currencies as ‘USD’ then the extract logic will not be able to generate a record for From Currency=USD. This is because, not all Source Systems will have a USD->USD conversion record. We have _Generated mappings to take care of this case. We generate a record with Conversion Rate=1 for such cases. Reusable Lookups Before PS1, we had a Mapplet for Currency Conversions. In PS1, we only have reusable Lookups- LKP_W_EXCH_RATE_G and LKP_W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. These lookups have another layer of logic so that all the lookup conditions are met when they are used in various Fact Mappings. Any user who would want to do a LKP on W_EXCH_RATE_G or W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G should and must use these Lookups. A direct join or Lookup on the tables might lead to wrong data being returned. Changing Currency preferences in the Dashboard: In the 796x series, all amount metrics in OBIA were showing the Global1 amount. The customer needed to change the metric definitions to show them in another Currency preference. Project Analytics started supporting currency preferences since 7.9.6 release though, and it published a Tech note for other module customers to add toggling between currency preferences to the solution. List of Currency Preferences Starting from 11.1.1.x release, the BI Platform added a new feature to support multiple currencies. The new session variable (PREFERRED_CURRENCY) is populated through a newly introduced currency prompt. This prompt can take its values from the xml file: userpref_currencies_OBIA.xml, which is hosted in the BI Server installation folder, under :< home>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\userpref_currencies.xml This file contains the list of currency preferences, like“Local Currency”, “Global Currency 1”,…which customers can also rename to give them more meaningful business names. There are two options for showing the list of currency preferences to the user in the dashboard: Static and Dynamic. In Static mode, all users will see the full list as in the user preference currencies file. In the Dynamic mode, the list shown in the currency prompt drop down is a result of a dynamic query specified in the same file. Customers can build some security into the rpd, so the list of currency preferences will be based on the user roles…BI Applications built a subject area: “Dynamic Currency Preference” to run this query, and give every user only the list of currency preferences required by his application roles. Adding Currency to an Amount Field When the user selects one of the items from the currency prompt, all the amounts in that page will show in the Currency corresponding to that preference. For example, if the user selects “Global Currency1” from the prompt, all data will be showing in Global Currency 1 as specified in the Configuration Manager. If the user select “Local Currency”, all amount fields will show in the Currency of the Business Unit selected in the BU filter of the same page. If there is no particular Business Unit selected in that filter, and the data selected by the query contains amounts in more than one currency (for example one BU has USD as a functional currency, the other has EUR as functional currency), then subtotals will not be available (cannot add USD and EUR amounts in one field), and depending on the set up (see next paragraph), the user may receive an error. There are two ways to add the Currency field to an amount metric: In the form of currency code, like USD, EUR…For this the user needs to add the field “Apps Common Currency Code” to the report. This field is in every subject area, usually under the table “Currency Tag” or “Currency Code”… In the form of currency symbol ($ for USD, € for EUR,…) For this, the user needs to format the amount metrics in the report as a currency column, by specifying the currency tag column in the Column Properties option in Column Actions drop down list. Typically this column should be the “BI Common Currency Code” available in every subject area. Select Column Properties option in the Edit list of a metric. In the Data Format tab, select Custom as Treat Number As. Enter the following syntax under Custom Number Format: [$:currencyTagColumn=Subjectarea.table.column] Where Column is the “BI Common Currency Code” defined to take the currency code value based on the currency preference chosen by the user in the Currency preference prompt.

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• Metro Walkthrough: Creating a Task List with a ListView and IndexedDB

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can work with data in a Metro style application written with JavaScript. In particular, we create a super simple Task List application which enables you to create and delete tasks. Here’s a video which demonstrates how the Task List application works: In order to build this application, I had to take advantage of several features of the WinJS library and technologies including: IndexedDB – The Task List application stores data in an IndexedDB database. HTML5 Form Validation – The Task List application uses HTML5 validation to ensure that a required field has a value. ListView Control – The Task List application displays the tasks retrieved from the IndexedDB database in a WinJS ListView control. Creating the IndexedDB Database The Task List application stores all of its data in an IndexedDB database named TasksDB. This database is opened/created with the following code: var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; The msIndexedDB.open() method accepts two parameters: the name of the database to open and the version of the database to open. If a database with a matching version already exists, then calling the msIndexedDB.open() method opens a connection to the existing database. If the database does not exist then the upgradeneeded event is raised. You handle the upgradeneeded event to create a new database. In the code above, the upgradeneeded event handler creates an object store named “tasks” (An object store roughly corresponds to a database table). When you add items to the tasks object store then each item gets an id property with an auto-incremented value automatically. The code above also includes an error event handler. If the IndexedDB database cannot be opened or created, for whatever reason, then an error message is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console window. Displaying a List of Tasks The TaskList application retrieves its list of tasks from the tasks object store, which we created above, and displays the list of tasks in a ListView control. Here is how the ListView control is declared: <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The ListView control is bound to the TaskList.tasks.dataSource data source. The TaskList.tasks.dataSource is created with the following code: // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); }; }; }; // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks }); Notice the success event handler. This handler is called when a database is successfully opened/created. In the code above, all of the items from the tasks object store are retrieved into a cursor and added to a WinJS.Binding.List object named tasks. Because the ListView control is bound to the WinJS.Binding.List object, copying the tasks from the object store into the WinJS.Binding.List object causes the tasks to appear in the ListView: Adding a New Task You add a new task in the Task List application by entering the title of a new task into an HTML form and clicking the Add button. Here’s the markup for creating the form: <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> Notice that the INPUT element includes a required attribute. In a Metro application, you can take advantage of HTML5 Validation to validate form fields. If you don’t enter a value for the newTaskTitle field then the following validation error message is displayed: For a brief introduction to HTML5 validation, see my previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/03/13/html5-form-validation.aspx When you click the Add button, the form is submitted and the form submit event is raised. The following code is executed in the default.js file: // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); The code above retrieves the title of the new task and calls the addTask() method in the tasks.js file. Here’s the code for the addTask() method which is responsible for actually adding the new task to the IndexedDB database: // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } The code above does two things. First, it adds the new task to the tasks object store in the IndexedDB database. Second, it adds the new task to the data source bound to the ListView. The dataSource.insertAtEnd() method is called to add the new task to the data source so the new task will appear in the ListView (with a nice little animation). Deleting Existing Tasks The Task List application enables you to select one or more tasks by clicking or tapping on one or more tasks in the ListView. When you click the Delete button, the selected tasks are removed from both the IndexedDB database and the ListView. For example, in the following screenshot, two tasks are selected. The selected tasks appear with a teal background and a checkmark: When you click the Delete button, the following code in the default.js file is executed: // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); The selected tasks are retrieved with the TaskList selection.getItem() method. In the code above, the deleteTask() method is called for each of the selected tasks. Here’s the code for the deleteTask() method: // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", “readwrite”); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } This code does two things: it deletes the existing task from the database and removes the existing task from the ListView. In both cases, the right task is removed by using the key associated with the task. However, the task key is different in the case of the database and in the case of the ListView. In the case of the database, the task key is the value of the task id property. In the case of the ListView, on the other hand, the task key is auto-generated by the ListView. When the task is removed from the ListView, an animation is used to collapse the tasks which appear above and below the task which was removed. The Complete Code Above, I did a lot of jumping around between different files in the application and I left out sections of code. For the sake of completeness, I want to include the entire code here: the default.html, default.js, and tasks.js files. Here are the contents of the default.html file. This file contains the UI for the Task List application: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Task List</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- TaskList references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/tasks.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: x-large; } form { display: inline; } #appContainer { margin: 20px; width: 600px; } .win-container { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <div> <!-- Templates --> <div id="taskTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <h1>Super Task List</h1> <div id="appContainer"> <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> <button id="btnDeleteTasks">Delete</button> <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the code for the default.js file. This code wires up the Add Task form and Delete button: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll().then(function () { // Get reference to Tasks ListView var tasksListView = document.getElementById("tasksListView"); // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); }); } }; app.start(); })(); Finally, here is the tasks.js file. This file contains all of the code for opening, creating, and interacting with IndexedDB: (function () { "use strict"; // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); }; }; }; // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks, addTask: addTask, deleteTask: deleteTask }); })(); Summary I wrote this blog entry because I wanted to create a walkthrough of building a simple database-driven application. In particular, I wanted to demonstrate how you can use a ListView control with an IndexedDB database to store and retrieve database data.

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• The Inkremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #4 - Make increments tangible

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/12/the-inkremental-architectacutes-napkin---4---make-increments-tangible.aspxThe driver of software development are increments, small increments, tiny increments. With an increment being a slice of the overall requirement scope thin enough to implement and get feedback from a product owner within 2 days max. Such an increment might concern Functionality or Quality.[1] To make such high frequency delivery of increments possible, the transition from talking to coding needs to be as easy as possible. A user story or some other documentation of what´s supposed to get implemented until tomorrow evening at latest is one side of the medal. The other is where to put the logic in all of the code base. To implement an increment, only logic statements are needed. Functionality like Quality are just about expressions and control flow statements. Think of Assembler code without the CALL/RET instructions. That´s all is needed. Forget about functions, forget about classes. To make a user happy none of that is really needed. It´s just about the right expressions and conditional executions paths plus some memory allocation. Automatic function inlining of compilers which makes it clear how unimportant functions are for delivering value to users at runtime. But why then are there functions? Because they were invented for optimization purposes. We need them for better Evolvability and Production Efficiency. Nothing more, nothing less. No software has become faster, more secure, more scalable, more functional because we gathered logic under the roof of a function or two or a thousand. Functions make logic easier to understand. Functions make us faster in producing logic. Functions make it easier to keep logic consistent. Functions help to conserve memory. That said, functions are important. They are even the pivotal element of software development. We can´t code without them - whether you write a function yourself or not. Because there´s always at least one function in play: the Entry Point of a program. In Ruby the simplest program looks like this:puts "Hello, world!" In C# more is necessary:class Program { public static void Main () { System.Console.Write("Hello, world!"); } } C# makes the Entry Point function explicit, not so Ruby. But still it´s there. So you can think of logic always running in some function. Which brings me back to increments: In order to make the transition from talking to code as easy as possible, it has to be crystal clear into which function you should put the logic. Product owners might be content once there is a sticky note a user story on the Scrum or Kanban board. But developers need an idea of what that sticky note means in term of functions. Because with a function in hand, with a signature to run tests against, they have something to focus on. All´s well once there is a function behind whose signature logic can be piled up. Then testing frameworks can be used to check if the logic is correct. Then practices like TDD can help to drive the implementation. That´s why most code katas define exactly how the API of a solution should look like. It´s a function, maybe two or three, not more. A requirement like “Write a function f which takes this as parameters and produces such and such output by doing x” makes a developer comfortable. Yes, there are all kinds of details to think about, like which algorithm or technology to use, or what kind of state and side effects to consider. Even a single function not only must deliver on Functionality, but also on Quality and Evolvability. Nevertheless, once it´s clear which function to put logic in, you have a tangible starting point. So, yes, what I´m suggesting is to find a single function to put all the logic in that´s necessary to deliver on a the requirements of an increment. Or to put it the other way around: Slice requirements in a way that each increment´s logic can be located under the roof of a single function. Entry points Of course, the logic of a software will always be spread across many, many functions. But there´s always an Entry Point. That´s the most important function for each increment, because that´s the root to put integration or even acceptance tests on. A batch program like the above hello-world application only has a single Entry Point. All logic is reached from there, regardless how deep it´s nested in classes. But a program with a user interface like this has at least two Entry Points: One is the main function called upon startup. The other is the button click event handler for “Show my score”. But maybe there are even more, like another Entry Point being a handler for the event fired when one of the choices gets selected; because then some logic could check if the button should be enabled because all questions got answered. Or another Entry Point for the logic to be executed when the program is close; because then the choices made should be persisted. You see, an Entry Point to me is a function which gets triggered by the user of a software. With batch programs that´s the main function. With GUI programs on the desktop that´s event handlers. With web programs that´s handlers for URL routes. And my basic suggestion to help you with slicing requirements for Spinning is: Slice them in a way so that each increment is related to only one Entry Point function.[2] Entry Points are the “outer functions” of a program. That´s where the environment triggers behavior. That´s where hardware meets software. Entry points always get called because something happened to hardware state, e.g. a key was pressed, a mouse button clicked, the system timer ticked, data arrived over a wire.[3] Viewed from the outside, software is just a collection of Entry Point functions made accessible via buttons to press, menu items to click, gestures, URLs to open, keys to enter. Collections of batch processors I´d thus say, we haven´t moved forward since the early days of software development. We´re still writing batch programs. Forget about “event-driven programming” with its fancy GUI applications. Software is just a collection of batch processors. Earlier it was just one per program, today it´s hundreds we bundle up into applications. Each batch processor is represented by an Entry Point as its root that works on a number of resources from which it reads data to process and to which it writes results. These resources can be the keyboard or main memory or a hard disk or a communication line or a display. Together many batch processors - large and small - form applications the user perceives as a single whole: Software development that way becomes quite simple: just implement one batch processor after another. Well, at least in principle ;-) Features Each batch processor entered through an Entry Point delivers value to the user. It´s an increment. Sometimes its logic is trivial, sometimes it´s very complex. Regardless, each Entry Point represents an increment. An Entry Point implemented thus is a step forward in terms of Agility. At the same time it´s a tangible unit for developers. Therefore, identifying the more or less numerous batch processors in a software system is a rewarding task for product owners and developers alike. That´s where user stories meet code. In this example the user story translates to the Entry Point triggered by clicking the login button on a dialog like this: The batch then retrieves what has been entered via keyboard, loads data from a user store, and finally outputs some kind of response on the screen, e.g. by displaying an error message or showing the next dialog. This is all very simple, but you see, there is not just one thing happening, but several. Get input (email address, password) Load user for email address If user not found report error Check password Hash password Compare hash to hash stored in user Show next dialog Viewed from 10,000 feet it´s all done by the Entry Point function. And of course that´s technically possible. It´s just a bunch of logic and calling a couple of API functions. However, I suggest to take these steps as distinct aspects of the overall requirement described by the user story. Such aspects of requirements I call Features. Features too are increments. Each provides some (small) value of its own to the user. Each can be checked individually by a product owner. Instead of implementing all the logic behind the Login() entry point at once you can move forward increment by increment, e.g. First implement the dialog, let the user enter any credentials, and log him/her in without any checks. Features 1 and 4. Then hard code a single user and check the email address. Features 2 and 2.1. Then check password without hashing it (or use a very simple hash like the length of the password). Features 3. and 3.2 Replace hard coded user with a persistent user directoy, but a very simple one, e.g. a CSV file. Refinement of feature 2. Calculate the real hash for the password. Feature 3.1. Switch to the final user directory technology. Each feature provides an opportunity to deliver results in a short amount of time and get feedback. If you´re in doubt whether you can implement the whole entry point function until tomorrow night, then just go for a couple of features or even just one. That´s also why I think, you should strive for wrapping feature logic into a function of its own. It´s a matter of Evolvability and Production Efficiency. A function per feature makes the code more readable, since the language of requirements analysis and design is carried over into implementation. It makes it easier to apply changes to features because it´s clear where their logic is located. And finally, of course, it lets you re-use features in different context (read: increments). Feature functions make it easier for you to think of features as Spinning increments, to implement them independently, to let the product owner check them for acceptance individually. Increments consist of features, entry point functions consist of feature functions. So you can view software as a hierarchy of requirements from broad to thin which map to a hierarchy of functions - with entry points at the top.   I like this image of software as a self-similar structure on many levels of abstraction where requirements and code match each other. That to me is true agile design: the core tenet of Agility to move forward in increments is carried over into implementation. Increments on paper are retained in code. This way developers can easily relate to product owners. Elusive and fuzzy requirements are not tangible. Software production is moving forward through requirements one increment at a time, and one function at a time. In closing Product owners and developers are different - but they need to work together towards a shared goal: working software. So their notions of software need to be made compatible, they need to be connected. The increments of the product owner - user stories and features - need to be mapped straightforwardly to something which is relevant to developers. To me that´s functions. Yes, functions, not classes nor components nor micro services. We´re talking about behavior, actions, activities, processes. Their natural representation is a function. Something has to be done. Logic has to be executed. That´s the purpose of functions. Later, classes and other containers are needed to stay on top of a growing amount of logic. But to connect developers and product owners functions are the appropriate glue. Functions which represent increments. Can there always be such a small increment be found to deliver until tomorrow evening? I boldly say yes. Yes, it´s always possible. But maybe you´ve to start thinking differently. Maybe the product owner needs to start thinking differently. Completion is not the goal anymore. Neither is checking the delivery of an increment through the user interface of a software. Product owners need to become comfortable using test beds for certain features. If it´s hard to slice requirements thin enough for Spinning the reason is too little knowledge of something. Maybe you don´t yet understand the problem domain well enough? Maybe you don´t yet feel comfortable with some tool or technology? Then it´s time to acknowledge this fact. Be honest about your not knowing. And instead of trying to deliver as a craftsman officially become a researcher. Research an check back with the product owner every day - until your understanding has grown to a level where you are able to define the next Spinning increment. ? Sometimes even thin requirement slices will cover several Entry Points, like “Add validation of email addresses to all relevant dialogs.” Validation then will it put into a dozen functons. Still, though, it´s important to determine which Entry Points exactly get affected. That´s much easier, if strive for keeping the number of Entry Points per increment to 1. ? If you like call Entry Point functions event handlers, because that´s what they are. They all handle events of some kind, whether that´s palpable in your code or note. A public void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {…} might look like an event handler to you, but public static void Main() {…} is one also - for then event “program started”. ?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 10, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 10, 2011Popular ReleasesZen4Sync, Orchestration and Test Load platform for SQL Server Merge Replication: Zen4Sync Report 1.0 - Excel Add-In: Zen4Sync Report is an Excel Add-In allowing you to generate reports based on the data generated by your Test Sessions. Choose a Zen4Sync Report release according to your version of Excel. The downloaded .zip archive contains all the resources needed to install the Zen4Sync Report Add-In for your version of Excel. For instrunctions on how to install, use and customize Zen4Sync Report, please see the Zen4Sync Report Guide.Candescent NUI: Candescent NUI Start Menu: This is the first version of the Candescent NUI Start Menu. There is currently only one item in the start menu by default (Windows Explorer). There is no user interface for configuration yet, but you can add programs yourself by adding lines to the file menu_config.csv. Please don't change the first line. Lines for programs have the following format: Name;Path Default Explorer;c:\windows\explorer.exe MyApp;c:\...\myapp.exe To show the menu, present your open hand to the kinect at a distan...Media Companion: MC 3.406b weekly: An minor issue was found with 3.406b, the fixed version is now posted.... Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you find MC not displaying movie data properly, please try a 'movie rebuild' to reload the data from the nfo's into MC's cache. Fixes Movies Readded movie preference to rename invalid or scene nfo's to info extension Fix crash during ...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5.1 is currently the most stable version and includes all of the functionality requested so far. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed an incorrect path to x64 client setup folder. It comes as a ZIP file that contains three files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively a...Windows Azure VM Assistant: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5 (Debug) - Test Release VersionSizeOnDisk: 1.8.0.3: Fix (issue 317): Main window icon loading error on windows server 2003 32bit runing on x86 cpu. Bypass of the Microsoft windows comexception.SketchFlow Template for Windows Phone: SketchFlow Template for Windows Phone 7: Initial release. Please make sure you are using a version of Blend with SketchFlow enabled and have also installed the the Mango developer tools for Windows Phone. fastJSON: v1.8: - Silverlight 4.0+ support merged - RegisterCustomType() for user defined serialization/deserialization without changing the source code open closed principalNetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9: Changes: - fix examples (include issue 16026) - add new examples - 32Bit/64Bit Walkthrough is now available in technical Documentation. Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...Reusable Library: V1.1.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.54.0: New on this release: 1) Mayor performance improvements. 2) AdjustToContents now take into account the text rotation. 3) Fixed issues 6782, 6784, 6788HTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx .15 ALPHA: This release fixes line counting a little bit and adds the masshighlight() sub, which highlights pasted and inserted code.AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.3: - Improved summoner spells are now displayed - Fixed some of the startup errors people got - Double clicking an item selects it - Some usability changes that make using AutoLoL just a little easier - Bug fixes AutoLoL v2 is not an update, but an entirely new version! Please install to a different directory than AutoLoL v1Host Profiles: Host Profiles 1.0: Host Profiles 1.0 Release Quickly modify host file Automatically flush dnsVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.SharePoint Search XSL Samples: SharePoint 2010 Samples: I have updated some of the samples from the 2007 release. These all work in SharePoint 2010. I removed the Pivot on File Extension because SharePoint 2010 search has refiners that perform the same function.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta5: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta5 ?????????? ???? ?? ???????? ???"????????"?? ????????????? ????????/???? ?? ???"????"??? ?? ??????????? ?? ?? ??????????? ?? ?????????????????? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ????????????Discussions???????? ????AcDown??????????????VFPX: GoFish 4 Beta 1: Current beta is Build 144 (released 2011-06-07 ) See the GoFish4 info page for details and video link: http://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GoFishSterling NoSQL OODB for .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4 and 5, and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.5: Welcome to the Sterling 1.5 RTM. This version is backwards compatible without modification to the 1.4 beta. For the 1.0, you will need to upgrade your database. Please see this discussion for details. You must modify your 1.0 code for persistence. The 1.5 version defaults to an in-memory driver. To save to isolated storage or use one of the new mechanisms, see the available drivers and pass an instance of the appropriate one to your database (different databases may use different drivers). ...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 10 - June 3, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To install and run the reference implementation, you must perform the fol...New ProjectsAngry Apps: A game platform written on top of XNA Game Studio. The purpose of this project is to project a vanilla type Game project which can be used in many types of games.BLooD_ICQ: bloodicqCloud Fox: Cloud Fox is a Windows Phone application that allows you to view your Firefox Sync data on your mobile phone. It is similar to Firefox Home for iPhone. The current version will target phones running NoDo, but future versions will eventually require Mango. The application is developed in C# using Silverlight, Json.Net, Mvvm Light and Ninject.Configuration files Merger: This program is to help to merge different config files(environmental difference) and common config file into a single web.config/app.config. CRM 2011 Plugin Utilities: This project contains utilities from CRM 2011 plugins. Genera/calculate full name of a custom entity given the first, last and middle name.CUDA driver API: Making the CUDA driver API as simple to use as the runtime API. Almost.DBXMLTransfer: Command line application that: 1) extracts xml returned by a stored procedure to a file and 2) passes xml contained in a file to a stored procedure (which can use it for inserts & updates for example)Dot Generator: This is a project I did to generate numbers using the number of the dots in the number it self to get a visual representation of how big larg numbers areDRYlib.Net: DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) -- or, in other words, code-reuse -- makes me create this Class Library so I don't have to keep creating the same code here and there. Feel free to use these snippets. I'm releasing them under a permissive license (Apache Public License 2.0). The DRYlib is created using Visual BASIC 2010 Express. What you can find in this DRYlib include, but not limited to: * CRC Hash algorithms * Simple, high-performance Integer extensions * Simple, oft-used Stri...DW.Configurations: DW.Configurations - Enables an easy handling of application settings Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.Game.MauMau: Its a MauMau game with the possibility to define all rules DW.Game.Sudoku: It's just a Sudoku gameDW.Interactivity: DW.Interactivity - Brings additional functionalities to WPF controls Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.Logging: DW.Logging - Supports an easy working with log files Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.Services: DW.Services - Brings standard services Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.SharpTools: DW.SharpTools - Brings additional possibilities to C# Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.UnitTests: DW.UnitTests - Gives some objects for easy UnitTests Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.WPFDev: DW.WPFDev - Some useful objects for developing custom controls and behaviors Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.DW.WPFToolkit: DW.WPFToolkit - A custom controls library Please see www.my.libraries.de for more information and documentation.Elucidate: A GUI to drive the SnapRAID command line (All supported platforms): Definition: explain in detail Synonyms: annotate, clarify, clear, clear up, decode, demonstrate, enlighten, exemplify, explicate, expound, get across, illuminate, illustrate, interpret, make perfectly clear This will take on the task of creating a SnapRAID GUI to drive it's command line options, but give a little help and clarification (And logging) to guide the novice user.FixWordProperties for Office 2003, 2007 and 2010: Ken Getz originally wrote the FixWordProperties I believe in 2006. I had a a few extra requirements like the ability to unlock locked files, without passwords, using the office interop model, instead of word and a few more things that I needed in the winter of 2007.Information System Alumni Community: Here is our Internet Programming project. This site help alumni to always keep interact with their friends through this site.They can track his friend name, city, occupation and then interact with them to (whoa..like Social Network right!!).Go check this out int main code samples: Repository for all demos/samples posted at http://blog.r2d2rigo.es/english/LarX - XNA Game Engine: LarX is an XNA Game Engine, 2D and 3D, that uses SunBurn for Rendering, sgMotion for animations, and BEPU for Physics. It enables developers to write quicly AAA games.Membership, Role and Profile Providers for develop, debug, test: These ASP.NET providers for Membership, Roles and Profiles are valuable during development, debugging and testing due to the ease of creating, removing and changing users, user roles, etc. Music search engine: Ilovethismusic.com lets you listen & download music based on your mood, weather, or any type of expression you can think of. Just press Play.NicolasLight: This is for business projectOlympic.Magazine: sport supplements e-shop projectProject Obscura: Project Obscura is a game about to be in development by a group of friends, more data soon...RegularExpressionTest: .SalesManagementSystem: SalesManagementSystemShoozla: Very simple and powerful tool to search for missing covers. It finds album covers automatically and periodically. It uses LASTFM web service (website registration needed). WPF Application developed in C# following a MVVM design pattern.Silverlight Mind Map demo: A Mind Map control library and sample application created in Silveright. Although the library can be useful by itself, the main goal of this project is to server as a demo and reference application for Wiki that shows different Silverlight testing techniques. SketchFlow Template for Windows Phone: The SketchFlow Template for Windows Phone adds a new SketchFlow template for Expression Blend users, making it fast and easy to prototype Windows Phone applications.Smart Blog: Smart Blog ????，??ASP.NET??，?????Entity Framework、MVC 3.0(razor)、WCF???。???????SqlCE?????，????????，????、??。 SQLiteManager (sys_27): SQLiteManager makes for manage SQLite Database. It's developed in C#. (WPF and use MVVM-patern)testing access to TFS: This is a just a trivial set of test files to learn about TFS. I am testing each step of this process and will try to document it for others. Maybe this is obvious to others, but I am still learning TFS.TFS NuGetter: NuGetter is a TFS 2010 Build Activity designed to provide packaging and deployment management to projects destined for a NuGet Gallery.

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• MonologFX: FLOSS JavaFX Dialogs for the Taking

  - by HecklerMark

  Some time back, I was searching for basic dialog functionality within JavaFX and came up empty. After finding a decent open-source offering on GitHub that almost fit the bill, I began using it...and immediately began thinking of ways to "do it differently."  :-)  Having a weekend to kill, I ended up creating DialogFX and releasing it on GitHub (hecklerm/DialogFX) for anyone who might find it useful. Shortly thereafter, it was incorporated into JFXtras (jfxtras.org) as well. Today I'm sharing a different, more flexible and capable JavaFX dialog called MonologFX that I've been developing and refining over the past few months. The summary of its progression thus far is pretty well captured in the README.md file I posted with the project on GitHub: After creating the DialogFX library for JavaFX, I received several suggestions and requests for additional or different functionality, some of which ran counter to the interfaces and/or intent of the DialogFX "way of doing things". Great ideas, but not completely compatible with the existing functionality. Wanting to incorporate these capabilities, I started over...incorporating some parts of DialogFX into the new MonologFX, as I called it, but taking it in a different direction when it seemed sensible to do so. In the meantime, the OpenJFX team has released dialog code that will be refined and eventually incorporated into JavaFX and OpenJFX. Rather than just scrap the MonologFX code or hoard it, I'm releasing it here on GitHub with the hope that someone may find it useful, interesting, or entertaining. You may never need it, but regardless, MonologFX is there for the taking. Things of Note So, what are some features of MonologFX? Four kinds of dialog boxes: ACCEPT (check mark icon), ERROR (red 'x'), INFO (blue "i"), and QUESTION (blue question mark) Button alignment configurable by developer: LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER Skins/stylesheets support Shortcut key/mnemonics support (Alt-<key>) Ability to designate default (RETURN-key) and cancel (ESCAPE-key) buttons Built-in button types and labels for OK, CANCEL, ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE, YES, and NO Custom button types: CUSTOM1, CUSTOM2, CUSTOM3 Internationalization (i18n) built in. Currently, files are provided for English/US and Spanish/Spain locales; please share others and I'll add them! Icon support for your buttons, with or without text labels Fully Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), with latest source code & .jar always available at GitHub Quick Usage Overview Having an intense distaste for rough edges and gears flying when things break (!), I've tried to provide defaults for everything and "fail-safes" to avoid messy outcomes if some property isn't specified, etc. This also feeds the goal of making MonologFX as easy to use as possible, while retaining the library's full flexibility. Or at least that's the plan.  :-) You can hand-assemble your buttons and dialogs, but I've also included Builder classes to help move that along as well. Here are a couple examples:         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.OK)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.CANCEL)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Please feel free to try it out and share your thoughts.")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.CENTER)                .build();         MonologFXButton.Type retval = mono.showDialog();         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.YES)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.NO)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .type(MonologFX.Type.QUESTION)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Does this look like it might be useful?")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.RIGHT)                .build(); Extra Credit Thanks to everyone who offered ideas for improvement and/or extension to the functionality contained within DialogFX. The JFXtras team welcomed it into the fold, and while I doubt there will be a need to include MonologFX in JFXtras, team members Gerrit Grunwald & Jose Peredas Llamas volunteered templates and i18n expertise to make MonologFX what it is. Thanks for the push, guys! Where to Get (Git!) It If you'd like to check it out, point your browser to the MonologFX repository on GitHub. Full source code is there, along with the current .jar file. Please give it a try and share your thoughts! I'd love to hear from you. All the best,Mark

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 08, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 08, 2013Popular ReleasesDynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of Kitting: Here is the AX 2012 R2 CU7 release of kitting. Released both as a XPO and a model.PantheR's GraphX for .NET: GraphX for .NET RELEASE v1.0.1: PLEASE RATE THIS RELEASE IF YOU LIKED IT! THANKS! :) RELEASE 1.0.1 + Changed ExportToImage() parameters: added useZoomControlSurface param that enables zoom control parent visual space to be used for export instead whole GraphArea panel. Using this technique it is possible to export graphs with negative vertices coordinates. + Added common interface IZoomControl for all included Zoom controls + Added new method GraphArea.GenerateGraph() that accepts only optional parameters and will use in...ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 131107 [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"Team Foundation Server Upgrade Guide: v3 - TFS 2013 Upgrade Guide: Welcome to the Team Foundation Server Upgrade Guide Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Known issues NoneUpgrading SharePoint section is not included yet. Independent technical review is pending.Epi Info™ - Community Edition: Epi Info 7 (build 7.1.3.0): ResourcesFor the latest stable downloads and all up-to-date help and training material, please visit the official Epi Info 7 website: http://www.cdc.gov/epiinfo/7 To watch training and overview videos, visit the Epi Info YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/EpiInfoVideosVidCoder: 1.5.12 Beta: Added an option to preserve Created and Last Modified times when converting files. In Options -> Advanced. Added an option to mark an automatically selected subtitle track as "Default". Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5878. Fixed auto passthrough not applying just after switching to it. Fixed bug where preset/profile/tune could disappear when reverting a preset.Compare .NET Objects: Version 1.7.4.0: Manual merge of patch 15325 from Farris to fix issues 9075 and 9076 relating to defects with Ignoring the Collection Order Applied patch 15263 from MariuszWojcik to support LINQ enumerators.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.9.25): XrmToolbox improvement Correct changing connection from the status dropdown Tools improvement Updated tool Audit Center (v1.2013.9.10) -> Publish entities Iconator (v1.2013.9.27) -> Optimized asynchronous loading of images and entities MetadataDocumentGenerator (v1.2013.11.6) -> Correct system entities reading with incorrect attribute type Script Manager (v1.2013.9.27) -> Retrieve only custom events SiteMapEditor (v1.2013.11.7) -> Reset of CRM 2013 SiteMap ViewLayoutReplicator (v1.201...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: SQL Server 2014 CTP2 In-Memory OLTP Sample, based: This sample showcases the new In-Memory OLTP feature, which is part of SQL Server 2014 CTP2. It shows the new memory-optimized tables and natively-compiled stored procedures, and can be used to show the performance benefit of in-memory OLTP. Installation instructions for the sample are included in the file ‘awinmemsample.doc’, which is part of the download. You can ask a question about this sample at the SQL Server Samples Forum Composite C1 CMS - Open Source on .NET: Composite C1 4.1: Composite C1 4.1 (4.1.5058.34326) Write a review for this release - help us improve, recommend us. Getting started If you are new to Composite C1 and want to install it: http://docs.composite.net/Getting-started What's new in Composite C1 4.1 The following are highlights of major changes since Composite C1 4.0: General user features: Drag-and-drop images and files like PDF and Word directly from own your desktop and folders into page content Allow you to install Composite Form Builder ...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.9.0: Implemented Recent Scripts list Added checking for plugin updates from AboutBox Multiple formatting improvements/fixes Implemented selection of the CLR version when preparing distribution package Added project panel button for showing plugin shortcuts list Added 'What's New?' panel Fixed auto-formatting scrolling artifact Implemented navigation to "logical" file (vs. auto-generated) file from output panel To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Home Access Plus+: v9.7: Updated: JSON.net Fixed: Issue with the Windows 8 App Added: Windows 8.1 App Added: Win: Self Signed HAP+ Install Support Added: Win: Delete File Support Added: Timeout for the Logon Tracker Removed: Error Dialogs on the User Card Fixed: Green line showing over the booking form Note: a web.config file update is requiredWPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.10 binaries: Now row summaries are updated whenever autofilter value sis modified.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9.1): This new version includes: - Include me option is back - Fixed the login bug reported latelyVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0c: Changes between 1.0b and 1.0c (11 November 2013) : Set correctly the minimum required version in volumes header (this value must always follow the program version after any major changes). This also solves also the hidden volume issueCaptcha MVC: Captcha MVC 2.5: v 2.5: Added support for MVC 5. The DefaultCaptchaManager is no longer throws an error if the captcha values was entered incorrectly. Minor changes. v 2.4.1: Fixed issues with deleting incorrect values of the captcha token in the SessionStorageProvider. This could lead to a situation when the captcha was not working with the SessionStorageProvider. Minor changes. v 2.4: Changed the IIntelligencePolicy interface, added ICaptchaManager as parameter for all methods. Improved font size ...Duplica: duplica 0.2.498: this is first stable releaseDNN Blog: 06.00.01: 06.00.01 ReleaseThis is the first bugfix release of the new v6 blog module. These are the changes: Added some robustness in v5-v6 scripts to cater for some rare upgrade scenarios Changed the name of the module definition to avoid clash with Evoq Social Addition of sitemap providerVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.50: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageHostHQ.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgMoney.net" links NEW: Added Support for "ImgSavy.com" links NEW: Added Support for "PixTreat.com" links Bug fixesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1311.02: Add three new Actions in Custom Updates : Work with Files (Copy, Delete, Rename), Work with Folders (Add, Delete, Rename) and Work with Registry Keys (Add, Delete, Rename). Fix a bug, where after resigning an update, the display is not refresh. Modify the way WPP sort rows in 'Updates Detail Viewer' and 'Computer List Viewer' so that dates are correctly sorted. Add a Tab in the settings form to set Proxy settings when WPP needs to go on Internet. Fix a bug where 'Manage Catalogs Subsc...New ProjectsBDTramite: El presente proyecto sera realizado por los alumnos: - Oliver Becerra Briones - Eduardo Tello Cruzado - Gustavo Huaripata Sanchez - Williams Infante PradoCONDIMAR: SISTEMA DE VENTAS CONDIMARCurso20480B201311: course project new horizonsDeck Builder 5000: This application is a very simple tool used to make deck building in your favorite card battling game a breeze! doinikTara: doinik taraDovizHesap: Özel Dvz Gelistirme ProjesiEventSys: Sistema de EventosItems Filter (WPF DataGrid column Filter).: WPF quick filter controls - all where you need it. This is the easiest way to enrich you DataGrid width quick filter in header like in Excell, but not only thatJade: ????????? kolhoz: ??????? ??? ????????? ?????????? ????LINQ2DynamoDB: A type-safe data context for AWS DynamoDB with LINQ and in-memory caching support. Allows to combine DynamoDB's durability with cache speed and read consistencyM5NDFD: MVC5 NorthWind DataFirst Microsoft Forefront 2010 R2 Powershell Extension: Powershell extensions for Microsoft Forefront 2010 R2 to enable usage of powershell from both Portal as Workflow Activity and Synchronization Engine as XMAMulti Database Migrator: Miltiple database migratorMy Bacon Recipe (Prototype): MyBaconRecipe is a VB.NET prototype website for bacon recipes. Users can add, seach & sort recipes. Developed by Justin Mifsud as part of Assignment2 (7COM0152)MYPROJECT-sareddy: Just Sample ProjectObjectStore - An easy to use ObjectRelational-Mapper: An easy to use OR-Mapper which supports Code only(no Designer) and existing Database(no Sync or Codegeneration) by implementing abstract Classes at runtime.Open Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance System (EIDSS™): SummaryPegion: A LAN Messenger projectPetshop2013_MyM: LolololoppeSmokeTest110713: awdawdPraxis: Esta es la primera prueba.Praxis2: PraxisProject Dionysus: Local Movie App being built undergroundProject JDT: About management system.PROJECT SITI KULIM: project siti punyaProject Taiping: Project TaipingPublic_Library: ???SHRFrameWork: This Framework use EF6 , Repository, Unit of Work and othre patternsteamtesting: teamtestingTheProject: The project for Samara team !Travel Website: Travel Website is a website that contains several hotels. Users can browse these hotels, view detailed info, comment and rate them.?ng d?ng chuy?n và nh?n s? ki?n trên windows: de an xay dung ung dung chuyen va nhan su kien tren windowsVehicle Statistics Analysis: Build a generic framework for extracting second hand vehicle retail pricing. Virtual joystick control (Silverlight, WP): Simple on-screen "virtual" joystick control for SilverlightVisual Studio Coverage file to Emma converter: Visual Studio Coverage file to Emma converter. Simple solution, can apply only one tool to five Visual Studio versions. Fast multicore processing.WebForms DataSourceControl for EntityFramework CodeFirst: A ASP.NET WebForms DataSourceControl for use with DbContext & CodeFirst.WPF Study: wpf study project ???????: ???????，???? Session ??????????.

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• How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

  - by kanichiro.nishida

    Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source:  Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0.  JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB  Database Type: Oracle  Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database.  Port: Enter the database port.  Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’.  Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU.   Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using  ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select     "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING",    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR,      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from    "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor.     Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the  questios like below.  How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!  

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• Metro Walkthrough: Creating a Task List with a ListView and IndexedDB

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can work with data in a Metro style application written with JavaScript. In particular, we create a super simple Task List application which enables you to create and delete tasks. Here’s a video which demonstrates how the Task List application works: In order to build this application, I had to take advantage of several features of the WinJS library and technologies including: IndexedDB – The Task List application stores data in an IndexedDB database. HTML5 Form Validation – The Task List application uses HTML5 validation to ensure that a required field has a value. ListView Control – The Task List application displays the tasks retrieved from the IndexedDB database in a WinJS ListView control. Creating the IndexedDB Database The Task List application stores all of its data in an IndexedDB database named TasksDB. This database is opened/created with the following code: var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; The msIndexedDB.open() method accepts two parameters: the name of the database to open and the version of the database to open. If a database with a matching version already exists, then calling the msIndexedDB.open() method opens a connection to the existing database. If the database does not exist then the upgradeneeded event is raised. You handle the upgradeneeded event to create a new database. In the code above, the upgradeneeded event handler creates an object store named “tasks” (An object store roughly corresponds to a database table). When you add items to the tasks object store then each item gets an id property with an auto-incremented value automatically. The code above also includes an error event handler. If the IndexedDB database cannot be opened or created, for whatever reason, then an error message is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console window. Displaying a List of Tasks The TaskList application retrieves its list of tasks from the tasks object store, which we created above, and displays the list of tasks in a ListView control. Here is how the ListView control is declared: <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The ListView control is bound to the TaskList.tasks.dataSource data source. The TaskList.tasks.dataSource is created with the following code: // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; tasks.dataSource.beginEdits(); if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); } else { tasks.dataSource.endEdits(); }; }; }; // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks }); Notice the success event handler. This handler is called when a database is successfully opened/created. In the code above, all of the items from the tasks object store are retrieved into a cursor and added to a WinJS.Binding.List object named tasks. Because the ListView control is bound to the WinJS.Binding.List object, copying the tasks from the object store into the WinJS.Binding.List object causes the tasks to appear in the ListView: Adding a New Task You add a new task in the Task List application by entering the title of a new task into an HTML form and clicking the Add button. Here’s the markup for creating the form: <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> Notice that the INPUT element includes a required attribute. In a Metro application, you can take advantage of HTML5 Validation to validate form fields. If you don’t enter a value for the newTaskTitle field then the following validation error message is displayed: For a brief introduction to HTML5 validation, see my previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/03/13/html5-form-validation.aspx When you click the Add button, the form is submitted and the form submit event is raised. The following code is executed in the default.js file: // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); The code above retrieves the title of the new task and calls the addTask() method in the tasks.js file. Here’s the code for the addTask() method which is responsible for actually adding the new task to the IndexedDB database: // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } The code above does two things. First, it adds the new task to the tasks object store in the IndexedDB database. Second, it adds the new task to the data source bound to the ListView. The dataSource.insertAtEnd() method is called to add the new task to the data source so the new task will appear in the ListView (with a nice little animation). Deleting Existing Tasks The Task List application enables you to select one or more tasks by clicking or tapping on one or more tasks in the ListView. When you click the Delete button, the selected tasks are removed from both the IndexedDB database and the ListView. For example, in the following screenshot, two tasks are selected. The selected tasks appear with a teal background and a checkmark: When you click the Delete button, the following code in the default.js file is executed: // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); The selected tasks are retrieved with the TaskList selection.getItem() method. In the code above, the deleteTask() method is called for each of the selected tasks. Here’s the code for the deleteTask() method: // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } This code does two things: it deletes the existing task from the database and removes the existing task from the ListView. In both cases, the right task is removed by using the key associated with the task. However, the task key is different in the case of the database and in the case of the ListView. In the case of the database, the task key is the value of the task id property. In the case of the ListView, on the other hand, the task key is auto-generated by the ListView. When the task is removed from the ListView, an animation is used to collapse the tasks which appear above and below the task which was removed. The Complete Code Above, I did a lot of jumping around between different files in the application and I left out sections of code. For the sake of completeness, I want to include the entire code here: the default.html, default.js, and tasks.js files. Here are the contents of the default.html file. This file contains the UI for the Task List application: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Task List</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- TaskList references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/tasks.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: x-large; } form { display: inline; } #appContainer { margin: 20px; width: 600px; } .win-container { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <div> <!-- Templates --> <div id="taskTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <h1>Super Task List</h1> <div id="appContainer"> <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> <button id="btnDeleteTasks">Delete</button> <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the code for the default.js file. This code wires up the Add Task form and Delete button: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll().then(function () { // Get reference to Tasks ListView var tasksListView = document.getElementById("tasksListView"); // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); }); } }; app.start(); })(); Finally, here is the tasks.js file. This file contains all of the code for opening, creating, and interacting with IndexedDB: (function () { "use strict"; // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; tasks.dataSource.beginEdits(); if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); } else { tasks.dataSource.endEdits(); }; }; }; // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks, addTask: addTask, deleteTask: deleteTask }); })(); Summary I wrote this blog entry because I wanted to create a walkthrough of building a simple database-driven application. In particular, I wanted to demonstrate how you can use a ListView control with an IndexedDB database to store and retrieve database data.

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• The case of the phantom ADF developer (and other yarns)

  - by Chris Muir

  A few years of ADF experience means I see common mistakes made by different developers, some I regularly make myself.  This post is designed to assist beginners to Oracle JDeveloper Application Development Framework (ADF) avoid a common ADF pitfall, the case of the phantom ADF developer [add Scooby-Doo music here]. ADF Business Components - triggers, default table values and instead of views. Oracle's JDeveloper tutorials help with the A-B-Cs of ADF development, typically built on the nice 'n safe demo schema provided by with the Oracle database such as the HR demo schema. However it's not too long until ADF beginners, having built up some confidence from learning with the tutorials and vanilla demo schemas, start building ADF Business Components based upon their own existing database schema objects.  This is where unexpected problems can sneak in. The crime Developers may encounter a surprising error at runtime when editing a record they just created or updated and committed to the database, based on their own existing tables, namely the error: JBO-25014: Another user has changed the row with primary key oracle.jbo.Key[x] ...where X is the primary key value of the row at hand.  In a production environment with multiple users this error may be legit, one of the other users has updated the row since you queried it.  Yet in a development environment this error is just plain confusing.  If developers are isolated in their own database, creating and editing records they know other users can't possibly be working with, or all the other developers have gone home for the day, how is this error possible? There are no other users?  It must be the phantom ADF developer! [insert dramatic music here] The following picture is what you'll see in the Business Component Browser, and you'll receive a similar error message via an ADF Faces page: A false conclusion What can possibly cause this issue if it isn't our phantom ADF developer?  Doesn't ADF BC implement record locking, locking database records when the row is modified in the ADF middle-tier by a user?  How can our phantom ADF developer even take out a lock if this is the case?  Maybe ADF has a bug, maybe ADF isn't implementing record locking at all?  Shouldn't we see the error "JBO-26030: Failed to lock the record, another user holds the lock" as we attempt to modify the record, why do we see JBO-25014? : Let's verify that ADF is in fact issuing the correct SQL LOCK-FOR-UPDATE statement to the database. First we need to verify ADF's locking strategy.  It is determined by the Application Module's jbo.locking.mode property.  The default (as of JDev 11.1.1.4.0 if memory serves me correct) and recommended value is optimistic, and the other valid value is pessimistic. Next we need a mechanism to check that ADF is issuing the LOCK statements to the database.  We could ask DBAs to monitor locks with OEM, but optimally we'd rather not involve overworked DBAs in this process, so instead we can use the ADF runtime setting –Djbo.debugoutput=console.  At runtime this options turns on instrumentation within the ADF BC layer, which among a lot of extra detail displayed in the log window, will show the actual SQL statement issued to the database, including the LOCK statement we're looking to confirm. Setting our locking mode to pessimistic, opening the Business Components Browser of a JSF page allowing us to edit a record, say the CHARGEABLE field within a BOOKINGS record where BOOKING_NO = 1206, upon editing the record see among others the following log entries: [421] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[422] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[423] Where binding param 1: 1206  As can be seen on line 422, in fact a LOCK-FOR-UPDATE is indeed issued to the database.  Later when we commit the record we see: [441] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[442] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 1 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[443] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[444] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[445] Update binding param 1: N[446] Where binding param 2: 1206[447] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [448] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [449] EntityCache close prepared statement ....and as a result the changes are saved to the database, and the lock is released. Let's see what happens when we use the optimistic locking mode, this time to change the same BOOKINGS record CHARGEABLE column again.  As soon as we edit the record we see little activity in the logs, nothing to indicate any SQL statement, let alone a LOCK has been taken out on the row. However when we save our records by issuing a commit, the following is recorded in the logs: [509] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[510] OracleSQLBuilder Executing doEntitySelect on: BOOKINGS (true)[511] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[512] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[513] Where binding param 1: 1205[514] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 2 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[515] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[516] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[517] Update binding param 1: Y[518] Where binding param 2: 1205[519] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [520] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [521] EntityCache close prepared statement Again even though we're seeing the midtier delay the LOCK statement until commit time, it is in fact occurring on line 412, and released as part of the commit issued on line 419.  Therefore with either optimistic or pessimistic locking a lock is indeed issued. Our conclusion at this point must be, unless there's the unlikely cause the LOCK statement is never really hitting the database, or the even less likely cause the database has a bug, then ADF does in fact take out a lock on the record before allowing the current user to update it.  So there's no way our phantom ADF developer could even modify the record if he tried without at least someone receiving a lock error. Hmm, we can only conclude the locking mode is a red herring and not the true cause of our problem.  Who is the phantom? At this point we'll need to conclude that the error message "JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is somehow legit, even though we don't understand yet what's causing it. This leads onto two further questions, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, and what's been changed anyway? To answer the first question, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, the Fusion Guide's section 4.10.11 How to Protect Against Losing Simultaneous Updated Data , that details the Entity Object Change-Indicator property, gives us the answer: At runtime the framework provides automatic "lost update" detection for entity objects to ensure that a user cannot unknowingly modify data that another user has updated and committed in the meantime. Typically, this check is performed by comparing the original values of each persistent entity attribute against the corresponding current column values in the database at the time the underlying row is locked. Before updating a row, the entity object verifies that the row to be updated is still consistent with the current state of the database.  The guide further suggests to make this solution more efficient: You can make the lost update detection more efficient by identifying any attributes of your entity whose values you know will be updated whenever the entity is modified. Typical candidates include a version number column or an updated date column in the row.....To detect whether the row has been modified since the user queried it in the most efficient way, select the Change Indicator option to compare only the change-indicator attribute values. We now know that ADF BC doesn't use the locking mechanism at all to protect the current user against updates, but rather it keeps a copy of the original record fetched, separate to the user changed version of the record, and it compares the original record against the one in the database when the lock is taken out.  If values don't match, be it the default compare-all-columns behaviour, or the more efficient Change Indicator mechanism, ADF BC will throw the JBO-25014 error. This leaves one last question.  Now we know the mechanism under which ADF identifies a changed row, what we don't know is what's changed and who changed it? The real culprit What's changed?  We know the record in the mid-tier has been changed by the user, however ADF doesn't use the changed record in the mid-tier to compare to the database record, but rather a copy of the original record before it was changed.  This leaves us to conclude the database record has changed, but how and by who? There are three potential causes: Database triggers The database trigger among other uses, can be configured to fire PLSQL code on a database table insert, update or delete.  In particular in an insert or update the trigger can override the value assigned to a particular column.  The trigger execution is actioned by the database on behalf of the user initiating the insert or update action. Why this causes the issue specific to our ADF use, is when we insert or update a record in the database via ADF, ADF keeps a copy of the record written to the database.  However the cached record is instantly out of date as the database triggers have modified the record that was actually written to the database.  Thus when we update the record we just inserted or updated for a second time to the database, ADF compares its original copy of the record to that in the database, and it detects the record has been changed – giving us JBO-25014. This is probably the most common cause of this problem. Default values A second reason this issue can occur is another database feature, default column values.  When creating a database table the schema designer can define default values for specific columns.  For example a CREATED_BY column could be set to SYSDATE, or a flag column to Y or N.  Default values are only used by the database when a user inserts a new record and the specific column is assigned NULL.  The database in this case will overwrite the column with the default value. As per the database trigger section, it then becomes apparent why ADF chokes on this feature, though it can only specifically occur in an insert-commit-update-commit scenario, not the update-commit-update-commit scenario. Instead of trigger views I must admit I haven't double checked this scenario but it seems plausible, that of the Oracle database's instead of trigger view (sometimes referred to as instead of views).  A view in the database is based on a query, and dependent on the queries complexity, may support insert, update and delete functionality to a limited degree.  In order to support fully insertable, updateable and deletable views, Oracle introduced the instead of view, that gives the view designer the ability to not only define the view query, but a set of programmatic PLSQL triggers where the developer can define their own logic for inserts, updates and deletes. While this provides the database programmer a very powerful feature, it can cause issues for our ADF application.  On inserting or updating a record in the instead of view, the record and it's data that goes in is not necessarily the data that comes out when ADF compares the records, as the view developer has the option to practically do anything with the incoming data, including throwing it away or pushing it to tables which aren't used by the view underlying query for fetching the data. Readers are at this point reminded that this article is specifically about how the JBO-25014 error occurs in the context of 1 developer on an isolated database.  The article is not considering how the error occurs in a production environment where there are multiple users who can cause this error in a legitimate fashion.  Assuming none of the above features are the cause of the problem, and optimistic locking is turned on (this error is not possible if pessimistic locking is the default mode *and* none of the previous causes are possible), JBO-25014 is quite feasible in a production ADF application if 2 users modify the same record. At this point under project timelines pressure, the obvious fix for developers is to drop both database triggers and default values from the underlying tables.  However we must be careful that these legacy constructs aren't used and assumed to be in place by other legacy systems.  Dropping the database triggers or default value that the existing Oracle Forms  applications assumes and requires to be in place could cause unexpected behaviour and bugs in the Forms application.  Proficient software engineers would recognize such a change may require a partial or full regression test of the existing legacy system, a potentially costly and timely exercise, not ideal. Solving the mystery once and for all Luckily ADF has built in functionality to deal with this issue, though it's not a surprise, as Oracle as the author of ADF also built the database, and are fully aware of the Oracle database's feature set.  At the Entity Object attribute level, the Refresh After Insert and Refresh After Update properties.  Simply selecting these instructs ADF BC after inserting or updating a record to the database, to expect the database to modify the said attributes, and read a copy of the changed attributes back into its cached mid-tier record.  Thus next time the developer modifies the current record, the comparison between the mid-tier record and the database record match, and JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is no longer an issue. [Post edit - as per the comment from Oracle's Steven Davelaar below, as he correctly points out the above solution will not work for instead-of-triggers views as it relies on SQL RETURNING clause which is incompatible with this type of view] Alternatively you can set the Change Indicator on one of the attributes.  This will work as long as the relating column for the attribute in the database itself isn't inadvertently updated.  In turn you're possibly just masking the issue rather than solving it, because if another developer turns the Change Indicator back on the original issue will return.

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #2 - Balancing the forces

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/02/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---2---balancing-the-forces.aspxCategorizing requirements is the prerequisite for ecconomic architectural decisions. Not all requirements are created equal. However, to truely understand and describe the requirement forces pulling on software development, I think further examination of the requirements aspects is varranted. Aspects of Functionality There are two sides to Functionality requirements. It´s about what a software should do. I call that the Operations it implements. Operations are defined by expressions and control structures or calls to frameworks of some sort, i.e. (business) logic statements. Operations calculate, transform, aggregate, validate, send, receive, load, store etc. Operations are about behavior; they take input and produce output by considering state. I´m not using the term “function” here, because functions - or methods or sub-programs - are not necessary to implement Operations. Functions belong to a different sub-aspect of requirements (see below). Operations alone are not enough, though, to make a customer happy with regard to his/her Functionality requirements. Only correctly implemented Operations provide full value. This should make clear, why testing is so important. And not just manual tests during development of some operational feature, but automated tests. Because only automated tests scale when over time the number of operations increases. Without automated tests there is no guarantee formerly correct operations are still correct after more got added. To retest all previous operations manually is infeasible. So whoever relies just on manual tests is not really balancing the two forces Operations and Correctness. With manual tests more weight is put on the side of the scale of Operations. That might be ok for a short period of time - but in the long run it will bite you. You need to plan for Correctness in the long run from the first day of your project on. Aspects of Quality As important as Functionality is, it´s not the driver for software development. No software has ever been written to just implement some operation in code. We don´t need computers just to do something. All computers can do with software we can do without them. Well, at least given enough time and resources. We could calculate the most complex formulas without computers. We could do auctions with millions of people without computers. The only reason we want computers to help us with this and a million other Operations is… We don´t want to wait for the results very long. Or we want less errors. Or we want easier accessability to complicated solutions. So the main reason for customers to buy/order software is some Quality. They want some Functionality with a higher Quality (e.g. performance, scalability, usability, security…) than without the software. But Qualities come in at least two flavors: Most important are Primary Qualities. That´s the Qualities software truely is written for. Take an online auction website for example. Its Primary Qualities are performance, scalability, and usability, I´d say. Auctions should come within reach of millions of people; setting up an auction should be very easy; finding a suitable auction and bidding on it should be as fast as possible. Only if those Qualities have been implemented does security become relevant. A secure auction website is important - but not as important as a fast auction website. Nobody would want to use the most secure auction website if it was unbearably slow. But there would be people willing to use the fastest auction website even it was lacking security. That´s why security - with regard to online auction software - is not a Primary Quality, but just a Secondary Quality. It´s a supporting quality, so to speak. It does not deliver value by itself. With a password manager software this might be different. There security might be a Primary Quality. Please get me right: I don´t want to denigrate any Quality. There´s a long list of non-functional requirements at Wikipedia. They are all created equal - but that does not mean they are equally important for all software projects. When confronted with Quality requirements check with the customer which are primary and which are secondary. That will help to make good economical decisions when in a crunch. Resources are always limited - but requirements are a bottomless ocean. Aspects of Security of Investment Functionality and Quality are traditionally the requirement aspects cared for most - by customers and developers alike. Even today, when pressure rises in a project, tunnel vision will focus on them. Any measures to create and hold up Security of Investment (SoI) will be out of the window pretty quickly. Resistance to customers and/or management is futile. As long as SoI is not placed on equal footing with Functionality and Quality it´s bound to suffer under pressure. To look closer at what SoI means will help to become more conscious about it and make customers and management aware of the risks of neglecting it. SoI to me has two facets: Production Efficiency (PE) is about speed of delivering value. Customers like short response times. Short response times mean less money spent. So whatever makes software development faster supports this requirement. This must not lead to duct tape programming and banging out features by the dozen, though. Because customers don´t just want Operations and Quality, but also Correctness. So if Correctness gets compromised by focussing too much on Production Efficiency it will fire back. Customers want PE not just today, but over the whole course of a software´s lifecycle. That means, it´s not just about coding speed, but equally about code quality. If code quality leads to rework the PE is on an unsatisfactory level. Also if code production leads to waste it´s unsatisfactory. Because the effort which went into waste could have been used to produce value. Rework and waste cost money. Rework and waste abound, however, as long as PE is not addressed explicitly with management and customers. Thanks to the Agile and Lean movements that´s increasingly the case. Nevertheless more could and should be done in many teams. Each and every developer should keep in mind that Production Efficiency is as important to the customer as Functionality and Quality - whether he/she states it or not. Making software development more efficient is important - but still sooner or later even agile projects are going to hit a glas ceiling. At least as long as they neglect the second SoI facet: Evolvability. Delivering correct high quality functionality in short cycles today is good. But not just any software structure will allow this to happen for an indefinite amount of time.[1] The less explicitly software was designed the sooner it´s going to get stuck. Big ball of mud, monolith, brownfield, legacy code, technical debt… there are many names for software structures that have lost the ability to evolve, to be easily changed to accomodate new requirements. An evolvable code base is the opposite of a brownfield. It´s code which can be easily understood (by developers with sufficient domain expertise) and then easily changed to accomodate new requirements. Ideally the costs of adding feature X to an evolvable code base is independent of when it is requested - or at least the costs should only increase linearly, not exponentially.[2] Clean Code, Agile Architecture, and even traditional Software Engineering are concerned with Evolvability. However, it seems no systematic way of achieving it has been layed out yet. TDD + SOLID help - but still… When I look at the design ability reality in teams I see much room for improvement. As stated previously, SoI - or to be more precise: Evolvability - can hardly be measured. Plus the customer rarely states an explicit expectation with regard to it. That´s why I think, special care must be taken to not neglect it. Postponing it to some large refactorings should not be an option. Rather Evolvability needs to be a core concern for every single developer day. This should not mean Evolvability is more important than any of the other requirement aspects. But neither is it less important. That´s why more effort needs to be invested into it, to bring it on par with the other aspects, which usually are much more in focus. In closing As you see, requirements are of quite different kinds. To not take that into account will make it harder to understand the customer, and to make economic decisions. Those sub-aspects of requirements are forces pulling in different directions. To improve performance might have an impact on Evolvability. To increase Production Efficiency might have an impact on security etc. No requirement aspect should go unchecked when deciding how to allocate resources. Balancing should be explicit. And it should be possible to trace back each decision to a requirement. Why is there a null-check on parameters at the start of the method? Why are there 5000 LOC in this method? Why are there interfaces on those classes? Why is this functionality running on the threadpool? Why is this function defined on that class? Why is this class depending on three other classes? These and a thousand more questions are not to mean anything should be different in a code base. But it´s important to know the reason behind all of these decisions. Because not knowing the reason possibly means waste and having decided suboptimally. And how do we ensure to balance all requirement aspects? That needs practices and transparency. Practices means doing things a certain way and not another, even though that might be possible. We´re dealing with dangerous tools here. Like a knife is a dangerous tool. Harm can be done if we use our tools in just any way at the whim of the moment. Over the centuries rules and practices have been established how to use knifes. You don´t put them in peoples´ legs just because you´re feeling like it. You hand over a knife with the handle towards the receiver. You might not even be allowed to cut round food like potatos or eggs with it. The same should be the case for dangerous tools like object-orientation, remote communication, threads etc. We need practices to use them in a way so requirements are balanced almost automatically. In addition, to be able to work on software as a team we need transparency. We need means to share our thoughts, to work jointly on mental models. So far our tools are focused on working with code. Testing frameworks, build servers, DI containers, intellisense, refactoring support… That´s all nice and well. I don´t want to miss any of that. But I think it´s not enough. We´re missing mental tools, tools for making thinking and talking about software (independently of code) easier. You might think, enough of such tools already exist like all those UML diagram types or Flow Charts. But then, isn´t it strange, hardly any team is using them to design software? Or is that just due to a lack of education? I don´t think so. It´s a matter value/weight ratio: the current mental tools are too heavy weight compared to the value they deliver. So my conclusion is, we need lightweight tools to really be able to balance requirements. Software development is complex. We need guidance not to forget important aspects. That´s like with flying an airplane. Pilots don´t just jump in and take off for their destination. Yes, there are times when they are “flying by the seats of their pants”, when they are just experts doing thing intuitively. But most of the time they are going through honed practices called checklist. See “The Checklist Manifesto” for very enlightening details on this. Maybe then I should say it like this: We need more checklists for the complex businss of software development.[3] But that´s what software development mostly is about: changing software over an unknown period of time. It needs to be corrected in order to finally provide promised operations. It needs to be enhanced to provide ever more operations and qualities. All this without knowing when it´s going to stop. Probably never - until “maintainability” hits a wall when the technical debt is too large, the brownfield too deep. Software development is not a sprint, is not a marathon, not even an ultra marathon. Because to all this there is a foreseeable end. Software development is like continuously and foreever running… ? And sometimes I dare to think that costs could even decrease over time. Think of it: With each feature a software becomes richer in functionality. So with each additional feature the chance of there being already functionality helping its implementation increases. That should lead to less costs of feature X if it´s requested later than sooner. X requested later could stand on the shoulders of previous features. Alas, reality seems to be far from this despite 20+ years of admonishing developers to think in terms of reusability.[1] ? Please don´t get me wrong: I don´t want to bog down the “art” of software development with heavyweight practices and heaps of rules to follow. The framework we need should be lightweight. It should not stand in the way of delivering value to the customer. It´s purpose is even to make that easier by helping us to focus and decreasing waste and rework. ?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 13, 2012Popular ReleasesPublic Key Infrastructure PowerShell module: PowerShell PKI Module v1.8: Installation guide: Use default installation path to install this module for current user only. To install this module for all users — enable "Install for all users" check-box in installation UI Note: if previous module installations are detected, they are removed during upgrade. Note: PowerShell 3.0 RC is now supported. Note: Windows Server 2012 is partially supported (output formatting is not working for me). Release notes for version 1.8.0: Version 1.8 introduces a set of new .NET clas...Metodología General Ajustada - MGA: 02.07.02: Cambios Parmenio: Corrección para que se generen los objetivos en el formato PRO_F03. Se debe ejcutar el script en la BD. Cambios John: Soporte técnico telefónico y por correo electrónico. Integración de código fuente. Se ajustan los siguientes formatos para que no dupliquen los anexos al hacer clic dos veces en Actualizar: FORMATO ID 03 - ANALISIS DE PARTICIPANTES, FORMATO ID 05 - OBJETIVOS.Generación de instaladores: Conectado y Desconectado.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.0.0.0 - Ferret: - Merging both 3.5 and 2.0 codebases to a single .NET 2.0 assembly. - MSBuild Task. - NAnt Task.ExcelFileEditor: .CS File: nothingBizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter: Release 4.0: Works with BizTalk Server 2010. Compiled in .NET Framework 4.0. In this new version are available small improvements compared to the current version (3.0). We can highlight the following improvements or changes: 24 hours support in “start time” property. Previous versions had an issue with setting the start time, as it shown 12 hours watch but no AM/PM. Daily scheduler review. Solved a small bug on Daily Properties: unable to switch between “Every day” and “on these days” Installation e...Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0 RC: - Upgrade to Entity Framework 4.3.1 - Added AutoMapper custom version (by nopCommerce Team) - Added missed model properties and localization resources of Plugin Definitions - Minor changes - Fixed some bugsQTP FT Uninstaller: QTP FT Uninstaller v3: - KnowledgeInbox has made this tool open source - Converted to C# - Better scanning & cleaning mechanismWebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.7: Changes included in this release: updated ClientEngine added proper exception handling code added state support for callback added property AllowUnstrustedCertificate for JsonWebSocket added properties for sending ping automatically improved JsBridge fixed a uri compatibility issueXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0 Beta: Catalog and Publication reviews and ratings Store language packs in data base Improve reporting system Improve Import/Export system A lot of WebAdmin app UI improvements Initial implementation of the WebForum app DB indexes Improve and simplify architecture Less abstractions Modernize architecture Improve, simplify and unify API Simplify and improve testing A lot of new unit tests Codebase refactoring and ReSharpering Utilize Castle Windsor Utilize NHibernate ORM ...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.55: Properly handle IE extension to CSS3 grammar that allows for multiple parameters to functional pseudo-class selectors. add new switch -braces:(new|same) that affects where opening braces are placed in multi-line output. The default, "new" puts them on their own new line; "same" outputs them at the end of the previous line. add new optional values to the -inline switch: -inline:(force|noforce), which can be combined with the existing boolean value via comma-separators; value "force" (which...Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework: MMP Player Framework 2.7 (Silverlight and WP7): Additional DownloadsSMFv2.7 Full Installer (MSI) - This will install everything you need in order to develop your own SMF player application, including the IIS Smooth Streaming Client. It only includes the assemblies. If you want the source code please follow the link above. Smooth Streaming Sample Player - This is a pre-built player that includes support for IIS Smooth Streaming. You can configure the player to playback your content by simplying editing a configuration file - no need to co...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.0: Everything seems perfect if you find any problem you can report to http://www.rbsoft.org/contact.htmlMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2.zip contains several reports include Sales Reason Comparisons SQL2008R2.rdl which uses Adventure Works DW 2008R2 as a data source reference. For more information, go to Sales Reason Comparisons report.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 7: Fix - Fixed Metro build to pass Windows Application Certification Kit on Windows 8 Release Preview Fix - Fixed Metro build error caused by an anonymous type Fix - Fixed ItemConverter not being used when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed an incorrect object being passed to the Error event when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed decimal properties not being correctly ignored with DefaultValueHandlingLINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.3.0: New to release 1.0.3.0:Combinatronics: Combinations (unique) Combinations (with repetition) Permutations (unique) Permutations (with repetition) Convert jagged arrays to fixed multidimensional arrays Convert fixed multidimensional arrays to jagged arrays ElementAtMax ElementAtMin ElementAtAverage New set of array extension (1.0.2.8):Rotate Flip Resize (maintaing data) Split Fuse Replace Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) Ne...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 1: 6?12????? ??? - ?????.net2.0?.net4.0????Winform?Web???????。 NET2 - .net 2.0?Winform?Web???? NET4 - .net 4.0?Winform?Web???? Libs - SDK ???，??2.0?4.0?SDK??? 6?11????? ??? - ?Entities???????????EntityBase，???ToString()???????json???，??????4.0???????。2.0?3.5???！ ??? - Request????????AccessToken??????source=appkey?????。????，????????，???????public_timeline?????????。 ?? - ???ClinetLogin??????????RefreshToken???????false???。 ?? - ???RepostTimeline????Statuses???null???。 ?? - Utility?Bui...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 4.5.0: Added Instruments tab for modules Open folder content feature Some bug fixesNew Projects4SQ - Foursquare for WP7: This is a public Foursquare App, designed for the COMMUNITY for WP7.Alert Management Web Part: Business Problem: In a Project management site, When new project sites created, Project Manager creates alerts for all team members in multiple Lists/Libraries. Pain point is: He need to manually create alerts by going to each and every list/library >> Alert Me >> and then adding users to keep them informed. Yes, Its a pain for them to add users one by one in all of the lists and libraries, Solution: we started creating Custom Alert Management web part which will solve this problem. K...An Un-sql SQL Database Installer: D.E.M.O.N SQL Database Installer is an Un-SQL(SQL means boring here) Database server installer for many types of Database :MySQL, SQLite and others.Aqzgf: android for qzgfbaoming: ????????????，???dbentry.net 4.2??????。Comdaybe 2012_knockoutjs examples: This is a visual studio 2012 project containing all the demo's of #comdaybe 2012. more information on: http://www.communityday.be/ETExplorer: This application is a replacement for the standard windows explorer. When I began working with Windows 7 I noticed that some of the features I liked from XP were missing. After trying many freeware replacements and not finding any of them having all the features I needed, I decided to develop my own explorer replacement.ExamAnalysis: Exam Analysis Website (building...)FizzBuzz: FizzBuzzImproved Dnn Event Log Email Notification provider: The email notifications for log events in Dnn are poor. This project aims to improve them through a new logging provider. The initial work uses the existing logging provider and just overrides the SendLogNotifications method. Over time hopefully this will be improved to enhance the email sending capabilities of Dnn.InfoMap: a framework for mapsiTextSharp MPL for Silverlight & Windows Phone: This is a port of the iText Sharp (4.2) that was the last version published under the Mozilla Public License for Silverlight and Windows Phone. You can use this version in a commercial application and it does not require your app to be released as open source. You do not need any kind of license from anyone to use this unless you want to change the publishing information (where it sets iText as the publisher)ModifyMimeTypes: In Exchange 2007 and 2010, the Content-Type encoding for MIME attachments is determined by a list which is stored in the Exchange Organization container in Active Directory within the msExchMimeTypes property. The list can be easily viewed in the Exchange Management Shell using: •(Get-OrganizationConfig).MimeTypes The list is order specific. So if two entries exist for the same attachment type, the one earlier in the list will be the one that is used. One example of this is the encod...Monitor Reporting Services with PowerPivot: PowerPivot workbook with a connection to Reporting Service log. Several built in reports are already created in the workbook. You will need to connect to the execution log 2 view in your report server database. Typically the report server Database is named ReportServer. The view to query is named is ExecutionLog2. You may need to add a where clause to the query in the workbook to limit the data you want to see. I already have a where cluase that limits it to only rendered reports. The Date...QCats: QCats put hearts into socail relationship.Rad sa bazom: Ovo je samo proba, brsem brzoREJS: An easy to use, easy to implement Razor preparser for CSS and JS with support for caching, external data, LESS and much more.RexSharp: RexSharp is a relatively new web framework, that can easily be integrated with ASP.NET. It is based largely on the Websharper framework, written in F# - but with significant additions and optimizations. Like Websharper, RexSharp aims to make web and mobile app development a lot more fun, with F#. This is a preliminary release - detailed instructions for using the framework will be made available in a short while. ShareDev.Webparts: Coming soon...SharePoint Common Framework: SharepointCommon is a framework for Microsoft SharePoint 2010© Server and Foundation. It allows to map list items to simple hand-writen POCO classes and perform actions by manipulate with entities.Solution Extender for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Solution Extender makes it easier for Dynamics CRM 2011 integrators to export/import components that can't be included in solutions. You will be able to export/import Duplicate detection rules, Saved views and more to come It's developed in C#.System Center 2012 - Orchestrator Integration Packs and Utilities: System Center 2012 - Orchestrator Integration Packs and UtilitiesTalkBack: A small library to enable decoupled communication between different components.Tomson Scattering for GDT: Tomson is a software used on Gas Dynamic Trap setup in Institute of Nuclear Physics of Russian Academy of Sciences for electron temperature calculation in plasma based on tomson scattering method measurements.tony first project: first projectVirtual Card Table: This is a classroom project for explaining TDD.WellFound Yachts: WellFound Yachts

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• Quick Quips on QR Codes

  - by Tim Dexter

  Yes, I'm an alliterating all-star; I missed my calling as a newspaper headline writer. I have recently received questions from several folks on support for QR codes. You know them they are everywhere you look, even here! How does Publisher handle QR codes then? In theory, exactly the same way we handle any other 2D barcode font. We need the font file, a mapping entry and an encoding class. With those three pieces we can embed QR codes into any output. To test the theory, I went off to IDAutomation, I have worked with them and many customers over the years and their fonts and encoders have worked great and have been very reliable. They kindly provide demo fonts which has made my life so much easier to be able to write posts like this. Their QR font and encoder is a little tough to find. I started here and then hit the Demo Now button. On the next page I hit the right hand Demo Now button. In the resulting zip file you'll need two files: AdditionalFonts.zip >> Automation2DFonts >> TrueType >> IDAutomation2D.ttf Java Class Encoder >> IDAutomation_JavaFontEncoder_QRCode.jar - the QRBarcodeExample.java is useful to see how to call the encoder. The font file needs to be installed into the windows/fonts directory, just copy and paste it in using file explorer and windows will install it for you. Remember, we are using the demo font here and you'll see if you get your phones decoder to looks a the font above there is a fixed string 'DEMO' at the beginning. You want that removed? Go buy the font from the IDAutomation folks. The Encoder Next you need to create your encoding wrapper class. Publisher does ship a class but its compiled and I do not recommend trying to modify it, you can just build your own. I have loaded up my class here. You do not need to be a java guru, its pretty straightforward. I'd recommend a java IDE like JDeveloper from a convenience point of view. I have annotated my class and added a main method to it so you can test your encoders from JDeveloper without having to deploy them first. You can load up the project form the zip file straight into JDeveloper.Next, take a look at IDAutomation's example java class and you'll see: QRCodeEncoder qre=new QRCodeEncoder();  String DataToEncode = "IDAutmation Inc.";  boolean ApplyTilde = false;  int EncodingMode = 0;  int Version = 0;  int ErrorCorrectionLevel = 0;  System.out.println( qre.FontEncode(DataToEncode, ApplyTilde, EncodingMode, Version, ErrorCorrectionLevel) ); You'll need to check what settings you need to set for the ApplyTilde, EncodingMode, Version and ErrorCorrectionLevel. They are covered in the user guide from IDAutomation here. If you do not want to hard code the values in the encoder then you can quite easily externalize them and read the values from a text file. I have not covered that scenario here, I'm going with IDAutomation's defaults and my phone app is reading the fonts no problem. Now you know how to call the encoder, you need to incorporate it into your encoder wrapper class. From my sample class:       Class[] clazz = new Class[] { "".getClass() };        ENCODERS.put("code128a",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128a", clazz));       ENCODERS.put("code128b",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128b", clazz));       ENCODERS.put("code128c",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("code128c", clazz));       ENCODERS.put("qrcode",mUtility.getClass().getMethod("qrcode", clazz)); I just added a new entry to register the encoder method 'qrcode' (in red). Then I created a new method inside the class to call the IDAutomation encoder. /** Call to IDAutomations QR Code encoder. Passing the data to encode      Returning the encoded string to the template for formatting **/ public static final String qrcode (String DataToEncode) {   QRCodeEncoder qre=new QRCodeEncoder();    boolean ApplyTilde = false;    int EncodingMode = 0;    int Version = 0;    int ErrorCorrectionLevel = 0; return qre.FontEncode(DataToEncode, ApplyTilde, EncodingMode, Version, ErrorCorrectionLevel); } Almost the exact same code in their sample class. The DataToEncode string is passed in rather than hardcoded of course. With the class done you can now compile it, but you need to ensure that the IDAutomation_JavaFontEncoder_QRCode.jar is in the classpath. In JDeveloper, open the project properties >> Libraries and Classpaths and then add the jar to the list. You'll need the publisher jars too. You can find those in the jlib directory in your Template Builder for Word directory.Note! In my class, I have used package oracle.psbi.barcode; As my package spec, yours will be different but you need to note it for later. Once you have it compiling without errors you will need to generate a jar file to keep it in. In JDeveloper highlight your project node >> New >> Deployment Profile >> JAR file. Once you have created the descriptor, just take the defaults. It will tell you where the jar is located. Go get it and then its time to copy it and the IDAutomation jar into the Template Builder for Word directory structure. Deploying the jars On your windows machine locate the jlib directory under the Template Builder for Word install directory. On my machine its here, F:\Program Files\Oracle\BI Publisher\BI Publisher Desktop\Template Builder for Word\jlib. Copy both of the jar files into the directory. The next step is to get the jars into the classpath for the Word plugin so that Publisher can find your wrapper class and it can then find the IDAutomation encoder. The most consistent way I have found so far, is to open up the RTF2PDF.jar in the same directory and make some mods. First make a backup of the jar file then open it using winzip or 7zip or similar and get into the META-INF directory. In there is a file, MANIFEST.MF. This contains the classpath for the plugin, open it in an editor and add the jars to the end of the classpath list. In mine I have: Manifest-Version: 1.0 Class-Path: ./activation.jar ./mail.jar ./xdochartstyles.jar ./bicmn.jar ./jewt4.jar ./share.jar ./bipres.jar ./xdoparser.jar ./xdocore.jar ./xmlparserv2.jar ./xmlparserv2-904.jar  ./i18nAPI_v3.jar ./versioninfo.jar ./barcodejar.jar ./IDAutomation_JavaFontEncoder_QRCode.jar Main-Class: RTF2PDF I have put in carriage returns above to make the Class-Path: entry more readable, make sure yours is all on one line. Be sure to use the ./ as a prefix to the jar name. Ensure the file is saved inside the jar file 7zip and winzip both have popups asking if you want to update the file in the jar file.Now you have the jars on the classpath, the Publisher plugin will be able to find our classes at run time. Referencing the Font The next step is to reference the font location so that the rendering engine can find it and embed a subset into the PDF output. Remember the other output formats rely on the font being present on the machine that is opening the document. The PDF is the only truly portable format. Inside the config directory under the Template Builder for Word install directory, mine is here, F:\Program Files\Oracle\BI Publisher\BI Publisher Desktop\Template Builder for Word\config. You'll find the file, 'xdo example.cfg'. Rename it to xdo.cfg and open it in a text editor. In the fonts section, create a new entry:       <font family="IDAutomation2D" style="normal" weight="normal">              <truetype path="C:\windows\fonts\IDAutomation2D.ttf" />       </font> Note, 'IDAutomation2D' (in red) is the same name as you can see when you open MSWord and look for the QRCode font. This must match exactly. When Publisher looks at the fonts in the RTF template at runtime it will see 'IDAutomation2D' it will then look at its font mapping entries to find where that font file resides on the disk. If the names do not match or the font is not present then the font will not get used and it will fall back on Helvetica. Building the Template Now you have the data encoder and the font in place and mapped; you can use it in the template. The two commands you will need to have present are: <?register-barcode-vendor:'ENCODER WRAPPER CLASS'; 'ENCODER NAME'?> for my encoder I have: <?register-barcode-vendor:'oracle.psbi.barcode.BarcodeUtil'; 'MyBarcodeEncoder'?> Notice the two parameters for the command. The first provides the package 'path' and class name (remember I said you need to remember that above.)The second is the name of the encoder, in my case 'MyBarcodeEncoder'. Check my full encoder class in the zip linked below to see where I named it. You can change it to something else, no problem.This command needs to be near the top of the template. The second command is the encoding command: <?format-barcode:DATAT_TO_ENCODE;'ENCODER_METHOD_NAME';'ENCODER_NAME'?> for my command I have <?format-barcode:DATATEXT;'qrcode';'MyBarcodeEncoder'?>DATATEXT is the XML element that contains the text to be encoded. If you want to hard code a piece of text just surround it with single quotes. qrcode is the name of my encoder method that calls the IDAutomation encoder. Remember this.MyBarcodeEncoder is the name of my encoder. Repetition? Yes but its needed again. Both of these commands are put inside their own form fields. Do not apply the QRCode font to the second field just yet. Lets make sure the encoder is working. Run you template with some data and you should get something like this for your encoded data: AHEEEHAPPJOPMOFADIPFJKDCLPAHEEEHA BNFFFNBPJGMDIDJPFOJGIGBLMPBNFFFNB APIBOHFJCFBNKHGGBMPFJFJLJBKGOMNII OANKPJFFLEPLDNPCLMNGNIJIHFDNLJFEH FPLFLHFHFILKFBLOIGMDFCFLGJGOPJJME CPIACDFJPBGDODOJCHALJOBPECKMOEDDF MFFNFNEPKKKCHAIHCHPCFFLDAHFHAGLMK APBBBPAPLDKNKJKKGIPDLKGMGHDDEPHLN HHHHHHHPHPHHPHPPHPPPPHHPHHPHPHPHP Grooovy huh? If you do not get the encoded text then go back and check that your jars are in the right spot and that you have the MANIFEST.MF file updated correctly. Once you do get the encoded text, highlight the field and apply the IDAutomation2D font to it. Then re-run the report and you will hopefully see the QR code in your output. If not, go back and check the xdo.cfg entry and make sure its in the right place and the font location is correct. That's it, you now have QR codes in Publisher outputs. Everything I have written above, has been tested with the 5.6.3, 10.1.3.4.2 codelines. I'll be testing the 11g code in the next day or two and will update you with any changes. One thing I have not covered yet and will do in the next few days is how to deploy all of this to your server. Look out for a follow up post. One note on the apparent white lines in the font (see the image above). Once printed they disappear and even viewing the code on a screen with the white lines, my phone app is still able to read and interpret the contents no problem. I have zipped up my encoder wrapper class as a JDeveloper 11.1.1.6 project here. Just dig into the src directories to find the BarcodeUtil.java file if you just want the code. I have put comments into the file to hopefully help the novice java programmer out. Happy QR'ing!

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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 Monday, March 07, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 07, 2011Popular ReleasesDotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Master Data Services Manager: stable 1.0.3: Update 2011-03-07 : bug fixes added external configuration File : configuration.config added TreeView Display of model (still in dev) http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5067/screenshot073l.jpg added Connection Parameters (username, domain, password, stored encrypted in configuration file) http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/5350/screenshot072qc.jpgSharePoint Content Inventory: Release 1.1: Release 1.1Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.4 Beta: - Moved the core of the PopupMenu class to the new PopupMenuBase class. - Renamed the MenuTriggerElement class to MenuTriggerRelationship. - Renamed the ApplicationMenus property to MenuTriggers. - Renamed the ImageLeftOpacity property to ImageOpacity. - Renamed the ImageLeftVisibility property to ImageVisibility. - Renamed the ImageLeftMinWidth property to ImageMinWidth. - Renamed the ImagePathForRightMargin property to ImageRightPath. - Renamed the ImageSourceForRightMargin property to Ima...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. 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 t...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.2: 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 added fullscreen for the popup and popupformIronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.IIS Tuner: IIS Tuner 1.0: IIS and ASP.NET performance optimization toolMinemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: The CRM 2011 OData Query Designer is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM 2011 Solution. This tool allows you to build OData queries by selecting filter criteria, select attributes and order by attributes. The tool also allows you to Execute the query and view the ATOM and JSON data returned. The look and feel of this component will improve and new functionality will be added in the near future so please provide feedback on your experience. Import this solution int...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 beta 2: New SEO Optimisation WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.5, MVC3 RTM WARNING For run and debug SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 dow...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...New ProjectsAppFactory: Die AppFactory Dient zur Vereinfachung der entwicklung von WPF Anwedungen. Es ist in C# entwickelt.Change the Default Playback Sound Device: ChangePlaybackDevice makes it easier for personal user to change the default playback sound device. You'll no longer have to change the default playback sound device by hand. It's developed in C#. Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML). Very configurable. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Diamond: The all in one toolkit for WPF and Silverligth projects.Digital Disk File Format: Digital Disk is a File format that uses a simple key system, it is currently in development. It is written in vb.net, but will be expanded into other languagesdotnetMvcMalll: this is a asp.net mvc mallEasyCache .NET: EasyCache .NET is a simplified API over the ASP.NET Cache object. Its purpose is to offer a more concise syntax for adding and retrieving items from the cache.Eric Fang SharePoint workflow activities: Eric Fang SharePoint workflow activitiesExpert.NET: Expert.NET is an expert system framework for .NET applications. Written in F#, it provides constructs for defining probabilistic rulesets, as well as an inference engine. Expert.NET is ideal for encoding domain knowledge used by troubleshooting applications.GameGolem: The GameGolem is an XNA Casual Gamers portal. The purpose is to create a single ClickOnce deployed "Game Launcher" which exposes simple API for games to keep track of highscores, achivements, etc. GameGolem will become a Kongregate-like XNA-based casual games portal.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.ISBC: Practicas ISBC 10/11maocaijun.database: databaseNCLI: A simple API for command line argument parsing, written in C#.nEMO: nEMO is a pure C# framework for Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization.N-tier architecture sample: A sample on how to practically design a system following an n-tier (multitier) architecture in line with the patterns and practices presented by Microsofts Application Architectural Guide 2.0. Focus is on a service application and it´s client applications of various types.PostsByMonth Widget: This is a simple widget for the Graffiti CMS application that allows you to get a monthly list of new posts to the site. It's configurable to allow for the # of posts to display as well as the the format of the month/year header, the title and the individual line entries. This is written in .Net 3.5 with Vb.Net.Puzzle Pal: Smartphone assistant for all your puzzling events.RavenDB Notification: Notification plugin for RavenDB. With this plugin you are able to subscribe to insert and delete notifications from the RavenDB server. Very helpfull if you need to process new documents on the remote clients and you do not like to query DB for new changes.Teamwork by Intrigue Deviation: A feature-rich team collaboration and project management effort built around Scrum methodology with MVC/2.test_flow: test flowTicari Uygulama Paketi: Ticari Uygulama Paketi (TUP), Microsoft Ofis 2010 ürünleri için gelistirilmis eklenti yazilimidir.XpsViewer: XpsVieweryaphan: yaphan cms.

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

  One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 08, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 08, 2011Popular ReleasesHTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx .15 ALPHA: This release fixes line counting a little bit and adds the masshighlight() sub, which highlights pasted and inserted code.AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.3: - Improved summoner spells are now displayed - Fixed some of the startup errors people got - Double clicking an item selects it - Some usability changes that make using AutoLoL just a little easier - Bug fixesVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.SharePoint Search XSL Samples: SharePoint 2010 Samples: I have updated some of the samples from the 2007 release. These all work in SharePoint 2010. I removed the Pivot on File Extension because SharePoint 2010 search has refiners that perform the same function.SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5 is currently the most stable version and includes all of the functionality requested so far. It comes as a ZIP file that contains three files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively available starting from Windows Vista. Config.ini – A configuration file for default settings. This file is...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta5: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta5 ?????????? ???? ?? ???????? ???"????????"?? ????????????? ????????/???? ?? ???"????"??? ?? ??????????? ?? ?? ??????????? ?? ?????????????????? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ????????????Discussions???????? ????AcDown??????????????Media Companion: MC 3.405-3 latest patch: -1 Added ability to choose to rename invalid nfos to info -2 Fix for multipart episodes not showing / Fix to skip invalid nfo's during rebuild -3 If movie plot empty use outline This file is just the mediacompanion.exe It has the cutting edge bug fixes as they are fixed during the week. The patch file number will be referred to in the relevant issue tracker comment. For the latest full program, you need to download the relevant weekly plus the patch.WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 02.00.01: changes Module Packages are now generated with MSBuild Added Cancel Edit Button to Cancel an Custom Tag Edit Fixed Issue #14 editing of custom tags Fixed Issue with Flash File and Google BotVFPX: GoFish 4 Beta 1: Current beta is Build 144 (released 2011-06-07 ) See the GoFish4 info page for details and video link: http://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GoFishOnTopReplica: Release 3.3.2: Incremental update over 3.3 and 3.3.1. Added Polish language translation (thanks to Jan Romanczyk). Added German language translation (thanks to Eric Hoffmann). Fixed some localization issues.SQL Compact Query Analyzer: Build 0.3.0.0: Beta build of SQL Compact Query Analyzer Features: - Execute SQL Queries against a SQL Server Compact Edition database - Easily edit the contents of the database - Supports SQLCE 3.1, 3.5 and 4.0 Prerequisites: - .NET Framework 4.0ShowUI: Write-UI -in PowerShell: ShowUI: ShowUI is a PowerShell module to help you write rich user interfaces in script.Babylon Toolkit: Babylon.Toolkit v1.0.4: Note about samples: In order to run samples, you need to configure visual studio to run them as an "Out-of-browser application". in order to do that, go to the property page of a sample project, go to the Debug tab, and check the "Out-of-browser application" radio. New features : New Effects BasicEffect3Lights (3 dir lights instead of 1 position light) CartoonEffect (work in progress) SkinnedEffect (with normal and specular map support) SplattingEffect (for multi-texturing with smooth ...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.8.2: With installerTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.5: Added new items associated with Terraria v1.0.3 to the character editor. Fixed multiple bugs with Piggy Bank EditorySterling NoSQL OODB for .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4 and 5, and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.5: Welcome to the Sterling 1.5 RTM. This version is backwards compatible without modification to the 1.4 beta. For the 1.0, you will need to upgrade your database. Please see this discussion for details. You must modify your 1.0 code for persistence. The 1.5 version defaults to an in-memory driver. To save to isolated storage or use one of the new mechanisms, see the available drivers and pass an instance of the appropriate one to your database (different databases may use different drivers). ...Grammar and Spell Checking Plugin for Windows Live Writer: Grammar Checker Plugin v1.0: First version of the grammar checker plugin for Windows Live Writer. You can show your appreciation for this plugin and support further development by donating via PayPal. Any amount will be appreciated. Thank you. Donatepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 10 - June 3, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To install and run the reference implementation, you must perform the fol...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Release Candidate: Highlights of this release This is the release candidate drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All code samples, including all ACS v2: ACS as a Federation Provider - Showing authentication with LiveID, Google, etc. ACS as a FP with Multiple Business Partners. ACS and REST endpoints. Using a WP7 client with REST endpoints. All ACS specific chapters. Two new chapters on SharePoint (SSO and Federation) All revised v1 chapters We are now ...Terraria Map Generator: TerrariaMapTool 1.0.0.4 Beta: 1) Fixed the generated map.html file so that the file:/// is included in the base path. 2) Added the ability to use parallelization during generation. This will cause the program to use as many threads as there are physical cores. 3) Fixed some background overdraw.New ProjectsAmur: Amur is a programming language project that allows the team members to explore functional programming language design. The compiler will target .NET and, for now, be developed in C#.Arche: Arche makes it easier for devlopers to architecture base with code generators. It's developed in C#. Avignon: A WPF version of the board game Carcassonne.Code Exercises in C#: A few c# files to demonstrate coding abilityCows And Bulls Project: Per tutti gli sviluppatori dotNET Che vogliono ritrovarsi per parlare di qualsiasi metodologia di sviluppo Agile Il Cows And Bulls Project È un progetto CodePlex Che si pone l'obiettivo di promuovere la discussione e lo scambio di esperienze sullo sviluppo Agile del software A differenza di altri progetti open source Il nostro progetto non utilizza la comunità per migliorare il codice sorgente ma usa il codice sorgente per migliorare una comunità Grazie molte a Stefania Menocci che h...CRM 2011 Workflow Utilities: This project includes custom workflow activities for CRM 2011 which provide additional workflow steps for actions such as "delete" and "share" within the CRM Process designer. These activities can be used in both workflows and dialogs but are not supported in CRM Online. Dot Net Reflector: OPEN SOURCE AND FREE Reflector. Let it be said right now. Dot Net Reflector forever will be free and here on codeplex.Exemplo de TFS do Papo: Projeto para testar conexao do TFS com Windows Phone 7Extended WCF Discovery: Extend the WCF discovery to support: 1. Service publish its real service address - such as external IP when service is behind NAT 2. Client discovery over any network topology (behind NAT) Also (in the roadmap): Binding discovery-clients will receive the binding from the server.FileProtector: This will make it easy for any user to protect their personal files. It's developed completely using C#Fingertip detection via OpenNI: "Fingertip Detection" prject is intended to give usual PC user availability to control PC unsing only hand and finger gestures. Project is built on .NET framework. Used technologies : 1. OpenNI 2. NITE 3. EmguCVHomeData: Stores and displays data from the household.Informicus LibraryHub: 4VasiliyLifeHelper: lifehelperMaxZhang.EasyEntities: EasyEntitiesMedianamik: MedianamikMethodWorx CMS: Open Source .NET CMS for fully hosted solutions, or integration into ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC projects. Microsoft Tag API for BlackBerry: Microsoft Tag is a compact, yet, data rich and user friendly tag system. This API allows for accessing and using Tags.MVVM Demo: A MVVM demoMyReportSL: My Report SiverlightNSS College Website: An effort to develop an open source website for NSS College, Rajakumari with the contributions from its current students and alumni...Oldies: Deletes or moves old files from current folderPhaLinks a Modern Native Lisp: PhaLinks is a modern lips with a custom VM that runs on PyPy. ProdUI: ProdUI is designed to be used when a GUI needs to be manipulated automatically (Prodded), either for testing, or to perform human UI interactions for data entry on systems that don't allow back-end access. The ProdUI toolset is developed in C#, using the UI Automation API and failing back on Win32 calls if that fails. Every attempt is made to verify that the action was actually performed, and proper notification if not.The system is designed to allow for single "off the cuff" prods, as well ...ResourceManager: A tool to allow relationships between various resources to be established and to show the effects of altering one resource on others. This is initially intended for use of keeping track of servers and licenses used by applications, but I'm hoping to leave it open to expansion.seriesCounter: SeriesCounter makes it easier for people that watch series to keep track at what episode of a series they are. You'll no longer have to remember it yourself. It's developed in C#.Shai Chi Android: Shai Chi AndroidSistemaControleMultas_LPUNICAP: Nada a declararSmarx Role: Smarx Role is a Windows Azure role that supports publishing web applications written in Node.js, Ruby, and Python. Apps are published/synchronized via Git or blob storage, allowing nearly instantaneous changes to published applications. It automatically pulls in dependent modules using each language's package manager (npm, Gem, or pip).Tetris3D: try to complete a 3D tetris cloneTrackMania WebServices SDK .NET: TrackMania WebServices SDK .NET is a .NET 4 library which provide every tools to get statistics from TrackMania ForeverTV Program Analyst: A TV program analyzing software, based on specific program log from tv stations. VB.net Roguelike: This is an attempt to make a Roguelike in VB.net. This is in it's very early stages, and any help would be appreciated! Definition of Roguelike: (from Wikipedia) The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental f...Wbfs Engine: Provides a simple and easy to use library for accessing games and wbfs partitions with .NET

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 29, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 29, 2013Popular ReleasesCrowd CMS: Crowd CMS FREE - Official Release: This is the original source files for Crowd CMS Free (v1.0.0) and is the latest stable release which has been bug-tested and fixed.Event-Based Components AppBuilder: AB3.AppDesigner.57.12: Iteration 57.12 (Redesign): I'm still not satisfied with the WireDecorator because of it's complexity. Therefore I need some iterations to simplify this class. In this iteration I introduced a new WireArrowDecorator which contains everything that's needed to act with the arrow of a wire. Coming soon: Iteration 58: Add a new wire by mouse (without text editing) Iteration 59: Add a wire segment (without text editing) Iteration 60: Edit existing wire definition (without text editing) ...HandJS: Hand.js v1.1.3: New configuration: HANDJS.doNotProcessCSS to disable CSS scanning.Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.1.0 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 6.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....DirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.8 binaries: Fixed issue with auto filter select all checkbox was getting checked automatically after reopening the filter.ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0beta1: +2013-10-28 v4.0 beta1 +?????Collapsed???????????????。 -????：window/group_panel.aspx??，???????，???????，?????????。 +??????SelectedNodeIDArray???????????????。 -????：tree/checkbox/tree_checkall.aspx??，?????，?????，????????????。 -??TimerPicker???????（????、????ing）。 -??????????????????????（???）。 -?????????????，??type=text/css（??~`）。 -MsgTarget???MessageTarget，???None。 -FormOffsetRight?????20px??5px。 -?Web.config?PageManager??FormLabelAlign???。 -ToolbarPosition??Left/Right。 -??Web.conf...CODE Framework: 4.0.31028.0: 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.ResX Resource Manager: 1.0.0.26: 1.0.0.26 WI1141: Improve message when an XML file fails to load. Ignore projects that fail to load. 1.0.0.25 WI1133: Improve error message 1.0.0.24 WI1121: Improve error messages 1.0.0.23 WI1098: VS Crash after changing filter 1.0.0.22 WI1091: Context menu for copy resource key. WI1090: Enable multi-line paste. 1.0.0.21 WI1060: ResX Manager crashes after update. 1.0.0.20 WI958: Reference something in DGX, so we don't need to load the assembly dynamically. WI1055: Add the possibility to ma...VidCoder: 1.5.10 Beta: Broke out all the encoder-specific passthrough options into their own dropdown. This should make what they do a bit more clear and clean up the codec list a bit. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5855.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v14: ImportantThis release has a separate download for Visual Studio 2010. The first link is for VS 2012 and later. Version History Changed in v14 Improved performance when scrolling and editing Fixed potential crash when Resharper is installed Fixed highlight of guides split around pragmas in C++/C# Restored VS 2010 support as a separate download Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.3 (mvc5): version 3.5.3 - support for mvc5 version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 ========================== - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.585b: IMDB plot scraping Fixed. New* Movie - Rename Folder using Movie Set, option to move ignored articles to end of Movie Set, only for folder renaming. Fixed* Media Companion - Fixed if using profiles, config files would blown up in size due to some settings duplicating. * Ignore Article of An was cutting of last character of movie title. * If Rescraping title, sort title changed depending on 'Move article to end of Sort Title' setting. * Movie - If changing Poster source order, list would beco...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.4: Release 1.11.4 =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to add the new tiles/walls in 1.2.1PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.0.7: This is a bug fix release, containing some important fixes! Fixed issue where Session 0 was not detected correctly, resulting in issues when attempting to display a UI when none was allowed Fixed Installation Prompt and Installation Restart Prompt appearing when deploy mode was non-interactive or silent Fixed issue where defer prompt is displayed after force closing multiple applications Fixed issue executing blocked app execution dialog from UNC path (executed instead from local tempo...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.7: 2013.10.24 Ver5.9.7 (1)FTP???????、２?????????????shift-jis????????????? (2)????HTTP????、???????POST??????????????????CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.1.0.34322 Alpha 4: This experimental release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Oculus Rift support. Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-1-0-34322-alpha-4 Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or sup...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 32 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) This release has been tested with Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, using TortoiseSVN 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8. It should also still work with Visual Studio 2005, but I couldn't find anyone to test it in VS2005. Build 32 (beta) changelogNew: Added Visual Studio 2013 support New: Added Visual Studio 2012 support New: Added SVN 1.8 support New: Added 'Ch...ABCat: ABCat v.2.0.1a: ?????????? ???????? ? ?????????? ?????? ???? ??? Win7. ????????? ?????? ????????? ?? ???????. ????? ?????, ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ?????????? ????????? "?? ??????? ????? ???????????? ?????????? ??????...", ?? ?????????? ??????? ? ?????????? ?????? Microsoft SQL Ce ?? ????????? ??????: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17876. ???????? ?????? x64 ??? x86 ? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????????? ???????. ??? ??????? ????????? ?? ?????????? ?????? Entity Framework, ? ???? ...patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance 2013: This is the 2013 release of Data Access Guidance. The documentation for this RI is also available on MSDN: Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn271399.aspxNew Projects7COM0152 - Web 2.0 Community Website: This is a project to create a User Content Cenerated community website for the Web Application Development module at the University of Hertfordshire.Airport System: Telerik Academy Teamwork - Airport SystemAppointments and ToDo Manager: Javascript Single Page ApplicationBlack NBT: A library to manage NBT (Named Binary Tag) files at format 19133. This project inclue a test client for the library. It's written en C# for .Net 4.5browser4gp: Applicazione che consente agli sviluppatori di pagine web di comunicare con il sistema operativo sottostante.BS Flow: It's a web project that using bootstrap to show instagram image flow.coLearning .NET Class - Team 3 v.2: .NET CRM tool. Grow your business one contact at a time with an expertly crafted API for generating leads and a simple web interface for managing contacts.Collections2: The Collection2 library allows you to create 2 way dictionaries. Ex: mydictionary[1] == "One", mydictionary["One"] == 1. Database Application: Load MySQL DB to SQL Server Unzip and import excel sales reports to SQL Server Generate PDF from SQL ServerDesign Pattern in C#: design pattern implementations in C#DropLogin&DropUser: Mass drop logins and users from many sql servers ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? SQL Server ? ????????????? ?? ???? ???? ??????.ElencySolutions.MultiProperty.CMS7: This project is simply a EPiServer CMS 7 re-write of the original code found here: https://episerveresmp.codeplex.com/File System Explorer: This application will drill into the Windows File System like Windows File Explorer but is more geared to working with multiple directories at a time. GriffinTeam: GriffinTeamjean1028jabbrchang: dfaLibDxp: Set of libraries for manipulating document-oriented databases for FSharp (F#)Library System: Telerik ASP.NET Web Forms Exam - Library SystemMaruko Toolbox: A Video-prosessing GUIMugen MVVM Toolkit ReSharper plugin: ReSharper plugin for Mugen MVVM Toolkit.RESX Utils: This is a tool to aid RESX resources management. It can detect and remove unused resources, compare RESX files and detect duplicates and discrepancies.Scorpicore2: follows banknotes and understanding their historySharePoint Logs Viewer: Develop & Maintain your SharePoint application quickly by using "SharePoint Logs Viewer"SPCloudMigrator: This project aims to simplify the migration from on-premise sharepoint version to sharepoint online.SSIS Connector for Sharepoint Online: SharePoint Online Source & Destination DataFlow Components to fetch data from SPOnline & push data in SPOnline.Transfer data from SP Online List to DBMS or FileTMS - Testing Management System: Una empresa de desarrollo de software, desea contar con una aplicación Web que le permita manejar los errores de sus productos. Esta aplicación permitirá a losWMI Inventory Client: WMI Inventory Client ?????????????? ?????????????? ?? WMIWPF MDI Metro: Metro Dark Theme for WPF MDI Project on codeplex.Zigbee playground: This is a project for experimenting with Zigbee wireless mesh networking.

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• Converting Encrypted Values

  - by Johnm

  Your database has been protecting sensitive data at rest using the cell-level encryption features of SQL Server for quite sometime. The employees in the auditing department have been inviting you to their after-work gatherings and buying you drinks. Thousands of customers implicitly include you in their prayers of thanks giving as their identities remain safe in your company's database. The cipher text resting snuggly in a column of the varbinary data type is great for security; but it can create some interesting challenges when interacting with other data types such as the XML data type. The XML data type is one that is often used as a message type for the Service Broker feature of SQL Server. It also can be an interesting data type to capture for auditing or integrating with external systems. The challenge that cipher text presents is that the need for decryption remains even after it has experienced its XML metamorphosis. Quite an interesting challenge nonetheless; but fear not. There is a solution. To simulate this scenario, we first will want to create a plain text value for us to encrypt. We will do this by creating a variable to store our plain text value: -- set plain text value DECLARE @PlainText NVARCHAR(255); SET @PlainText = 'This is plain text to encrypt'; The next step will be to create a variable that will store the cipher text that is generated from the encryption process. We will populate this variable by using a pre-defined symmetric key and certificate combination: -- encrypt plain text value DECLARE @CipherText VARBINARY(MAX); OPEN SYMMETRIC KEY SymKey     DECRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE SymCert     WITH PASSWORD='mypassword2010';     SET @CipherText = EncryptByKey                          (                            Key_GUID('SymKey'),                            @PlainText                           ); CLOSE ALL SYMMETRIC KEYS; The value of our newly generated cipher text is 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--. This will be important as we reference our cipher text later in this post. Our final step in preparing our scenario is to create a table variable to simulate the existence of a table that contains a column used to hold encrypted values. Once this table variable has been created, populate the table variable with the newly generated cipher text: -- capture value in table variable DECLARE @tbl TABLE (EncVal varbinary(MAX)); INSERT INTO @tbl (EncVal) VALUES (@CipherText); We are now ready to experience the challenge of capturing our encrypted column in an XML data type using the FOR XML clause: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT               EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); If you add the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="AG4Skzy/sEafeavMeaWDBwEAAACE--" /> </root> Strangely, the value that is captured appears nothing like the value that was created through the encryption process. The result being that when this XML is converted into a readable data set the encrypted value will not be able to be decrypted, even with access to the symmetric key and certificate used to perform the decryption. An immediate thought might be to convert the varbinary data type to either a varchar or nvarchar before creating the XML data. This approach makes good sense. The code for this might look something like the following: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); However, this results in the following error: Msg 9420, Level 16, State 1, Line 26 XML parsing: line 1, character 37, illegal xml character A quick query that returns CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) reveals that the value that is causing the error looks like something off of a genuine Chinese menu. While this situation does present us with one of those spine-tingling, expletive-generating challenges, rest assured that this approach is on the right track. With the addition of the "style" argument to the CONVERT method, our solution is at hand. When dealing with converting varbinary data types we have three styles available to us: - The first is to not include the style parameter, or use the value of "0". As we see, this style will not work for us. - The second option is to use the value of "1" will keep our varbinary value including the "0x" prefix. In our case, the value will be 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- - The third option is to use the value of "2" which will chop the "0x" prefix off of our varbinary value. In our case, the value will be 006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- Since we will want to convert this back to varbinary when reading this value from the XML data we will want the "0x" prefix, so we will want to change our code as follows: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal,1) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); Once again, with the inclusion of the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--" /> </root> Nice! We are now cooking with gas. To continue our scenario, we will want to parse the XML data into a data set so that we can glean our freshly captured cipher text. Once we have our cipher text snagged we will capture it into a variable so that it can be used during decryption: -- read back xml DECLARE @hdoc INT; DECLARE @EncVal NVARCHAR(MAX); EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT, @xml; SELECT @EncVal = EncVal FROM OPENXML (@hdoc, '/root/MYTABLE') WITH ([EncVal] VARBINARY(MAX) '@EncVal'); EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc; Finally, the decryption of our cipher text using the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method and the certificate utilized to perform the encryption earlier in our exercise: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            @EncVal                           )                     ) EncVal; Ah yes, another hurdle presents itself! The decryption produced the value of NULL which in cryptography means that either you don't have permissions to decrypt the cipher text or something went wrong during the decryption process (ok, sometimes the value is actually NULL; but not in this case). As we see, the @EncVal variable is an nvarchar data type. The third parameter of the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method requires a varbinary value. Therefore we will need to utilize our handy-dandy CONVERT method: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                             CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                             N'mypassword2010',                             CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal)                           )                     ) EncVal; Oh, almost. The result remains NULL despite our conversion to the varbinary data type. This is due to the creation of an varbinary value that does not reflect the actual value of our @EncVal variable; but rather a varbinary conversion of the variable itself. In this case, something like 0x3000780030003000360045003--. Considering the "style" parameter got us past XML challenge, we will want to consider its power for this challenge as well. Knowing that the value of "1" will provide us with the actual value including the "0x", we will opt to utilize that value in this case: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('SymCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal,1)                           )                     ) EncVal; Bingo, we have success! We have discovered what happens with varbinary data when captured as XML data. We have figured out how to make this data useful post-XML-ification. Best of all we now have a choice in after-work parties now that our very happy client who depends on our XML based interface invites us for dinner in celebration. All thanks to the effective use of the style parameter.

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• Adjust timezone of an AVM Fritz!Box 7390

  It's been a while that I purchased an AVM Fritz!Box 7390 but since I'm using this 'PABX' here in Mauritius, I'm not really happy about the wrong time in the logs or handsets connected. Lately, I had some spare time to address this issue, and the following article describes how to adjust the timezone settings in general. The original idea came from an FAQ found in c't 21/11 (for a 7270 written in German language) but I added a couple of things based on other resources online. The following tutorial may be valid for other models, too. Use your common sense and think before you act. Brief introduction to AVM Fritz!Box devices The Fritz!Box series of AVM has been around for more than a decade and those little 'red boxes' have a high level of versatility for your small office or home. High-speed connections, secure WLAN and convenient telephony make a home network out of any network. Whether it's a computer, tablet or smartphone, any device can be connected to the FRITZ!Box. And best of all, installation is so simple that users will be online in a matter of minutes. If you want to have peace of your mind in your small network then a Fritz!Box is the easiest way to achieve that. I'm using my box primarly as WiFi access point, VoIP gateway and media server but only because it came in second after my Linux system. Limitations in the administrative Web UI Unfortunately, there are no possibilities to adjust the timezone settings in the Web UI at all - even not in Expert mode. I assume that this is part of the 'simplification' provided by AVM's design team. That's okay, as long as you reside in Central Europe, and the implicit time handling is correct for your location. Adjusting the timezone I got my device through an order at Amazon Germany already some time ago, and honestly I wasn't bothered too much about the pre-configured (fixed) timezone setting - CET or CEST depending on daylight saving. But you know, it's that kind of splinter at the back of your head that keeps nagging and bothering you indirectly. So, finally I sat down yesterday evening and did a quick research on how to change the timezone. Even though there are a number of results, I read the FAQ from the c't magazine first, as I consider this as a trusted and safe source of information. Of course, it is most important to avoid to 'brick' your device. You've been warned - No support Tinkering with the configuration of any AVM devices seems to be a violation of their official support channels. So, be warned and continue onlyin case that you're sure about what you are going to do. The following solutions are 'as-is' and they worked for my box flawlessly but may cause an issue in your case. Don't blame me... Solution 1 - Backup, modify and restore That's the way as described in the c't article and a couple of other forum postings I found online, mainly from Australia. Login the administrative Web UI and navigate to 'System => Einstellungen sichern' (System => Backup configuration) and store your current configuration to a local file on your machine. Despite some online postings it is not necessary to specify a password in order to secure or encrypt your backup. IMHO, this only adds another unnecessary layer of complexity to the process. Anyway, next you should create a another copy of your settings and keep it unmodified. That's our safety net to restore the current settings in case that we might have to issue a factory setting reset to the box. Now, open the configuration file with an advanced text editor which is capable to deal with Unix carriage returns properly - Windows Notepad doesn't do the job but Wordpad or Notepad++. Personally, I don't care and simply use geany, gedit or nano on Linux. In total there are 3 modifications that we have to apply to the configuration file - one new line and two adjustments. First, we have to add an instruction near the top of file that overrides the device internal checksum validation. Without this line, your settings won't be accepted. Caution: The drectives are case-sensitve and your outcome should read something like this: **** FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390 CONFIGURATION EXPORTPassword=$$$$<ignore>FirmwareVersion=84.05.52CONFIG_INSTALL_TYPE=iks_16MB_xilinx_4eth_2ab_isdn_nt_te_pots_wlan_usb_host_dect_64415OEM=avmCountry=049Language=deNoChecks=yes**** CFGFILE:ar7.cfg/* * /var/flash/ar7.cfg * Mon Jul 29 10:49:18 2013 */ar7cfg {... Then search for the expression 'timezone' and you should find a section like this one (~ line 1113): timezone_manual {        enabled = no;        offset = 0;        dst_enabled = no;        TZ_string = "";        name = "";} We would like to manually handle the timezone setting in our device and therefore we have to enable it and set the proper value for Mauritius. The configuration block should like so afterwards: timezone_manual {        enabled = yes;        offset = 0;        dst_enabled = no;        TZ_string = "MUT-4";        name = "";} We specify the designation and the offset in hours of the timezone we would like to have. Caution: The offset indicates the value one has to add to the local time to arrive at UTC. More details are described in the Explanation of TZ strings. Mauritius has GMT+4 which means that we have to substract 4 hours from the local time to have UTC. Finally, we restore the modified configuration file via the administrative Web UI under 'System => Einstellungen sichern => Wiederherstellen' (System => Backup configuration => Restore). This triggers a reboot of the device, so please be patient and wait until the Web UI displays the login dialog again. Good luck! Solution 2 - Telnet A more elegant, read: technically interesting, way to adjust configuration settings in your Fritz!Box is to access it directly through Telnet. By default AVM disables that protocol channel and you have to enable it with a connected telephone. In order to activate the telnet service dial the following combination: #96*7* #96*8* (to disable telnet again after work has been completed) If you're using an AVM handset like the Fritz!Fon then you will receive a confirmation message on the display like so: telnetd ein Next, depending on your favourite operating system, you either launch a Command prompt in Windows or a terminal in Linux, get your Admin password ready, and you connect to your box like so: $ telnet fritz.box Trying 192.168.1.1...Connected to fritz.box.Escape character is '^]'.password: BusyBox v1.19.3 (2012-10-12 14:52:09 CEST) built-in shell (ash)Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.ermittle die aktuelle TTYtty is "/dev/pts/0"Console Ausgaben auf dieses Terminal umgelenkt# That's it, you are connected and we can continue to change the configuration manually. In order to adjust the timezone setting we have to open the ar7.cfg file. As we are now operating in a specialised environment, we only have limited capabilities at hand. One of those is a reduced version of vi - nvi. Let's open a second browser window with the fine manual page of nvi and start to edit our configuration file: # nvi /var/flash/ar7.cfg In our configuration file, we have to navigate to the timezone directives. The easiest way is to search for the expression 'timezone' by typing in the following: /timezone    (press Enter/Return) Now, we should see the exact lines of code like in the backed up version: timezone_manual {                                                                            enabled = no;                                                          offset = 0;                                                         dst_enabled = no;                                                   TZ_string = "";                                                     name = "";                                                        } And of course, we apply the same changes as described in the previous section: timezone_manual {                                                                            enabled = yes;                                                          offset = 0;                                                         dst_enabled = no;                                                   TZ_string = "MUT-4";                                                     name = "";                                                        } Finally, we have to write our changes back to the file and apply the new settings. :wq    (press Enter/Return) # ar7cfgchanged That's it! Finally, close the telnet session by pressing Ctrl+] and enter 'quit'. Additional ideas... There are a couple of more possibilities to enhance and to extend the usability of a Fritz!Box. There are lots of resources available on the net, but I'd like to name a few here. Especially for Linux users it is essential to be able to connect to any device remotely in a  safe and secure way. And the installation of a SSH server on the box would be a first step to improve this situation, also to avoid to run telnet after all. Sometimes, there might be problems in your VoIP connections, feel free to adjust the settings of codecs and connection handling, too. I guess, you'll get the idea... The only frontiers are in your mind.

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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, March 10, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 10, 2011Popular ReleasesTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comSharePoint Field Groups To Users: GroupsToUsers Release 1.0: SharePoint "Groups to Users" is a custom field that displays two separate drop-down lists. The first drop-down populates with all SharePoint Groups from the current web. By selecting a particular group the second drop-down list gets populated with all Users within the selected SharePoint group.DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (RC2): More fixes and improvements. Note for multiplayer - you may need to set r_waterwarp to 0 or 2 before connecting to a server, otherwise you will get a "Mod_PointInLeaf: bad model" error and not be able to connect. You can set it back to 1 after you connect, of course. This only came to light after releasing, and will be fixed in the next one.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-03-09: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008Office Web.UI: Version 2.4: After having lost all modifications done for 2.3. I finally did it again... Have a look at http://www.officewebui.com/change-log Also, the documentation continues to grow... http://www.officewebui.com/category/kb ThanksmyCollections: Version 1.3: New in version 1.3 : Added Editor management for Books Added Amazon API for Books Us, Fr, De Added Amazon Us, Fr, De for Movies Added The MovieDB for Fr and De Added Author for Books Added Editor and Platform for Games Added Amazon Us, De for Games Added Studio for XXX Added Background for XXX Bug fixing with Softonic API Bug fixing with IMDB UI improvement Removed GraceNote Added Amazon Us,Fr, De for Series Added TVDB Fr and De for Series Added Tracks for Musi...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.1: Version 1.1 (8 Mar 2011)new Dialog class for redirecting users to Facebook dialogs new Async publishing methods new Check for Extended Permissions option fixed bug: inappropiate condition of redirecting to login in Api class fixed bug: IframeRedirect method not workingpatterns & practices : Composite Services: Composite Services Guidance - CTP2: This is the second CTP of the p&p Composite Service Guidance.Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.0 Beta 1: Beta 1You can't install IronPython Tools for Visual Studio side-by-side with Python Tools for Visual Studio. A race condition sometimes causes local MPI debugging to miss breakpoints. When MPI jobs on a cluster fail they don’t get cleaned up correctly, which can cause debugging to stall because the associated MPI job is stuck in the queue. The "Threads" view has a race condition which can cause it not to display properly at times. VS2010 shortcuts that are pinned to the taskbar are so...DotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. 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 t...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.2: 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 added fullscreen for the popup and popupformIronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...New ProjectsAll2Iso: Convert any disk image format to ISO. Actually it can only convert from BIN. Any help is appreciated.Asset Management by Joko for GENCPROS: This is my initial test project using codeplex storageAxvius: Axvius' core C# API library. Includes, Now, a class for overriding the system clock; especially useful for unit tests.Collision Avoidance Simulator: The vertex buffer, in conjunction with the spatial conguration of human models, a particle system and a reduced set of rules are processed in order to obtain a dynamic knowledge base for collision avoidance calculations. Developed in C++.Configuring role link in Biztalk 2009: Configuring role link in Biztalk 2009CrazySnake: Crazy Snake é o famoso jogo da cobra, esse em sua versão tanto para windows, quanto para windows phone 7dIRca WP7 IRC Client: IRC client with possible SL/WPF ports. Utilizes native tcp sockets until the communication layer from MS solidifies. Basically put, this project would not exist without the work of some wp7 hackers. Pip pip old boys.DoanVienProject: Ðây là porject qu?n lý doàn viênDynamics AX Build Scripts: Sharing build scripts for Dynamics AX integration with source control, focused on Team Foundation Server (TFS)EPiServer CMS ElencySolutions.MultipleProperty: The MultipleProperty classes are for use in EPiServer CMS 6 and provide an easy way for developers to build complex custom properties that comprise of other EPiServer custom properties. Feriados Móveis Brasil: This project aim to calculate the holidays in Brazil who is based on catholic dates. The main holiday is the Easter Sunday and the other holidays are calculated based on that date. Cálculo de feriados móveis para o Brasil baseados nas datas festivas católicas.flyskynet: myselft projectGriffTom: GriffTomImage Resizer (????????): ??????????????????，????????????????。?????jpg??。 ??????，????????????。iPray: Islamic Prayer Software.Japanese Learners & Enthusiasts Kanji Project: Help create games, puzzles, and exercises to assist learners of Japanese to master Kanji comprehension. Games/etc. will be written in C#, jQuery and/or Silverlight for ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor. Initial goal is for a user of the site to master grade level 1 Kanji (first 80 Kanji).MailChimp Amazon Simple Email Service .NET Wrapper: A .NET 4 wrapper for MailChimp's Amazon Simple Email Service. It's developed in C# using Hammock.NGuice: .NET????Guice???????????。???.NET?????????，?Guice?.NET??????????。???????：http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/Rubrica Persone: Libreria che contiene gli oggetti e le form per la gestione di una rubrica di persone, facilmente integrabile in altre applicazioni.SCCM Client Center Integration Pack for Opalis: "SCCM Client Center Integration Pack for Opalis" is an System Center Opalis Integration Pack to manage and orchestrate System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 Agents from Opalis workflows.Sugar-free programming: I like to think about breadth or depth developer, or Mort, Elvis, or Einstein developer stereotypes, as roles we could play accordingly to the task at hand…see more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/marcod/archive/2011/03/01/sugarfreecs1.aspxTest Project 1: This is test project siteTestZoner: TestZoneTextBookReader: ???????????????????????，??????????，??????！ ??.net 2.0uSiteBuilder: uSiteBuilder is a framework made for .NET developers to simplify, speedup and take Umbraco development to next level. Aim of this framework is to reduce developer interaction with Umbraco back-end (browser based development), to create Umbraco websites in a more .NET way...VinculacionMicrosoft: Vinculacion Microsoft is a project for distributing Dreamsparks and Faculty Connection codes to students and professors. It is developed in ASP .Net and designed for Universities in Mexico interested in the different benefits that Microsoft has for them. Vio: Vio is an application for Sharetronix Based websites. Allowing users to connect to their community via their Windows Desktop.whatsnew.exe a command line utility to find new files: whatsnew.exe is a command line utility that lists the files created (new files) in a given number of days. whatsnew.exe 's syntax is very simple: whatsnew path numberofdays Also whatsnew supports other options like HTML or XML output, hyperlinked outputs and more.

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• Top 50 ASP.Net Interview Questions & Answers

  - by Samir R. Bhogayta

  1. What is ASP.Net? It is a framework developed by Microsoft on which we can develop new generation web sites using web forms(aspx), MVC, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. Its successor of Microsoft Active Server Pages(ASP). Currently there is ASP.NET 4.0, which is used to develop web sites. There are various page extensions provided by Microsoft that are being used for web site development. Eg: aspx, asmx, ascx, ashx, cs, vb, html, xml etc. 2. What’s the use of Response.Output.Write()? We can write formatted output  using Response.Output.Write(). 3. In which event of page cycle is the ViewState available?   After the Init() and before the Page_Load(). 4. What is the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect?   In Server.Transfer page processing transfers from one page to the other page without making a round-trip back to the client’s browser.  This provides a faster response with a little less overhead on the server.  The clients url history list or current url Server does not update in case of Server.Transfer. Response.Redirect is used to redirect the user’s browser to another page or site.  It performs trip back to the client where the client’s browser is redirected to the new page.  The user’s browser history list is updated to reflect the new address. 5. From which base class all Web Forms are inherited? Page class.  6. What are the different validators in ASP.NET? Required field Validator Range  Validator Compare Validator Custom Validator Regular expression Validator Summary Validator 7. Which validator control you use if you need to make sure the values in two different controls matched? Compare Validator control. 8. What is ViewState? ViewState is used to retain the state of server-side objects between page post backs. 9. Where the viewstate is stored after the page postback? ViewState is stored in a hidden field on the page at client side.  ViewState is transported to the client and back to the server, and is not stored on the server or any other external source. 10. How long the items in ViewState exists? They exist for the life of the current page. 11. What are the different Session state management options available in ASP.NET? In-Process Out-of-Process. In-Process stores the session in memory on the web server. Out-of-Process Session state management stores data in an external server.  The external server may be either a SQL Server or a State Server.  All objects stored in session are required to be serializable for Out-of-Process state management. 12. How you can add an event handler?  Using the Attributes property of server side control. e.g. [csharp] btnSubmit.Attributes.Add(“onMouseOver”,”JavascriptCode();”) [/csharp] 13. What is caching? Caching is a technique used to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed data or files in memory. The request for a cached file/data will be accessed from cache instead of actual location of that file. 14. What are the different types of caching? ASP.NET has 3 kinds of caching : Output Caching, Fragment Caching, Data Caching. 15. Which type if caching will be used if we want to cache the portion of a page instead of whole page? Fragment Caching: It caches the portion of the page generated by the request. For that, we can create user controls with the below code: [xml] <%@ OutputCache Duration=”120? VaryByParam=”CategoryID;SelectedID”%> [/xml] 16. List the events in page life cycle.   1) Page_PreInit 2) Page_Init 3) Page_InitComplete 4) Page_PreLoad 5) Page_Load 6) Page_LoadComplete 7) Page_PreRender 8)Render 17. Can we have a web application running without web.Config file?   Yes 18. Is it possible to create web application with both webforms and mvc? Yes. We have to include below mvc assembly references in the web forms application to create hybrid application. [csharp] System.Web.Mvc System.Web.Razor System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations [/csharp] 19. Can we add code files of different languages in App_Code folder?   No. The code files must be in same language to be kept in App_code folder. 20. What is Protected Configuration? It is a feature used to secure connection string information. 21. Write code to send e-mail from an ASP.NET application? [csharp] MailMessage mailMess = new MailMessage (); mailMess.From = “[email protected]”; mailMess.To = “[email protected]”; mailMess.Subject = “Test email”; mailMess.Body = “Hi This is a test mail.”; SmtpMail.SmtpServer = “localhost”; SmtpMail.Send (mailMess); [/csharp] MailMessage and SmtpMail are classes defined System.Web.Mail namespace.  22. How can we prevent browser from caching an ASPX page?   We can SetNoStore on HttpCachePolicy object exposed by the Response object’s Cache property: [csharp] Response.Cache.SetNoStore (); Response.Write (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString ()); [/csharp] 23. What is the good practice to implement validations in aspx page? Client-side validation is the best way to validate data of a web page. It reduces the network traffic and saves server resources. 24. What are the event handlers that we can have in Global.asax file? Application Events: Application_Start , Application_End, Application_AcquireRequestState, Application_AuthenticateRequest, Application_AuthorizeRequest, Application_BeginRequest, Application_Disposed,  Application_EndRequest, Application_Error, Application_PostRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreSendRequestContent, Application_PreSendRequestHeaders, Application_ReleaseRequestState, Application_ResolveRequestCache, Application_UpdateRequestCache Session Events: Session_Start,Session_End 25. Which protocol is used to call a Web service? HTTP Protocol 26. Can we have multiple web config files for an asp.net application? Yes. 27. What is the difference between web config and machine config? Web config file is specific to a web application where as machine config is specific to a machine or server. There can be multiple web config files into an application where as we can have only one machine config file on a server. 28.  Explain role based security ?   Role Based Security used to implement security based on roles assigned to user groups in the organization. Then we can allow or deny users based on their role in the organization. Windows defines several built-in groups, including Administrators, Users, and Guests. [xml] <AUTHORIZATION>< authorization > < allow roles=”Domain_Name\Administrators” / >   < !– Allow Administrators in domain. — > < deny users=”*”  / >                            < !– Deny anyone else. — > < /authorization > [/xml] 29. What is Cross Page Posting? When we click submit button on a web page, the page post the data to the same page. The technique in which we post the data to different pages is called Cross Page posting. This can be achieved by setting POSTBACKURL property of  the button that causes the postback. Findcontrol method of PreviousPage can be used to get the posted values on the page to which the page has been posted. 30. How can we apply Themes to an asp.net application? We can specify the theme in web.config file. Below is the code example to apply theme: [xml] <configuration> <system.web> <pages theme=”Windows7? /> </system.web> </configuration> [/xml] 31: What is RedirectPermanent in ASP.Net?   RedirectPermanent Performs a permanent redirection from the requested URL to the specified URL. Once the redirection is done, it also returns 301 Moved Permanently responses. 32: What is MVC? MVC is a framework used to create web applications. The web application base builds on  Model-View-Controller pattern which separates the application logic from UI, and the input and events from the user will be controlled by the Controller. 33. Explain the working of passport authentication. First of all it checks passport authentication cookie. If the cookie is not available then the application redirects the user to Passport Sign on page. Passport service authenticates the user details on sign on page and if valid then stores the authenticated cookie on client machine and then redirect the user to requested page 34. What are the advantages of Passport authentication? All the websites can be accessed using single login credentials. So no need to remember login credentials for each web site. Users can maintain his/ her information in a single location. 35. What are the asp.net Security Controls? <asp:Login>: Provides a standard login capability that allows the users to enter their credentials <asp:LoginName>: Allows you to display the name of the logged-in user <asp:LoginStatus>: Displays whether the user is authenticated or not <asp:LoginView>: Provides various login views depending on the selected template <asp:PasswordRecovery>:  email the users their lost password 36: How do you register JavaScript for webcontrols ? We can register javascript for controls using <CONTROL -name>Attribtues.Add(scriptname,scripttext) method. 37. In which event are the controls fully loaded? Page load event. 38: what is boxing and unboxing? Boxing is assigning a value type to reference type variable. Unboxing is reverse of boxing ie. Assigning reference type variable to value type variable. 39. Differentiate strong typing and weak typing In strong typing, the data types of variable are checked at compile time. On the other hand, in case of weak typing the variable data types are checked at runtime. In case of strong typing, there is no chance of compilation error. Scripts use weak typing and hence issues arises at runtime. 40. How we can force all the validation controls to run? The Page.Validate() method is used to force all the validation controls to run and to perform validation. 41. List all templates of the Repeater control. ItemTemplate AlternatingltemTemplate SeparatorTemplate HeaderTemplate FooterTemplate 42. List the major built-in objects in ASP.NET?  Application Request Response Server Session Context Trace 43. What is the appSettings Section in the web.config file? The appSettings block in web config file sets the user-defined values for the whole application. For example, in the following code snippet, the specified ConnectionString section is used throughout the project for database connection: [csharp] <em><configuration> <appSettings> <add key=”ConnectionString” value=”server=local; pwd=password; database=default” /> </appSettings></em> [/csharp] 44.      Which data type does the RangeValidator control support? The data types supported by the RangeValidator control are Integer, Double, String, Currency, and Date. 45. What is the difference between an HtmlInputCheckBox control and anHtmlInputRadioButton control? In HtmlInputCheckBoxcontrol, multiple item selection is possible whereas in HtmlInputRadioButton controls, we can select only single item from the group of items. 46. Which namespaces are necessary to create a localized application? System.Globalization System.Resources 47. What are the different types of cookies in ASP.NET? Session Cookie – Resides on the client machine for a single session until the user does not log out. Persistent Cookie – Resides on a user’s machine for a period specified for its expiry, such as 10 days, one month, and never. 48. What is the file extension of web service? Web services have file extension .asmx.. 49. What are the components of ADO.NET? The components of ADO.Net are Dataset, Data Reader, Data Adaptor, Command, connection. 50. What is the difference between ExecuteScalar and ExecuteNonQuery? ExecuteScalar returns output value where as ExecuteNonQuery does not return any value but the number of rows affected by the query. ExecuteScalar used for fetching a single value and ExecuteNonQuery used to execute Insert and Update statements.

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• Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure

  After successful automatic distribution of IPv6 address information via DHCPv6 in your local network it might be time to start offering some more services. Usually, we would use host names in order to communicate with other machines instead of their bare IPv6 addresses. During the following paragraphs we are going to enable our own DNS name server with IPv6 address resolving. This is the third article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. What's your name and your IPv6 address? $ sudo service bind9 status * bind9 is running If the service is not recognised, you have to install it first on your system. This is done very easy and quickly like so: $ sudo apt-get install bind9 Once again, there is no specialised package for IPv6. Just the regular application is good to go. But of course, it is necessary to enable IPv6 binding in the options. Let's fire up a text editor and modify the configuration file. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.optionsacl iosnet {        127.0.0.1;        192.168.1.0/24;        ::1/128;        2001:db8:bad:a55::/64;};listen-on { iosnet; };listen-on-v6 { any; };allow-query { iosnet; };allow-transfer { iosnet; }; Most important directive is the listen-on-v6. This will enable your named to bind to your IPv6 addresses specified on your system. Easiest is to specify any as value, and named will bind to all available IPv6 addresses during start. More details and explanations are found in the man-pages of named.conf. Save the file and restart the named service. As usual, check your log files and correct your configuration in case of any logged error messages. Using the netstat command you can validate whether the service is running and to which IP and IPv6 addresses it is bound to, like so: $ sudo service bind9 restart $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "named\W*$"tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                    LISTEN      1734/named      udp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                                1734/named   Sweet! Okay, now it's about time to resolve host names and their assigned IPv6 addresses using our own DNS name server. $ host -t aaaa www.6bone.net 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: www.6bone.net is an alias for 6bone.net.6bone.net has IPv6 address 2001:5c0:1000:10::2 Alright, our newly configured BIND named is fully operational. Eventually, you might be more familiar with the dig command. Here is the same kind of IPv6 host name resolve but it will provide more details about that particular host as well as the domain in general. $ dig @2001:db8:bad:a55::2 www.6bone.net. AAAA More details on the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (bind) daemon and IPv6 are available in Chapter 22.1 of Peter Bieringer's HOWTO on IPv6. Setting up your own DNS zone Now, that we have an operational named in place, it's about time to implement and configure our own host names and IPv6 address resolving. The general approach is to create your own zone database below the bind folder and to add AAAA records for your hosts. In order to achieve this, we have to define the zone first in the configuration file named.conf.local. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.local //// Do any local configuration here//zone "ios.mu" {        type master;        file "/etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu";}; Here we specify the location of our zone database file. Next, we are going to create it and add our host names, our IP and our IPv6 addresses. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu $ORIGIN .$TTL 259200     ; 3 daysios.mu                  IN SOA  ios.mu. hostmaster.ios.mu. (                                2014031101 ; serial                                28800      ; refresh (8 hours)                                7200       ; retry (2 hours)                                604800     ; expire (1 week)                                86400      ; minimum (1 day)                                )                        NS      server.ios.mu.$ORIGIN ios.mu.server                  A       192.168.1.2server                  AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::2client1                 A       192.168.1.3client1                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::3client2                 A       192.168.1.4client2                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::4 With a couple of machines in place, it's time to reload that new configuration. Note: Each time you are going to change your zone databases you have to modify the serial information, too. Named loads the plain text zone definitions and converts them into an internal, indexed binary format to improve lookup performance. If you forget to change your serial then named will not use the new records from the text file but the indexed ones. Or you have to flush the index and force a reload of the zone. This can be done easily by either restarting the named: $ sudo service bind9 restart or by reloading the configuration file using the name server control utility - rndc: $ sudo rndc reconfig Check your log files for any error messages and whether the new zone database has been accepted. Next, we are going to resolve a host name trying to get its IPv6 address like so: $ host -t aaaa server.ios.mu. 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: server.ios.mu has IPv6 address 2001:db8:bad:a55::2 Looks good. Alternatively, you could have just ping'd the system as well using the ping6 command instead of the regular ping: $ ping6 serverPING server(2001:db8:bad:a55::2) 56 data bytes64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.615 ms64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.407 ms^C--- ios1 ping statistics ---2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001msrtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.407/0.511/0.615/0.104 ms That also looks promising to me. How about your configuration? Next, it might be interesting to extend the range of available services on the network. One essential service would be to have web sites at hand.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: How to Deploy Web Apps Using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part II

  - by mbridge

  In previous post, I have discussed on how to work with ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First for developing web apps. In this post, I will demonstrate on working with domain entity with deep object graph, Service Layer and View Models and will also complete the rest of the demo application. In the previous post, we have done CRUD operations against Category entity and this post will be focus on Expense entity those have an association with Category entity. Domain Model Category Entity public class Category   {       public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]       [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]       public string Name { get; set;}       public string Description { get; set; }       public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }   } Expense Entity public class Expense     {                public int ExpenseId { get; set; }                public string  Transaction { get; set; }         public DateTime Date { get; set; }         public double Amount { get; set; }         public int CategoryId { get; set; }         public virtual Category Category { get; set; }     } We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. Repository class for Expense Transaction Let’s create repository class for handling CRUD operations for Expense entity public class ExpenseRepository : RepositoryBase<Expense>, IExpenseRepository     {     public ExpenseRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface IExpenseRepository : IRepository<Expense> { } Service Layer If you are new to Service Layer, checkout Martin Fowler's article Service Layer . According to Martin Fowler, Service Layer defines an application's boundary and its set of available operations from the perspective of interfacing client layers. It encapsulates the application's business logic, controlling transactions and coordinating responses in the implementation of its operations. Controller classes should be lightweight and do not put much of business logic onto it. We can use the service layer as the business logic layer and can encapsulate the rules of the application. Let’s create a Service class for coordinates the transaction for Expense public interface IExpenseService {     IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime ednDate);     Expense GetExpense(int id);             void CreateExpense(Expense expense);     void DeleteExpense(int id);     void SaveExpense(); } public class ExpenseService : IExpenseService {     private readonly IExpenseRepository expenseRepository;            private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;     public ExpenseService(IExpenseRepository expenseRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {                  this.expenseRepository = expenseRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }     public IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)     {         var expenses = expenseRepository.GetMany(exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate);         return expenses;     }     public void CreateExpense(Expense expense)     {         expenseRepository.Add(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public Expense GetExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         return expense;     }     public void DeleteExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         expenseRepository.Delete(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public void SaveExpense()     {         unitOfWork.Commit();     } } View Model for Expense Transactions In real world ASP.NET MVC applications, we need to design model objects especially for our views. Our domain objects are mainly designed for the needs for domain model and it is representing the domain of our applications. On the other hand, View Model objects are designed for our needs for views. We have an Expense domain entity that has an association with Category. While we are creating a new Expense, we have to specify that in which Category belongs with the new Expense transaction. The user interface for Expense transaction will have form fields for representing the Expense entity and a CategoryId for representing the Category. So let's create view model for representing the need for Expense transactions. public class ExpenseViewModel {     public int ExpenseId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Category Required")]     public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Transaction Required")]     public string Transaction { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Date Required")]     public DateTime Date { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Amount Required")]     public double Amount { get; set; }       public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Category { get; set; } } The ExpenseViewModel is designed for the purpose of View template and contains the all validation rules. It has properties for mapping values to Expense entity and a property Category for binding values to a drop-down for list values of Category. Create Expense transaction Let’s create action methods in the ExpenseController for creating expense transactions public ActionResult Create() {     var expenseModel = new ExpenseViewModel();     var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();     expenseModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(-1);     expenseModel.Date = DateTime.Today;     return View(expenseModel); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(ExpenseViewModel expenseViewModel) {                      if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();             expenseViewModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expenseViewModel.CategoryId);             return View("Save", expenseViewModel);         }         Expense expense=new Expense();         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expenseViewModel,expense);         expenseService.CreateExpense(expense);         return RedirectToAction("Index");              } In the Create action method for HttpGet request, we have created an instance of our View Model ExpenseViewModel with Category information for the drop-down list and passing the Model object to View template. The extension method ToSelectListItems is shown below public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems(         this IEnumerable<Category> categories, int  selectedId) {     return           categories.OrderBy(category => category.Name)                 .Select(category =>                     new SelectListItem                     {                         Selected = (category.CategoryId == selectedId),                         Text = category.Name,                         Value = category.CategoryId.ToString()                     }); } In the Create action method for HttpPost, our view model object ExpenseViewModel will map with posted form input values. We need to create an instance of Expense for the persistence purpose. So we need to copy values from ExpenseViewModel object to Expense object. ASP.NET MVC futures assembly provides a static class ModelCopier that can use for copying values between Model objects. ModelCopier class has two static methods - CopyCollection and CopyModel.CopyCollection method will copy values between two collection objects and CopyModel will copy values between two model objects. We have used CopyModel method of ModelCopier class for copying values from expenseViewModel object to expense object. Finally we did a call to CreateExpense method of ExpenseService class for persisting new expense transaction. List Expense Transactions We want to list expense transactions based on a date range. So let’s create action method for filtering expense transactions with a specified date range. public ActionResult Index(DateTime? startDate, DateTime? endDate) {     //If date is not passed, take current month's first and last dte     DateTime dtNow;     dtNow = DateTime.Today;     if (!startDate.HasValue)     {         startDate = new DateTime(dtNow.Year, dtNow.Month, 1);         endDate = startDate.Value.AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     //take last date of start date's month, if end date is not passed     if (startDate.HasValue && !endDate.HasValue)     {         endDate = (new DateTime(startDate.Value.Year, startDate.Value.Month, 1)).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     var expenses = expenseService.GetExpenses(startDate.Value ,endDate.Value);     //if request is Ajax will return partial view     if (Request.IsAjaxRequest())     {         return PartialView("ExpenseList", expenses);     }     //set start date and end date to ViewBag dictionary     ViewBag.StartDate = startDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     ViewBag.EndDate = endDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     //if request is not ajax     return View(expenses); } We are using the above Index Action method for both Ajax requests and normal requests. If there is a request for Ajax, we will call the PartialView ExpenseList. Razor Views for listing Expense information Let’s create view templates in Razor for showing list of Expense information ExpenseList.cshtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense>   <table>         <tr>             <th>Actions</th>             <th>Category</th>             <th>                 Transaction             </th>             <th>                 Date             </th>             <th>                 Amount             </th>         </tr>       @foreach (var item in Model) {              <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.ExpenseId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.ExpenseId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divExpenseList" })             </td>              <td>                 @item.Category.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Transaction             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:d}", item.Date)             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:F}", item.Amount)             </td>         </tr>          }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Expense", "Create") |         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Category", "Create","Category")     </p> Index.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Expense List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.ui.datepicker.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />      @using (Ajax.BeginForm(new AjaxOptions{ UpdateTargetId="divExpenseList", HttpMethod="Get"})) {     <table>         <tr>         <td>         <div>           Start Date: @Html.TextBox("StartDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["StartDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })         </div>         </td>         <td><div>            End Date: @Html.TextBox("EndDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["EndDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })          </div></td>          <td> <input type="submit" value="Search By TransactionDate" /></td>         </tr>     </table>         }   <div id="divExpenseList">             @Html.Partial("ExpenseList", Model)     </div> <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script> Ajax search functionality using Ajax.BeginForm The search functionality of Index view is providing Ajax functionality using Ajax.BeginForm. The Ajax.BeginForm() method writes an opening <form> tag to the response. You can use this method in a using block. In that case, the method renders the closing </form> tag at the end of the using block and the form is submitted asynchronously by using JavaScript. The search functionality will call the Index Action method and this will return partial view ExpenseList for updating the search result. We want to update the response UI for the Ajax request onto divExpenseList element. So we have specified the UpdateTargetId as "divExpenseList" in the Ajax.BeginForm method. Add jQuery DatePicker Our search functionality is using a date range so we are providing two date pickers using jQuery datepicker. You need to add reference to the following JavaScript files to working with jQuery datepicker. - jquery-ui.js - jquery.ui.datepicker.js For theme support for datepicker, we can use a customized CSS class. In our example we have used a CSS file “jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css”. For more details about the datepicker component, visit jquery UI website at http://jqueryui.com/demos/datepicker . In the jQuery ready event, we have used following JavaScript function to initialize the UI element to show date picker. <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script> Summary In this two-part series, we have created a simple web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM, Razor and EF Code First CTP 5. I have demonstrated patterns and practices  such as Dependency Injection, Repository pattern, Unit of Work, ViewModel and Service Layer. My primary objective was to demonstrate different practices and options for developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. You can implement these approaches in your own way for building web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3. I will refactor this demo app on later time.

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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