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• I have finally traded my Blackberry in for a Droid!

  - by Bob Porter

  Over the years I have used a number of different types of phones. Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Nokia, and now Android. Until the Blackberry, which was my last phone (and I still have one issued from my office) I had never found a phone that “just worked” especially with email and messaging. The Blackberry did, and does, excel at those functions. My last personal phone was a Storm 1 which was Blackberry’s first touch screen phone. The Storm 2 was an improved version that fixed some screen press detection issues from the first model and it added Wifi. Over the last few years I have watched others acquire and fall in love with their ‘Droid’s including a number of iPhone users which surprised me. Our office has until recently only supported Blackberry phones, adding iPhones within the last year or so. When I spoke with our internal telecom folks they confirmed they were evaluating Android phones, but felt they still were not secure enough out of the box for corporate use and SOX compliance. That being said, as a personal phone, the Droid Rocks! I am impressed with its speed, the number of apps available, and the overall design. It is not as “flashy” as an iPhone but it does everything that I care about and more. The model I bought is the Motorola Droid 2 Global from Verizon. It is currently running Android 2.2 for it’s OS, 2.3 is just around the corner. It has 8 gigs of internal flash memory and can handle up to a 32 gig SDCard. (I currently have 2 8 gig cards, one for backups, and have ordered a 16 gig card!) Being a geek at heart, I “rooted” the phone which means gained superuser access to the OS on the phone. And opens a number of doors for further modifications down the road. Also being a geek meant I have already setup a development environment and built and deployed the obligatory “Hello Droid” application. I will be writing of my development experiences with this new platform here often, to start off I thought I would share my current application list to give you an idea what I am using. Zedge: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.zedge.android XDA: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkxda.activity WRAL.com: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mylocaltv.wral Wireless Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.tether Winamp: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.nullsoft.winamp Win7 Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggles.win7 Wifi Analyzer: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer WeatherBug: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aws.android Weather Widget Forecast Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.weather.forecastaddon Weather & Toggle Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather2 Vlingo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.vlingo.client VirtualTENHO-G: http://market.android.com/details?id=jp.bustercurry.virtualtenho_g Twitter: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.twitter.android TweetDeck: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.thedeck.android.app Tricorder: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.hermit.tricorder Titanium Backup PRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackupPro Titanium Backup: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup Terminal Emulator: http://market.android.com/details?id=jackpal.androidterm Talking Tom Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.outfit7.talkingtom Stock Blue: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.stockblue ST: Red Alert Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaper ST: Red Alert: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaperplus Solitaire: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kmagic.solitaire Skype: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.skype.raider Silent Time Lite: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.QuiteHypnotic.SilentTime ShopSavvy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.biggu.shopsavvy Shopper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.shopper Shiny clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.clock.shiny ShareMyApps: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sense Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.senseglassadwtheme ROM Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.rommanager Roboform Bookmarklet Installer: http://market.android.com/details?id=roboformBookmarkletInstaller.android.com RealCalc: http://market.android.com/details?id=uk.co.nickfines.RealCalc Package Buddy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.psyrus.packagebuddy Overstock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.overstock OMGPOP Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggle.omgpop OI File Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.openintents.filemanager nook: http://market.android.com/details?id=bn.ereader MyAtlas-Google Maps Navigation ext: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adaptdroid.navbookfree3 MSN Droid: http://market.android.com/details?id=msn.droid.im Matrix Live Wallpaper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jarodyv.livewallpaper.matrix LogMeIn: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.logmein.ignitionpro.android Liveshare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cooliris.app.liveshare Kobo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kobobooks.android Instant Heart Rate: http://market.android.com/details?id=si.modula.android.instantheartrate IMDb: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.imdb.mobile Home Plus Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.skin.weather.homeplus Handcent SMS: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handcent.nextsms H7C Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skin.h7c GTasks: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.dayup.gtask GPS Status: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.eclipsim.gpsstatus2 Google Voice: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googlevoice Google Sky Map: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid Google Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.reader GoMarks: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androappsdev.gomarks Goggles: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.unveil Glossy Black Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skin.glossyblack Fox News: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.foxnews.android Foursquare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.joelapenna.foursquared FBReader: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.geometerplus.zlibrary.ui.android Fandango: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.fandango Facebook: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.facebook.katana Extensive Notes Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.flufflydelusions.app.extensive_notes_donate Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.expensemanager Espresso UI (LightShow w/ Slide): http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jaguirre.slide.lightshow Engadget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aol.mobile.engadget Earth: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.earth Drudge: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.iavian.dreport Dropbox: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dropbox.android DroidForums: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkdrodiforums.activity DroidArmor ADW: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.addesigns.droidarmorADW Droid Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skins.white Droid 2 Bootstrapper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.droid2.bootstrap doubleTwist: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.doubleTwist.androidPlayer Documents To Go: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dataviz.docstogo Digital Clock Widget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.maize.digitalClock Desk Home: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cowbellsoftware.deskdock Default Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skins.defaultclock Daily Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.techahead.ExpenseManager ConnectBot: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.connectbot Colorized Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.colorized Chrome to Phone: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.chrometophone CardStar: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cardstar.android Books: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.books Black Ipad Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.toggle.widget.skin.blackipad Black Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.blackglassadwtheme Bing: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.microsoft.mobileexperiences.bing BeyondPod Unlock Key: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod.unlockkey BeyondPod: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod BeejiveIM: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.beejive.im Beautiful Widgets Animations Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.bw.forecast Beautiful Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifulwidgets Beautiful Live Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifullive BBC News: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.jimblackler.newswidget Barnacle Wifi Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.szym.barnacle Barcode Scanner: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android ASTRO SMB Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.smb ASTRO Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.pro ASTRO Bluetooth Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.network.bluetooth ASTRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro AppBrain App Market: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps App Drawer Icon Pack: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adwtheme.appdrawericonpack androidVNC: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.androidVNC AndroidGuys: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handmark.mpp.AndroidGuys Android System Info: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.electricsheep.asi AndFTP: http://market.android.com/details?id=lysesoft.andftp ADWTheme Red: http://market.android.com/details?id=adw.theme.red ADWLauncher EX: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adwfreak.launcher ADW.Theme.One: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.one ADW.Faded theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.xrcore.adwtheme.faded ADW Gingerbread: http://market.android.com/details?id=me.robertburns.android.adwtheme.gingerbread Advanced Task Killer Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller Adobe Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.reader Adobe Flash Player 10.1: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.flashplayer Adobe AIR: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.air 3G Auto OnOff: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.yuantuo --- Generated by ShareMyApps http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sent from my Droid

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• Working with Silverlight DataGrid RowDetailsTemplate

  - by mohanbrij

  In this post I am going to show how we can use the Silverlight DataGrid RowDetails Template, Before I start I assume that you know basics of Silverlight and also know how you create a Silverlight Projects. I have started with the Silverlight Application, and kept all the default options before I created a Silverlight Project. After this I added a Silverlight DataGrid control to my MainForm.xaml page, using the DragDrop feature of Visual Studio IDE, this will help me to add the default namespace and references automatically. Just to give you a quick look of what exactly I am going to do, I will show you in the screen below my final target, before I start explaining rest of my codes. Before I start with the real code, first I have to do some ground work, as I am not getting the data from the DB, so I am creating a class where I will populate the dummy data. EmployeeData.cs public class EmployeeData { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string State { get; set; } public string Country { get; set; } public EmployeeData() { } public List<EmployeeData> GetEmployeeData() { List<EmployeeData> employees = new List<EmployeeData>(); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#407, PH1, Foyer Appartment", City = "Bangalore", Country = "India", FirstName = "Brij", LastName = "Mohan", State = "Karnataka" }); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#332, Dayal Niketan", City = "Jamshedpur", Country = "India", FirstName = "Arun", LastName = "Dayal", State = "Jharkhand" }); employees.Add ( new EmployeeData { Address = "#77, MSR Nagar", City = "Bangalore", Country = "India", FirstName = "Sunita", LastName = "Mohan", State = "Karnataka" }); return employees; } } The above class will give me some sample data, I think this will be good enough to start with the actual code. now I am giving below the XAML code from my MainForm.xaml First I will put the Silverlight DataGrid, <data:DataGrid x:Name="gridEmployee" CanUserReorderColumns="False" CanUserSortColumns="False" RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" Height="200" AutoGenerateColumns="False" Width="350" VerticalAlignment="Center"> Here, the most important property which I am going to set is RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" This will display the RowDetails only when we select the desired Row. Other option we have in this is Collapsed and Visible. Which will either make the row details always Visible or Always Collapsed. but to get the real effect I have selected VisibleWhenSelected. Now I am going to put the rest of my XAML code. <data:DataGrid.Columns> <!--Begin FirstName Column--> <data:DataGridTextColumn Width="150" Header="First Name" Binding="{Binding FirstName}"/> <!--End FirstName Column--> <!--Begin LastName Column--> <data:DataGridTextColumn Width="150" Header="Last Name" Binding="{Binding LastName}"/> <!--End LastName Column--> </data:DataGrid.Columns> <data:DataGrid.RowDetailsTemplate> <!-- Begin row details section. --> <DataTemplate> <Border BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" Background="White"> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="0.2*" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="0.8*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <!-- Controls are bound to FullAddress properties. --> <TextBlock Text="Address : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Address}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0" /> <TextBlock Text="City : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="1" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding City}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1" /> <TextBlock Text="State : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="2" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding State}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="2" /> <TextBlock Text="Country : " Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="3" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Country}" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" /> </Grid> </Border> </DataTemplate> <!-- End row details section. --> </data:DataGrid.RowDetailsTemplate>   In the code above, first I am declaring the simple dataGridTextColumn for FirstName and LastName, and after this I am creating the RowDetailTemplate, where we are just putting the code what we usually do to design the Grid. I mean nothing very much RowDetailTemplate Specific, most of the code which you will see inside the RowDetailsTemplate is plain and simple, where I am binding rest of the Address Column. And that,s it. Once we will bind the DataGrid, you are ready to go. In the code below from MainForm.xaml.cs, I am just binding the DataGrid public partial class MainPage : UserControl { public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); BindControls(); } private void BindControls() { EmployeeData employees = new EmployeeData(); gridEmployee.ItemsSource = employees.GetEmployeeData(); } } Once you will run, you can see the output I have given in the screenshot above. In this example I have just shown the very basic example, now it up to your creativity and requirement, you can put some other controls like checkbox, Images, even other DataGrid, etc inside this RowDetailsTemplate column. I am attaching my sample source code with this post. I have used Silverlight 3 and Visual Studio 2008, but this is fully compatible with you Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. you may just need to Upgrade the attached Sample. You can download from here.

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• Metro: Introduction to the WinJS ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to provide a quick introduction to the ListView control – just the bare minimum that you need to know to start using the control. When building Metro style applications using JavaScript, the ListView control is the primary control that you use for displaying lists of items. For example, if you are building a product catalog app, then you can use the ListView control to display the list of products. The ListView control supports several advanced features that I plan to discuss in future blog entries. For example, you can group the items in a ListView, you can create master/details views with a ListView, and you can efficiently work with large sets of items with a ListView. In this blog entry, we’ll keep things simple and focus on displaying a list of products. There are three things that you need to do in order to display a list of items with a ListView: Create a data source Create an Item Template Declare the ListView Creating the ListView Data Source The first step is to create (or retrieve) the data that you want to display with the ListView. In most scenarios, you will want to bind a ListView to a WinJS.Binding.List object. The nice thing about the WinJS.Binding.List object is that it enables you to take a standard JavaScript array and convert the array into something that can be bound to the ListView. It doesn’t matter where the JavaScript array comes from. It could be a static array that you declare or you could retrieve the array as the result of an Ajax call to a remote server. The following JavaScript file – named products.js – contains a list of products which can be bound to a ListView. (function () { "use strict"; var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55 }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99 } ]); WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: products }); })(); The products variable represents a WinJS.Binding.List object. This object is initialized with a plain-old JavaScript array which represents an array of products. To avoid polluting the global namespace, the code above uses the module pattern and exposes the products using a namespace. The list of products is exposed to the world as ListViewDemos.products. To learn more about the module pattern and namespaces in WinJS, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/22/metro-namespaces-and-modules.aspx Creating the ListView Item Template The ListView control does not know how to render anything. It doesn’t know how you want each list item to appear. To get the ListView control to render something useful, you must create an Item Template. Here’s what our template for rendering an individual product looks like: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> This template displays the product name and price from the data source. Normally, you will declare your template in the same file as you declare the ListView control. In our case, both the template and ListView are declared in the default.html file. To learn more about templates, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/27/metro-using-templates.aspx Declaring the ListView The final step is to declare the ListView control in a page. Here’s the markup for declaring a ListView: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> You declare a ListView by adding the data-win-control to an HTML DIV tag. The data-win-options attribute is used to set two properties of the ListView. The ListView is associated with its data source with the itemDataSource property. Notice that the data source is ListViewDemos.products.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.products. You need to associate the ListView with the dataSoure property. The ListView is associated with its item template with the help of the itemTemplate property. The ID of the item template — #productTemplate – is used to select the template from the page. Here’s what the complete version of the default.html page looks like: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</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> <!-- ListViewDemos references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the page above includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The page above also contains a Template control which contains the ListView item template. Finally, the page includes the declaration of the ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe the minimal set of steps which you must complete to use the WinJS ListView control to display a simple list of items. You learned how to create a data source, declare an item template, and declare a ListView control.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 14, The Different Forms of Task

  - by Reed

  Before discussing Task creation and actual usage in concurrent environments, I will briefly expand upon my introduction of the Task class and provide a short explanation of the distinct forms of Task.  The Task Parallel Library includes four distinct, though related, variations on the Task class. In my introduction to the Task class, I focused on the most basic version of Task.  This version of Task, the standard Task class, is most often used with an Action delegate.  This allows you to implement for each task within the task decomposition as a single delegate. Typically, when using the new threading constructs in .NET 4 and the Task Parallel Library, we use lambda expressions to define anonymous methods.  The advantage of using a lambda expression is that it allows the Action delegate to directly use variables in the calling scope.  This eliminates the need to make separate Task classes for Action<T>, Action<T1,T2>, and all of the other Action<…> delegate types.  As an example, suppose we wanted to make a Task to handle the ”Show Splash” task from our earlier decomposition.  Even if this task required parameters, such as a message to display, we could still use an Action delegate specified via a lambda: // Store this as a local variable string messageForSplashScreen = GetSplashScreenMessage(); // Create our task Task showSplashTask = new Task( () => { // We can use variables in our outer scope, // as well as methods scoped to our class! this.DisplaySplashScreen(messageForSplashScreen); }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This provides a huge amount of flexibility.  We can use this single form of task for any task which performs an operation, provided the only information we need to track is whether the task has completed successfully or not.  This leads to my first observation: Use a Task with a System.Action delegate for any task for which no result is generated. This observation leads to an obvious corollary: we also need a way to define a task which generates a result.  The Task Parallel Library provides this via the Task<TResult> class. Task<TResult> subclasses the standard Task class, providing one additional feature – the ability to return a value back to the user of the task.  This is done by switching from providing an Action delegate to providing a Func<TResult> delegate.  If we decompose our problem, and we realize we have one task where its result is required by a future operation, this can be handled via Task<TResult>.  For example, suppose we want to make a task for our “Check for Update” task, we could do: Task<bool> checkForUpdateTask = new Task<bool>( () => { return this.CheckWebsiteForUpdate(); }); Later, we would start this task, and perform some other work.  At any point in the future, we could get the value from the Task<TResult>.Result property, which will cause our thread to block until the task has finished processing: // This uses Task<bool> checkForUpdateTask generated above... // Start the task, typically on a background thread checkForUpdateTask.Start(); // Do some other work on our current thread this.DoSomeWork(); // Discover, from our background task, whether an update is available // This will block until our task completes bool updateAvailable = checkForUpdateTask.Result; This leads me to my second observation: Use a Task<TResult> with a System.Func<TResult> delegate for any task which generates a result. Task and Task<TResult> provide a much cleaner alternative to the previous Asynchronous Programming design patterns in the .NET framework.  Instead of trying to implement IAsyncResult, and providing BeginXXX() and EndXXX() methods, implementing an asynchronous programming API can be as simple as creating a method that returns a Task or Task<TResult>.  The client side of the pattern also is dramatically simplified – the client can call a method, then either choose to call task.Wait() or use task.Result when it needs to wait for the operation’s completion. While this provides a much cleaner model for future APIs, there is quite a bit of infrastructure built around the current Asynchronous Programming design patterns.  In order to provide a model to work with existing APIs, two other forms of Task exist.  There is a constructor for Task which takes an Action<Object> and a state parameter.  In addition, there is a constructor for creating a Task<TResult> which takes a Func<Object, TResult> as well as a state parameter.  When using these constructors, the state parameter is stored in the Task.AsyncState property. While these two overloads exist, and are usable directly, I strongly recommend avoiding this for new development.  The two forms of Task which take an object state parameter exist primarily for interoperability with traditional .NET Asynchronous Programming methodologies.  Using lambda expressions to capture variables from the scope of the creator is a much cleaner approach than using the untyped state parameters, since lambda expressions provide full type safety without introducing new variables.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 15, Making Tasks Run: The TaskScheduler

  - by Reed

  In my introduction to the Task class, I specifically made mention that the Task class does not directly provide it’s own execution.  In addition, I made a strong point that the Task class itself is not directly related to threads or multithreading.  Rather, the Task class is used to implement our decomposition of tasks.  Once we’ve implemented our tasks, we need to execute them.  In the Task Parallel Library, the execution of Tasks is handled via an instance of the TaskScheduler class. The TaskScheduler class is an abstract class which provides a single function: it schedules the tasks and executes them within an appropriate context.  This class is the class which actually runs individual Task instances.  The .NET Framework provides two (internal) implementations of the TaskScheduler class. Since a Task, based on our decomposition, should be a self-contained piece of code, parallel execution makes sense when executing tasks.  The default implementation of the TaskScheduler class, and the one most often used, is based on the ThreadPool.  This can be retrieved via the TaskScheduler.Default property, and is, by default, what is used when we just start a Task instance with Task.Start(). Normally, when a Task is started by the default TaskScheduler, the task will be treated as a single work item, and run on a ThreadPool thread.  This pools tasks, and provides Task instances all of the advantages of the ThreadPool, including thread pooling for reduced resource usage, and an upper cap on the number of work items.  In addition, .NET 4 brings us a much improved thread pool, providing work stealing and reduced locking within the thread pool queues.  By using the default TaskScheduler, our Tasks are run asynchronously on the ThreadPool. There is one notable exception to my above statements when using the default TaskScheduler.  If a Task is created with the TaskCreationOptions set to TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning, the default TaskScheduler will generate a new thread for that Task, at least in the current implementation.  This is useful for Tasks which will persist for most of the lifetime of your application, since it prevents your Task from starving the ThreadPool of one of it’s work threads. The Task Parallel Library provides one other implementation of the TaskScheduler class.  In addition to providing a way to schedule tasks on the ThreadPool, the framework allows you to create a TaskScheduler which works within a specified SynchronizationContext.  This scheduler can be retrieved within a thread that provides a valid SynchronizationContext by calling the TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() method. This implementation of TaskScheduler is intended for use with user interface development.  Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation both require any access to user interface controls to occur on the same thread that created the control.  For example, if you want to set the text within a Windows Forms TextBox, and you’re working on a background thread, that UI call must be marshaled back onto the UI thread.  The most common way this is handled depends on the framework being used.  In Windows Forms, Control.Invoke or Control.BeginInvoke is most often used.  In WPF, the equivelent calls are Dispatcher.Invoke or Dispatcher.BeginInvoke. As an example, say we’re working on a background thread, and we want to update a TextBlock in our user interface with a status label.  The code would typically look something like: // Within background thread work... string status = GetUpdatedStatus(); Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal, new Action( () => { statusLabel.Text = status; })); // Continue on in background method .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This works fine, but forces your method to take a dependency on WPF or Windows Forms.  There is an alternative option, however.  Both Windows Forms and WPF, when initialized, setup a SynchronizationContext in their thread, which is available on the UI thread via the SynchronizationContext.Current property.  This context is used by classes such as BackgroundWorker to marshal calls back onto the UI thread in a framework-agnostic manner. The Task Parallel Library provides the same functionality via the TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() method.  When setting up our Tasks, as long as we’re working on the UI thread, we can construct a TaskScheduler via: TaskScheduler uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(); We then can use this scheduler on any thread to marshal data back onto the UI thread.  For example, our code above can then be rewritten as: string status = GetUpdatedStatus(); (new Task(() => { statusLabel.Text = status; })) .Start(uiScheduler); // Continue on in background method This is nice since it allows us to write code that isn’t tied to Windows Forms or WPF, but is still fully functional with those technologies.  I’ll discuss even more uses for the SynchronizationContext based TaskScheduler when I demonstrate task continuations, but even without continuations, this is a very useful construct. In addition to the two implementations provided by the Task Parallel Library, it is possible to implement your own TaskScheduler.  The ParallelExtensionsExtras project within the Samples for Parallel Programming provides nine sample TaskScheduler implementations.  These include schedulers which restrict the maximum number of concurrent tasks, run tasks on a single threaded apartment thread, use a new thread per task, and more.

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• Securing an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application

  - by rajbk

  This post attempts to look at some of the methods that can be used to secure an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application called Northwind Traders Human Resources.  The sample code for the project is attached at the bottom of this post. We are going to use a slightly modified Northwind database. The screen capture from SQL server management studio shows the change. I added a new column called Salary, inserted some random salaries for the employees and then turned off AllowNulls.   The reporting relationship for Northwind Employees is shown below.   The requirements for our application are as follows: Employees can see their LastName, FirstName, Title, Address and Salary Employees are allowed to edit only their Address information Employees can see the LastName, FirstName, Title, Address and Salary of their immediate reports Employees cannot see records of non immediate reports.  Employees are allowed to edit only the Salary and Title information of their immediate reports. Employees are not allowed to edit the Address of an immediate report Employees should be authenticated into the system. Employees by default get the “Employee” role. If a user has direct reports, they will also get assigned a “Manager” role. We use a very basic empId/pwd scheme of EmployeeID (1-9) and password test$1. You should never do this in an actual application. The application should protect from Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). For example, Michael could trick Steven, who is already logged on to the HR website, to load a page which contains a malicious request. where without Steven’s knowledge, a form on the site posts information back to the Northwind HR website using Steven’s credentials. Michael could use this technique to give himself a raise :-) UI Notes The layout of our app looks like so: When Nancy (EmpID 1) signs on, she sees the default page with her details and is allowed to edit her address. If Nancy attempts to view the record of employee Andrew who has an employeeID of 2 (Employees/Edit/2), she will get a “Not Authorized” error page. When Andrew (EmpID 2) signs on, he can edit the address field of his record and change the title and salary of employees that directly report to him. Implementation Notes All controllers inherit from a BaseController. The BaseController currently only has error handling code. When a user signs on, we check to see if they are in a Manager role. We then create a FormsAuthenticationTicket, encrypt it (including the roles that the employee belongs to) and add it to a cookie. private void SetAuthenticationCookie(int employeeID, List<string> roles) { HttpCookiesSection cookieSection = (HttpCookiesSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/httpCookies"); AuthenticationSection authenticationSection = (AuthenticationSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/authentication"); FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket( 1, employeeID.ToString(), DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(authenticationSection.Forms.Timeout.TotalMinutes), false, string.Join("|", roles.ToArray())); String encryptedTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(authTicket); HttpCookie authCookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encryptedTicket); if (cookieSection.RequireSSL || authenticationSection.Forms.RequireSSL) { authCookie.Secure = true; } HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(authCookie); } We read this cookie back in Global.asax and set the Context.User to be a new GenericPrincipal with the roles we assigned earlier. protected void Application_AuthenticateRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e){ if (Context.User != null) { string cookieName = FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName; HttpCookie authCookie = Context.Request.Cookies[cookieName]; if (authCookie == null) return; FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(authCookie.Value); string[] roles = authTicket.UserData.Split(new char[] { '|' }); FormsIdentity fi = (FormsIdentity)(Context.User.Identity); Context.User = new System.Security.Principal.GenericPrincipal(fi, roles); }} We ensure that a user has permissions to view a record by creating a custom attribute AuthorizeToViewID that inherits from ActionFilterAttribute. public class AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute{ IEmployeeRepository employeeRepository = new EmployeeRepository(); public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { if (filterContext.ActionParameters.ContainsKey("id") && filterContext.ActionParameters["id"] != null) { if (employeeRepository.IsAuthorizedToView((int)filterContext.ActionParameters["id"])) { return; } } throw new UnauthorizedAccessException("The record does not exist or you do not have permission to access it"); }} We add the AuthorizeToView attribute to any Action method that requires authorization. [HttpPost][Authorize(Order = 1)]//To prevent CSRF[ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Globals.EditSalt, Order = 2)]//See AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute class[AuthorizeToViewID(Order = 3)] [ActionName("Edit")]public ActionResult Update(int id){ var employeeToEdit = employeeRepository.GetEmployee(id); if (employeeToEdit != null) { //Employees can edit only their address //A manager can edit the title and salary of their subordinate string[] whiteList = (employeeToEdit.IsSubordinate) ? new string[] { "Title", "Salary" } : new string[] { "Address" }; if (TryUpdateModel(employeeToEdit, whiteList)) { employeeRepository.Save(employeeToEdit); return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = id }); } else { ModelState.AddModelError("", "Please correct the following errors."); } } return View(employeeToEdit);} The Authorize attribute is added to ensure that only authorized users can execute that Action. We use the TryUpdateModel with a white list to ensure that (a) an employee is able to edit only their Address and (b) that a manager is able to edit only the Title and Salary of a subordinate. This works in conjunction with the AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute. The ValidateAntiForgeryToken attribute is added (with a salt) to avoid CSRF. The Order on the attributes specify the order in which the attributes are executed. The Edit View uses the AntiForgeryToken helper to render the hidden token: ......<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%><%=Html.AntiForgeryToken(NorthwindHR.Models.Globals.EditSalt)%><%= Html.ValidationSummary(true, "Please correct the errors and try again.") %><div class="editor-label"> <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.LastName) %></div><div class="editor-field">...... The application uses View specific models for ease of model binding. public class EmployeeViewModel{ public int EmployeeID; [Required] [DisplayName("Last Name")] public string LastName { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("First Name")] public string FirstName { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Title")] public string Title { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Address")] public string Address { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Salary")] [Range(500, double.MaxValue)] public decimal Salary { get; set; } public bool IsSubordinate { get; set; }} To help with displaying readonly/editable fields, we use a helper method. //Simple extension method to display a TextboxFor or DisplayFor based on the isEditable variablepublic static MvcHtmlString TextBoxOrLabelFor<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression, bool isEditable){ if (isEditable) { return htmlHelper.TextBoxFor(expression); } else { return htmlHelper.DisplayFor(expression); }} The helper method is used in the view like so: <%=Html.TextBoxOrLabelFor(model => model.Title, Model.IsSubordinate)%> As mentioned in this post, there is a much easier way to update properties on an object. Download Demo Project VS 2008, ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM Remember to change the connectionString to point to your Northwind DB NorthwindHR.zip Feedback and bugs are always welcome :-)

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 6, Declarative Data Parallelism

  - by Reed

  When working with a problem that can be decomposed by data, we have a collection, and some operation being performed upon the collection.  I’ve demonstrated how this can be parallelized using the Task Parallel Library and imperative programming using imperative data parallelism via the Parallel class.  While this provides a huge step forward in terms of power and capabilities, in many cases, special care must still be given for relative common scenarios. C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 introduced a new, declarative programming model to .NET via the LINQ Project.  When working with collections, we can now write software that describes what we want to occur without having to explicitly state how the program should accomplish the task.  By taking advantage of LINQ, many operations become much shorter, more elegant, and easier to understand and maintain.  Version 4.0 of the .NET framework extends this concept into the parallel computation space by introducing Parallel LINQ. Before we delve into PLINQ, let’s begin with a short discussion of LINQ.  LINQ, the extensions to the .NET Framework which implement language integrated query, set, and transform operations, is implemented in many flavors.  For our purposes, we are interested in LINQ to Objects.  When dealing with parallelizing a routine, we typically are dealing with in-memory data storage.  More data-access oriented LINQ variants, such as LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities in the Entity Framework fall outside of our concern, since the parallelism there is the concern of the data base engine processing the query itself. LINQ (LINQ to Objects in particular) works by implementing a series of extension methods, most of which work on IEnumerable<T>.  The language enhancements use these extension methods to create a very concise, readable alternative to using traditional foreach statement.  For example, let’s revisit our minimum aggregation routine we wrote in Part 4: double min = double.MaxValue; foreach(var item in collection) { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, we’re doing a very simple computation, but writing this in an imperative style.  This can be loosely translated to English as: Create a very large number, and save it in min Loop through each item in the collection. For every item: Perform some computation, and save the result If the computation is less than min, set min to the computation Although this is fairly easy to follow, it’s quite a few lines of code, and it requires us to read through the code, step by step, line by line, in order to understand the intention of the developer. We can rework this same statement, using LINQ: double min = collection.Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); Here, we’re after the same information.  However, this is written using a declarative programming style.  When we see this code, we’d naturally translate this to English as: Save the Min value of collection, determined via calling item.PerformComputation() That’s it – instead of multiple logical steps, we have one single, declarative request.  This makes the developer’s intentions very clear, and very easy to follow.  The system is free to implement this using whatever method required. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) extends LINQ to Objects to support parallel operations.  This is a perfect fit in many cases when you have a problem that can be decomposed by data.  To show this, let’s again refer to our minimum aggregation routine from Part 4, but this time, let’s review our final, parallelized version: // Safe, and fast! double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach( collection, // First, we provide a local state initialization delegate. () => double.MaxValue, // Next, we supply the body, which takes the original item, loop state, // and local state, and returns a new local state (item, loopState, localState) => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); return System.Math.Min(localState, value); }, // Finally, we provide an Action<TLocal>, to "merge" results together localState => { // This requires locking, but it's only once per used thread lock(syncObj) min = System.Math.Min(min, localState); } ); Here, we’re doing the same computation as above, but fully parallelized.  Describing this in English becomes quite a feat: Create a very large number, and save it in min Create a temporary object we can use for locking Call Parallel.ForEach, specifying three delegates For the first delegate: Initialize a local variable to hold the local state to a very large number For the second delegate: For each item in the collection, perform some computation, save the result If the result is less than our local state, save the result in local state For the final delegate: Take a lock on our temporary object to protect our min variable Save the min of our min and local state variables Although this solves our problem, and does it in a very efficient way, we’ve created a set of code that is quite a bit more difficult to understand and maintain. PLINQ provides us with a very nice alternative.  In order to use PLINQ, we need to learn one new extension method that works on IEnumerable<T> – ParallelEnumerable.AsParallel(). That’s all we need to learn in order to use PLINQ: one single method.  We can write our minimum aggregation in PLINQ very simply: double min = collection.AsParallel().Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); By simply adding “.AsParallel()” to our LINQ to Objects query, we converted this to using PLINQ and running this computation in parallel!  This can be loosely translated into English easily, as well: Process the collection in parallel Get the Minimum value, determined by calling PerformComputation on each item Here, our intention is very clear and easy to understand.  We just want to perform the same operation we did in serial, but run it “as parallel”.  PLINQ completely extends LINQ to Objects: the entire functionality of LINQ to Objects is available.  By simply adding a call to AsParallel(), we can specify that a collection should be processed in parallel.  This is simple, safe, and incredibly useful.

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• Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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• SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 3

  - by SQLOS Team

  In parts 1 and 2 of this series we looked at the basics of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server memory management. In this part Serdar looks at configuration guidelines for SQL Server memory management. Part 3: Configuration Guidelines for Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server Now that we understand SQL Server Memory Management and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory basics, let’s take a look at general configuration guidelines in order to utilize benefits of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in your SQL Server VMs. Requirements Host Operating System Requirements Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature is introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Therefore in order to use Dynamic Memory for your virtual machines, you need to have Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 in your Hyper-V host. Guest Operating System Requirements In addition to this Dynamic Memory is only supported in Standard, Web, Enterprise and Datacenter editions of windows running inside VMs. Make sure that your VM is running one of these editions. For additional requirements on each operating system see “Dynamic Memory Configuration Guidelines” here. SQL Server Requirements All versions of SQL Server support Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. However, only certain editions of SQL Server are aware of dynamically changing system memory. To have a truly dynamic environment for your SQL Server VMs make sure that you are running one of the SQL Server editions listed below: ·         SQL Server 2005 Enterprise ·         SQL Server 2008 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions ·         SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions Configuration guidelines for other versions of SQL Server are covered below in the FAQ section. Guidelines for configuring Dynamic Memory Parameters Here is how to configure Dynamic Memory for your SQL VMs in a nutshell: Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Parameter Recommendation Startup RAM 1 GB + SQL Min Server Memory Maximum RAM > SQL Max Server Memory Memory Buffer % 5 Memory Weight Based on performance needs   Startup RAM In order to ensure that your SQL Server VMs can start correctly, ensure that Startup RAM is higher than configured SQL Min Server Memory for your VMs. Otherwise SQL Server service will need to do paging in order to start since it will not be able to see enough memory during startup. Also note that Startup Memory will always be reserved for your VMs. This will guarantee a certain level of performance for your SQL Servers, however setting this too high will limit the consolidation benefits you’ll get out of your virtualization environment. Maximum RAM This one is obvious. If you’ve configured SQL Max Server Memory for your SQL Server, make sure that Dynamic Memory Maximum RAM configuration is higher than this value. Otherwise your SQL Server will not grow to memory values higher than the value configured for Dynamic Memory. Memory Buffer % Memory buffer configuration is used to provision file cache to virtual machines in order to improve performance. Due to the fact that SQL Server is managing its own buffer pool, Memory Buffer setting should be configured to the lowest value possible, 5%. Configuring a higher memory buffer will prevent low resource notifications from Windows Memory Manager and it will prevent reclaiming memory from SQL Server VMs. Memory Weight Memory weight configuration defines the importance of memory to a VM. Configure higher values for the VMs that have higher performance requirements. VMs with higher memory weight will have more memory under high memory pressure conditions on your host. Questions and Answers Q1 – Which SQL Server memory model is best for Dynamic Memory? The best SQL Server model for Dynamic Memory is “Locked Page Memory Model”. This memory model ensures that SQL Server memory is never paged out and it’s also adaptive to dynamically changing memory in the system. This will be extremely useful when Dynamic Memory is attempting to remove memory from SQL Server VMs ensuring no SQL Server memory is paged out. You can find instructions on configuring “Locked Page Memory Model” for your SQL Servers here. Q2 – What about other SQL Server Editions, how should I configure Dynamic Memory for them? Other editions of SQL Server do not adapt to dynamically changing environments. They will determine how much memory they should allocate during startup and don’t change this value afterwards. Therefore make sure that you configure a higher startup memory for your VM because that will be all the memory that SQL Server utilize Tune Maximum Memory and Memory Buffer based on the other workloads running on the system. If there are no other workloads consider using Static Memory for these editions. Q3 – What if I have multiple SQL Server instances in a VM? Having multiple SQL Server instances in a VM is not a general recommendation for predictable performance, manageability and isolation. In order to achieve a predictable behavior make sure that you configure SQL Min Server Memory and SQL Max Server Memory for each instance in the VM. And make sure that: ·         Dynamic Memory Startup Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Min Server Memory values for the instances in the VM ·         Dynamic Memory Maximum Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Max Server Memory values for the instances in the VM Q4 – I’m using Large Page Memory Model for my SQL Server. Can I still use Dynamic Memory? The short answer is no. SQL Server does not dynamically change its memory size when configured with Large Page Memory Model. In virtualized environments Hyper-V provides large page support by default. Most of the time, Large Page Memory Model doesn’t bring any benefits to a SQL Server if it’s running in virtualized environments. Q5 – How do I monitor SQL performance when I’m trying Dynamic Memory on my VMs? Use the performance counters below to monitor memory performance for SQL Server: Process - Working Set: This counter is available in the VM via process performance counters. It represents the actual amount of physical memory being used by SQL Server process in the VM. SQL Server – Buffer Cache Hit Ratio: This counter is available in the VM via SQL Server counters. This represents the paging being done by SQL Server. A rate of 90% or higher is desirable. Conclusion These blog posts are a quick start to a story that will be developing more in the near future. We’re still continuing our testing and investigations to provide more detailed configuration guidelines with example performance numbers with a white paper in the upcoming months. Now it’s time to give SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory a try. Use this guidelines to kick-start your environment. See what you think about it and let us know of your experiences. - Serdar Sutay Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET Wiki Control: This ASP.NET user control allows you to embed a very useful wiki directly into your already existing ASP.NET website taking advantage of the popula...BabyLog: Log baby daily activity.buddyHome: buddyHome is a project that can make your home smarter. as good as your buddy. Cloud Community: Cloud Community makes it easier for organizations to have a simple to use community platform. Our mission is to create an easy to use community pl...Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0: Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0 allows Microsoft CRM 4.0 customers and partners to monitor and analyze customers’ interaction from their...Console Highlighter: Hightlights Microsoft Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe) by outputting ANSI VT100 Control sequences to color the output. These sequences are not hand...Cornell Store: This is IN NO WAY officially affiliated or related to the Cornell University store. Instead, this is a project that I am doing for a class. Ther...DevUtilities: This project is for creating some utility tools, and they will be useful during the development.DotNetNuke® Skin Maple: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by DyNNamite.co.uk. The package includes 4 color variations and sev...HRNet: HRNetIIS Web Site Monitoring: A software for monitor a particular web site on IIS, even if its IP is sharing between different web site.Iowa Code Camp: The source code for the Iowa Code Camp website.Leonidas: Leonidas is a virtual tutorLunch 'n Learn: The Lunch 'n Learn web application is an open source ASP.NET MVC application that allows you to setup lunch 'n learn presentations for your team, c...MNT Cryptography: A very simple cryptography classMooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: mvc2linq2sql is a databinder for ASP.NET MVC that make able developer to clean bind object from HTML FORMS to Linq entities. Even 1 to N relations ...MoqBot: MoqBot is an auto mocking library for Moq and Ninject.mtExperience1: hoiMvcPager: MvcPager is a free paging component for ASP.NET MVC web application, it exposes a series of extension methods for using in ASP.NET MVC applications...OCal: OCal is based on object calisthenics to identify code smellsPex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver contains a collection of meta-heuristic search algorithms. The goal is to improve Pex's code coverage for code involvi...SetControls: Расширеные контролы для ASP.NET приложений. Полная информация ближе к релизу...shadowrage1597: CTC 195 Game Design classSharePoint Team-Mailer: A SharePoint 2007 solution that defines a generic CustomList for sending e-mails to SharePoint Groups.Sql Share: SQL Share is a collaboration tool used within the science to allow database engineers to work tightly with domain scientists.TechCalendar: Tech Events Calendar ASP.NET project.ZLYScript: A very simple script language compiler.New ReleasesALGLIB: ALGLIB 2.4.0: New ALGLIB release contains: improved versions of several linear algebra algorithms: QR decomposition, matrix inversion, condition number estimatio...AmiBroker Plug-Ins with C#: AmiBroker Plug-Ins v0.0.2: Source codes and a binaryAppFabric Caching UI Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Beta 2 UI Admin Tool: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x)Autodocs - WCF REST Automatic API Documentation Generator: Autodocs.ServiceModel.Web: This archive contains the reference DLL, instructions and license.Compact Plugs & Compact Injection: Compact Injection and Compact Plugs 1.1 Beta: First release of Compact Plugs (CP). The solution includes a simple example project of CP, called "TestCompactPlugs1". Also some fixes where made ...Console Highlighter: Console Highlighter 0.9 (preview release): Preliminary release.Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.3). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. The last one was ...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.2: Family Tree Analyzer Version 1.0.2 This early beta version implements loading a gedcom file and displaying some basic reports. These reports inclu...FRC1103 - FRC Dashboard viewer: 2010 Documentation v0.1: This is my current version of the control system documentation for 2010. It isn't complete, but it has the information required for a custom dashbo...jQuery.cssLess: jQuery.cssLess 0.5 (Even less release): NEW - support for nested special CSS classes (like :hover) MAIN RELEASE This release, code "Even less", is the one that will interpret cssLess wit...MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL DataBinder: I didn't try this... I just took it off from my project. Please, tell me any problem implementing in your own development and I'll be pleased to h...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0Mytrip.Mvc: Mytrip 1.0 preview 1: Article Manager Blog Manager L2S Membership(.NET Framework 3.5) EF Membership(.NET Framework 4) User Manager File Manager Localization Captcha ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.117: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. 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It has been marked as a CTP release as it is not ...White Tiger: 0.0.3.1: Now you can load or create files with whatever root element you want *check f or sets file permisionsMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NET Ajax LibraryMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsN2 CMSFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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• Routing Issue in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2

  - by imran_ku07

       Introduction:             Two weeks ago, ASP.NET MVC team shipped the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 release. This release includes some new features and some performance optimization. This release also fixes most of the bugs but still some minor issues are present in this release. Some of these issues are already discussed by Scott Guthrie at Update on ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 (and a workaround for a bug in it). In addition to these issues, I have found another issue in this release regarding routing. In this article, I will show you the issue regarding routing and a simple workaround for this issue.       Description:             The easiest way to understand an issue is to reproduce it in the application. So create a MVC 2 application and a MVC 3 RC 2 application. Then in both applications, just open global.asax file and update the default route as below,     routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id1 = UrlParameter.Optional, id2 = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );              Then just open Index View and add the following lines,    <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Home Page </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <% Html.RenderAction("About"); %> </asp:Content>             The above view will issue a child request to About action method. Now run both applications. ASP.NET MVC 2 application will run just fine. But ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application will throw an exception as shown below,                  You may think that this is a routing issue but this is not the case here as both ASP.NET MVC 2 and ASP.NET MVC  3 RC 2 applications(created above) are built with .NET Framework 4.0 and both will use the same routing defined in System.Web. Something is wrong in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2. So after digging into ASP.NET MVC source code, I have found that the UrlParameter class in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 overrides the ToString method which simply return an empty string.     public sealed class UrlParameter { public static readonly UrlParameter Optional = new UrlParameter(); private UrlParameter() { } public override string ToString() { return string.Empty; } }             In MVC 2 the ToString method was not overridden. So to quickly fix the above problem just replace UrlParameter.Optional default value with a different value other than null or empty(for example, a single white space) or replace UrlParameter.Optional default value with a new class object containing the same code as UrlParameter class have except the ToString method is not overridden (or with a overridden ToString method that return a string value other than null or empty). But by doing this you will loose the benefit of ASP.NET MVC 2 Optional URL Parameters. There may be many different ways to fix the above problem and not loose the benefit of optional parameters. Here I will create a new class MyUrlParameter with the same code as UrlParameter class have except the ToString method is not overridden. Then I will create a base controller class which contains a constructor to remove all MyUrlParameter route data parameters, same like ASP.NET MVC doing with UrlParameter route data parameters early in the request.     public class BaseController : Controller { public BaseController() { if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler is MvcHandler) { RouteValueDictionary rvd = ((MvcHandler)System.Web.HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler).RequestContext.RouteData.Values; string[] matchingKeys = (from entry in rvd where entry.Value == MyUrlParameter.Optional select entry.Key).ToArray(); foreach (string key in matchingKeys) { rvd.Remove(key); } } } } public class HomeController : BaseController { public ActionResult Index(string id1) { ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; return View(); } public ActionResult About() { return Content("Child Request Contents"); } }     public sealed class MyUrlParameter { public static readonly MyUrlParameter Optional = new MyUrlParameter(); private MyUrlParameter() { } }     routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id1 = MyUrlParameter.Optional, id2 = MyUrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );             MyUrlParameter class is a copy of UrlParameter class except that MyUrlParameter class not overrides the ToString method. Note that the default route is modified to use MyUrlParameter.Optional instead of UrlParameter.Optional. Also note that BaseController class constructor is removing MyUrlParameter parameters from the current request route data so that the model binder will not bind these parameters with action method parameters. Now just run the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application again, you will find that it runs just fine.             In case if you are curious to know that why ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application throws an exception if UrlParameter class contains a ToString method which returns an empty string, then you need to know something about a feature of routing for url generation. During url generation, routing will call the ParsedRoute.Bind method internally. This method includes a logic to match the route and build the url. During building the url, ParsedRoute.Bind method will call the ToString method of the route values(in our case this will call the UrlParameter.ToString method) and then append the returned value into url. This method includes a logic after appending the returned value into url that if two continuous returned values are empty then don't match the current route otherwise an incorrect url will be generated. Here is the snippet from ParsedRoute.Bind method which will prove this statement.       if ((builder2.Length > 0) && (builder2[builder2.Length - 1] == '/')) { return null; } builder2.Append("/"); ........................................................... ........................................................... ........................................................... ........................................................... if (RoutePartsEqual(obj3, obj4)) { builder2.Append(UrlEncode(Convert.ToString(obj3, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture))); continue; }             In the above example, both id1 and id2 parameters default values are set to UrlParameter object and UrlParameter class include a ToString method that returns an empty string. That's why this route will not matched.            Summary:             In this article I showed you the issue regarding routing and also showed you how to workaround this problem. I explained this issue with an example by creating a ASP.NET MVC 2 and a ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application. Finally I also explained the reason for this issue. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• 202 blog articles

  - by mprove

  All my blog articles under blogs.oracle.com since August 2005: 202 blog articles Apr 2012 blogs.oracle.com design patch Mar 2012 Interaction 12 - Critique Mar 2012 Typing. Clicking. Dancing. Feb 2012 Desktop Mobility in Hospitals with Oracle VDI /video Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 3 Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 2 Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 1 Feb 2012 Shit Interaction Designers Say Feb 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #3: How to display custom page titles in Spaces Jan 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #2: How to create an Admin menu in Spaces and save a lot of time Jan 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #1: How to apply custom resources in Spaces Jan 2012 Merry XMas and a Happy 2012! Dec 2011 One Year Oracle SocialChat - The Movie Nov 2011 Frank Ludolph's Last Working Day Nov 2011 Hans Rosling at TED Oct 2011 200 Countries x 200 Years Oct 2011 Blog Aggregation for Desktop Virtualization Oct 2011 Oracle VDI at OOW 2011 Sep 2011 Design for Conversations & Conversations for Design Sep 2011 All Oracle UX Blogs Aug 2011 Farewell Loriot Aug 2011 Oracle VDI 3.3 Overview Aug 2011 Sutherland's Closing Remarks at HyperKult Aug 2011 Surface and Subface Aug 2011 Back to Childhood in UI Design Jul 2011 The Art of Engineering and The Engineering of Art Jul 2011 Oracle VDI Seminar - June-30 Jun 2011 SGD White Paper May 2011 TEDxHamburg Live Feed May 2011 Oracle VDI in 3 Minutes May 2011 Space Ship Earth 2011 May 2011 blog moving times Apr 2011 Frozen tag cloud Apr 2011 Oracle: Hardware Software Complete in 1953 Apr 2011 Interaction Design with Wireframes Apr 2011 A guide to closing down a project Feb 2011 Oracle VDI 3.2.2 Jan 2011 free VDI charts Jan 2011 Sun Founders Panel 2006 Dec 2010 Sutherland on Leadership Dec 2010 SocialChat: Efficiency of E20 Dec 2010 ALWAYS ON Desktop Virtualization Nov 2010 12,000 Desktops at JavaOne Nov 2010 SocialChat on Sharing Best Practices Oct 2010 Globe of Visitors Oct 2010 SocialChat about the Next Big Thing Oct 2010 Oracle VDI UX Story - Wireframes Oct 2010 What's a PC anyway? Oct 2010 SocialChat on Getting Things Done Oct 2010 SocialChat on Infoglut Oct 2010 IT Twenty Twenty Oct 2010 Desktop Virtualization Webcasts from OOW Oct 2010 Oracle VDI 3.2 Overview Sep 2010 Blog Usability Top 7 Sep 2010 100 and counting Aug 2010 Oracle'izing the VDI Blogs Aug 2010 SocialChat on Apple Aug 2010 SocialChat on Video Conferencing Aug 2010 Oracle VDI 3.2 - Features and Screenshots Aug 2010 SocialChat: Don't stop making waves Aug 2010 SocialChat: Giving Back to the Community Aug 2010 SocialChat on Learning in Meetings Aug 2010 iPAD's Natural User Interface Jul 2010 Last day for Sun Microsystems GmbH Jun 2010 SirValUse Celebration Snippets Jun 2010 10 years SirValUse - Happy Birthday! Jun 2010 Wim on Virtualization May 2010 New Home for Oracle VDI Apr 2010 Renaissance Slide Sorter Comments Apr 2010 Unboxing Sun Ray 3 Plus Apr 2010 Desktop Virtualisierung mit Sun VDI 3.1 Apr 2010 Blog Relaunch Mar 2010 Social Messaging Slides from CeBIT Mar 2010 Social Messaging Talk at CeBIT Feb 2010 Welcome Oracle Jan 2010 My last presentation at Sun Jan 2010 Ivan Sutherland on Leadership Jan 2010 Learning French with Sun VDI Jan 2010 Learning Danish with Sun Ray Jan 2010 VDI workshop in Nieuwegein Jan 2010 Happy New Year 2010 Jan 2010 On Creating Slides Dec 2009 Best VDI Ever Nov 2009 How to store the Big Bang Nov 2009 Social Enterprise Tools. Beipiel Sun. Nov 2009 Nov-19 Nov 2009 PDF and ODF links on your blog Nov 2009 Q&A on VDI and MySQL Cluster Nov 2009 Zürich next week: Swiss Intranet Summit 09 Nov 2009 Designing for a Sustainable World - World Usabiltiy Day, Nov-12 Nov 2009 How to export a desktop from VDI 3 Nov 2009 Virtualisation Roadshow in the UK Nov 2009 Project Wonderland at EDUCAUSE 09 Nov 2009 VDI Roadshow in Dublin, Nov-26, 2009 Nov 2009 Sun VDI at EDUCAUSE 09 Nov 2009 Sun VDI 3.1 Architecture and New Features Oct 2009 VDI 3.1 is Early-Access Sep 2009 Virtualization for MySQL on VMware Sep 2009 Silpion & 13. Stock Sommerparty Sep 2009 Sun Ray and VMware View 3.1.1 2009-08-31 New Set of Sun Ray Status Icons 2009-08-25 Virtualizing the VDI Core? 2009-08-23 World Usability Day Hamburg 2009 - CfP 2009-07-16 Rising Sun 2009-07-15 featuring twittermeme 2009-06-19 ISC09 Student Party on June-20 /Hamburg 2009-06-18 Before and behind the curtain of JavaOne 2009-06-09 20k desktops at JavaOne 2009-06-01 sweet microblogging 2009-05-25 VDI 3 - Why you need 3 VDI hosts and what you can do about that? 2009-05-21 IA Konferenz 2009 2009-05-20 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - Power of the Web 2009-05-06 Planet of Sun and Oracle User Experience Design 2009-04-22 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - User Research 2009-04-08 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - Concept Workshops 2009-04-06 Localized documentation for Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager 1.1 2009-04-03 Sun VDI 3 Press Release 2009-03-25 Sun VDI 3 launches today! 2009-03-25 Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager 1.1 Update 2009-03-11 desktop virtualization wiki relaunch 2009-03-06 VDI 3 at CeBIT hall 6, booth E36 2009-03-02 Keyboard layout problems with Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2009-02-23 wikis.sun.com tips & tricks 2009-02-23 Sun VDI 3 is in Early Access 2009-02-09 VirtualCenter unable to decrypt passwords 2009-02-02 Sun & VMware Desktop Training 2009-01-30 VDI at next09? 2009-01-16 Sun VDI: How to use virtual machines with multiple network adapters 2009-01-07 Sun Ray and VMware View 2009-01-07 Hamburg World Usability Day 2008 - Webcasts 2009-01-06 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM slides 2008-12-15 mother of all demos 2008-12-08 Build your own Thumper 2008-12-03 Troubleshooting Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2008-12-02 My Roller Tag Cloud 2008-11-28 Sun Ray Connector: SSL connection to VDM 2008-11-25 Setting up SSL and Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2008-11-13 Inspiration for Today and Tomorrow 2008-10-23 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM released 2008-10-14 From Sketchpad to ILoveSketch 2008-10-09 Desktop Virtualization on Xing 2008-10-06 User Experience Forum on Xing 2008-10-06 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM certified 2008-09-17 Virtual Clouds over Las Vegas 2008-09-14 Bill Verplank sketches metaphors 2008-09-04 End of Early Access - Sun Ray Connector for VMware 2008-08-27 Early Access: Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2008-08-12 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling Part 2 2008-07-20 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling Part 3 2008-07-20 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling 2008-07-20 lost in wiki space 2008-07-07 Evolution of the Desktop 2008-06-17 Virtual Desktop Webcast 2008-06-16 Woodstock 2008-06-16 What's a Desktop PC anyway? 2008-06-09 Virtual-T-Box 2008-06-05 Virtualization Glossary 2008-05-06 Five User Experience Principles 2008-04-25 Virtualization News Feed 2008-04-21 Acetylcholinesterase - Second Season 2008-04-18 Acetylcholinesterase - End of Signal 2007-12-31 Produkt-Management ist... 2007-10-22 Usability Verbände, Verteiler und Netzwerke. 2007-10-02 The Meaning is the Message 2007-09-28 Visualization Methods 2007-09-10 Inhouse und Open Source Projekte – Usability verankern und Synergien nutzen 2007-09-03 Der Schwabe Darth Vader entdeckt das Virale Marketing 2007-08-29 Dick Hardt 3.0 on Identity 2.0 2007-08-27 quality of written text depends on the tool 2007-07-27 podcasts for reboot9 2007-06-04 It is the user's itch that need to be scratched 2007-05-25 A duel at reboot9 2007-05-14 Taxonomien und Folksonomien - Tagging als neues HCI-Element 2007-05-10 Dueling Interaction Models of Personal-Computing and Web-Computing 2007-03-01 22.März: Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work. /Filmpremiere Hamburg 2007-02-25 Bruce Sterling at UbiComp 2006 /webcast 2006-11-12 FSOSS 2006 /webcasts 2006-11-10 Highway 101 2006-11-09 User Experience Roundtable Hamburg: EuroGEL 2006 2006-11-08 Douglas Adams' Hyperland (BBC 1990) 2006-10-08 Taxonomien und Folksonomien – Tagging als neues HCI-Element 2006-09-13 Usability im Unternehmen 2006-09-13 Doug does HyperScope 2006-08-26 TED Talks and TechTalks 2006-08-21 Kai Krause über seine Freundschaft zu Douglas Adams 2006-07-20 Rebel At Work: Film Portrait on Weizenbaum 2006-07-04 Gabriele Fischer, mp3 2006-06-07 Dick Hardt at ETech 06 2006-06-05 Weinberger: From Control to Conversation 2006-04-16 Eye Tracking at User Experience Roundtable Hamburg 2006-04-14 dropping knowledge 2006-04-09 GEL 2005 2006-03-13 slide photos of reboot7 2006-03-04 Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 2006-02-28 User Experience Newsletter #13: Versioning 2006-02-03 Ester Dyson on Choice and Happyness 2006-02-02 Requirements-Engineering im Spannungsfeld von Individual- und Produktsoftware 2006-01-15 User Experience Newsletter #12: Intuition Quiz 2005-11-30 User Experience und Requirements-Engineering für Software-Projekte 2005-10-31 Ivan Sutherland on "Research and Fun" 2005-10-18 Ars Electronica / Mensch und Computer 2005 2005-09-14 60 Jahre nach Memex: Über die Unvereinbarkeit von Desktop- und Web-Paradigma 2005-08-31 reboot 7 2005-06-30

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• Launching a WPF Window in a Separate Thread, Part 1

  - by Reed

  Typically, I strongly recommend keeping the user interface within an application’s main thread, and using multiple threads to move the actual “work” into background threads.  However, there are rare times when creating a separate, dedicated thread for a Window can be beneficial.  This is even acknowledged in the MSDN samples, such as the Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads sample.  However, doing this correctly is difficult.  Even the referenced MSDN sample has major flaws, and will fail horribly in certain scenarios.  To ease this, I wrote a small class that alleviates some of the difficulties involved. The MSDN Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads Sample shows how to launch a new thread with a WPF Window, and will work in most cases.  The sample code (commented and slightly modified) works out to the following: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create and show the Window Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Set the apartment state newWindowThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); // Make the thread a background thread newWindowThread.IsBackground = true; // Start the thread newWindowThread.Start(); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This sample creates a thread, marks it as single threaded apartment state, and starts the Dispatcher on that thread. That is the minimum requirements to get a Window displaying and handling messages correctly, but, unfortunately, has some serious flaws. The first issue – the created thread will run continuously until the application shuts down, given the code in the sample.  The problem is that the ThreadStart delegate used ends with running the Dispatcher.  However, nothing ever stops the Dispatcher processing.  The thread was created as a Background thread, which prevents it from keeping the application alive, but the Dispatcher will continue to pump dispatcher frames until the application shuts down. In order to fix this, we need to call Dispatcher.InvokeShutdown after the Window is closed.  This would require modifying the above sample to subscribe to the Window’s Closed event, and, at that point, shutdown the Dispatcher: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This eliminates the first issue.  Now, when the Window is closed, the new thread’s Dispatcher will shut itself down, which in turn will cause the thread to complete. The above code will work correctly for most situations.  However, there is still a potential problem which could arise depending on the content of the Window1 class.  This is particularly nasty, as the code could easily work for most windows, but fail on others. The problem is, at the point where the Window is constructed, there is no active SynchronizationContext.  This is unlikely to be a problem in most cases, but is an absolute requirement if there is code within the constructor of Window1 which relies on a context being in place. While this sounds like an edge case, it’s fairly common.  For example, if a BackgroundWorker is started within the constructor, or a TaskScheduler is built using TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() with the expectation of synchronizing work to the UI thread, an exception will be raised at some point.  Both of these classes rely on the existence of a proper context being installed to SynchronizationContext.Current, which happens automatically, but not until Dispatcher.Run is called.  In the above case, SynchronizationContext.Current will return null during the Window’s construction, which can cause exceptions to occur or unexpected behavior. Luckily, this is fairly easy to correct.  We need to do three things, in order, prior to creating our Window: Create and initialize the Dispatcher for the new thread manually Create a synchronization context for the thread which uses the Dispatcher Install the synchronization context Creating the Dispatcher is quite simple – The Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher property gets the current thread’s Dispatcher and “creates a new Dispatcher if one is not already associated with the thread.”  Once we have the correct Dispatcher, we can create a SynchronizationContext which uses the dispatcher by creating a DispatcherSynchronizationContext.  Finally, this synchronization context can be installed as the current thread’s context via SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext.  These three steps can easily be added to the above via a single line of code: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create our context, and install it: SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext( Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher)); Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This now forces the synchronization context to be in place before the Window is created and correctly shuts down the Dispatcher when the window closes. However, there are quite a few steps.  In my next post, I’ll show how to make this operation more reusable by creating a class with a far simpler API…

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• How Oracle Data Integration Customers Differentiate Their Business in Competitive Markets

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 With data being a central force in driving innovation and competing effectively, data integration has become a key IT approach to remove silos and ensure working with consistent and trusted data. Especially with the release of 12c version, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer easy-to-use and high-performance solutions that help companies with their critical data initiatives, including big data analytics, moving to cloud architectures, modernizing and connecting transactional systems and more. In a recent press release we announced the great momentum and analyst recognition Oracle Data Integration products have achieved in the data integration and replication market. In this press release we described some of the key new features of Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. In addition, a few from our 4500+ customers explained how Oracle’s data integration platform helped them achieve their business goals. In this blog post I would like to go over what these customers shared about their experience. Land O’Lakes is one of America’s premier member-owned cooperatives, and offers an extensive line of agricultural supplies, as well as production and business services. Rich Bellefeuille, manager, ETL & data warehouse for Land O’Lakes told us how GoldenGate helped them modernize their critical ERP system without impacting service and how they are moving to new projects with Oracle Data Integrator 12c: “With Oracle GoldenGate 11g, we've been able to migrate our enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, ERP system, to a new database and application server platform with minimal downtime to our business. Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g we reduced database migration time from nearly 30 hours to less than 30 minutes. Given our quick success, we are considering expansion of our Oracle GoldenGate 12c footprint. We are also in the midst of deploying a solution leveraging Oracle Data Integrator 12c to manage our pricing data to handle orders more effectively and provide a better relationship with our clients. We feel we are gaining higher productivity and flexibility with Oracle's data integration products." ICON, a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, highlighted the competitive advantage that a solid data integration foundation brings. Diarmaid O’Reilly, enterprise data warehouse manager, ICON plc said “Oracle Data Integrator enables us to align clinical trials intelligence with the information needs of our sponsors. It helps differentiate ICON’s services in an increasingly competitive drug-development industry."  You can find more info on ICON's implementation here. A popular use case for Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration is offloading operational reporting from critical transaction processing systems. SolarWorld, one of the world’s largest solar-technology producers and the largest U.S. solar panel manufacturer, implemented Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration of manufacturing data for fast analysis. Russ Toyama, U.S. senior database administrator for SolarWorld told us real-time data helps their operations and GoldenGate’s solution supports high performance of their manufacturing systems: “We use Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration into our decision support system, which performs real-time analysis for manufacturing operations to continuously improve product quality, yield and efficiency. With reliable and low-impact data movement capabilities, Oracle GoldenGate also helps ensure that our critical manufacturing systems are stable and operate with high performance."  You can watch the full interview with SolarWorld's Russ Toyama here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Starwood Hotels and Resorts is one of the many customers that found out how well Oracle Data Integration products work with Oracle Exadata. Gordon Light, senior director of information technology for StarWood Hotels, says they had notable performance gain in loading Oracle Exadata reporting environment: “We leverage Oracle GoldenGate to replicate data from our central reservations systems and other OLTP databases – significantly decreasing the overall ETL duration. Moving forward, we plan to use Oracle GoldenGate to help the company achieve near-real-time reporting.”You can listen about Starwood Hotels' implementation here. Many companies combine the power of Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Data Integrator to have a single, integrated data integration platform for variety of use cases across the enterprise. Ufone is another good example of that. The leading mobile communications service provider of Pakistan has improved customer service using timely customer data in its data warehouse. Atif Aslam, head of management information systems for Ufone says: “Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate help us integrate information from various systems and provide up-to-date and real-time CRM data updates hourly, rather than daily. The applications have simplified data warehouse operations and allowed business users to make faster and better informed decisions to protect revenue in the fast-moving Pakistani telecommunications market.” You can read more about Ufone's use case here. In our Oracle Data Integration 12c launch webcast back in November we also heard from BT’s CTO Surren Parthab about their use of GoldenGate for moving to private cloud architecture. Surren also shared his perspectives on Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c releases. You can watch the video here. These are only a few examples of leading companies that have made data integration and real-time data access a key part of their data governance and IT modernization initiatives. They have seen real improvements in how their businesses operate and differentiate in today’s competitive markets. You can read about other customer examples in our Ebook: The Path to the Future and access resources including white papers, data sheets, podcasts and more via our Oracle Data Integration resource kit. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

  - by Edith Mireles-Oracle

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010New ProjectsBizTalk EDI Guidance: BizTalk EDI Guidance is intended to simplify the delivery of EDI solutions by leveraging the ESB Toolkit. This project is currently Alpha and sh...Continues Integration Sample: I'm providing a series of blog post to show a complete CI process using CruiseControl.Net and msbuild. The source code for this series is hosted here.DioM2D: My Dragons in our Midst RPG. Runs on my custom Starlight Engine.Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Security tools and guidelines for white-hat hacking and protecting ASP.NET web applications.Farseer Engine with XNATouch: Farseer is great engine for game physics. This implementation uses XNATouch framework.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: Feature Builder Guidance Extensions are Feature Extensions which extend the guidance for the Feature Building experience. Each FBGX will be suppli...Microsoft Office Document Security: MODS is a plugin for office 2007 thats includes Hash Encryption, Hex Convertion and more. Plugins: MODS For Word still working on (MODS for Excel ...Minimize Engine (XNA): The Minimize Engine is a basic 3D Games Engine created using XNA, with its primary focus around Grid Based games.MSForge TownCrier: This project is meant to build a notification and calling system for MSForge.net User Groups.NatureProtector: Silverlight 4 project.OutSync: OutSync is a free Windows desktop application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you...Quick Save Images, Clipboard save to file, Quick save, bmp, png, jpeg, Image: ClipSa is a very small tool for very quick picture saving. You put some picture into the clipboard (PrintScrn/Alt-PrintScrn/Ctrl-C), ClipSa saves ...ResHelper Manager: Resource strings management tool that creates localization files for any type of localization target (asp.net, wpf and so on...)SecureCookieHttpModule: Secure your session cookie (and other session-based) cookies for replay attacks using this easy to use ASP.NET HttpModule.simpleChMS: A Church Management System (ChMS) designed for churches or ministries like youth groups that want to facilitate better care or theie membership. Fo...sMAPtool: -SPDomainObject: mapping strong type objects to sp listsSQL Trim: This project aims at developing a universal trim function for Microsoft SQL Server. It trims: 1) pre spaces 2) post spaces 3) double spaces 3) subs...TurretGunner: mt-experienceNew ReleasesBeanProxy: BeanProxy 3.0: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. Any non-static, public interface/class or abstract class can be...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 蓝色之风记事本 0.2 Alpha: 一个超级Bug版本……CSharp Intellisense: V2.1: - Bug fix (Pascal Casing)DioM2D: DioM2D0.01: http://www.dragonsinourmidst.com/forums/showthread.php?p=690058#post690058Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Version 1.0.0.1: This is the initial release of the project. Read more about the available tests and features on the Documentation tab. You need the full .NET Frame...Event Scavenger: Collector service update - version 3.2.4: Added check if the database connection string is set up in the config file.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX-Binaries: This release consists of a zip file containing all the VSIXs resulting from building each of the FBGX packages found here as source. This will mak...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R2: - Detaching windows (right click on the tabs to detach them) - Highlight lines with your nick or other patterns - Fixed several bugs - Tabs can now...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 1.96: Fixed some minor bugs and improved the UI a bit. If you can not install the msi file you might be missing some prerequisites. You can try running t...Geocache Downloader: release 1.0: This is the first release.kp.net: Alpha release is avalable: The goal of this alpha release is to try the code in some production scenarios and find out what features should be tuned.Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync Beta May 14, 2010 release of Live-Exchange Calendar Sync 1.0 BETA. (Version 45334) Getting StartedInfo about installat...MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint: MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint ver 2.1.1: 1) Small bug fixed that appears on first start (when earliers versions wasn't installed). How to install:Download ZIP file and extract it on Sha...Microsoft Office Document Security: MODS 4 WORD (SOURCE INCLUDED): Includes Source CodeMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets): MoonyDesk Alpha: MoonyDesk Alpha (some memory improvements)OnTopReplica: Release 2.9.3: Some bugfixes and improvements. Czech translation added (thanks René Mihula).OutSync: OutSync v1.0.100.0: OutSync v1.0.100.0 is the final release by Mel before the move to CodePlex. I have tested it on Windows 7 32bit and 64bit with Office 2007 and it ...Quick Save Images, Clipboard save to file, Quick save, bmp, png, jpeg, Image: Clipsa v 0.1: Download and extract to any place 2 files - clipSa.exe and clipSa.exe.config Run clipSa.exe. That's all.ResHelper Manager: ResHelperManager: List of changes applied to this version of ResHelper is included in main download zip package. Example sourcesIn Source Code tab are sources of De...Rx Contrib: V1.3: - Bug Fix - BufferWithTimeOrCount with flexible time period setting when ever the time period elapsed...SharePoint DVK Integration: SharePoint 2007 DVK integration v1.0.3: Fixes Fixed default field bindings. I rebound too many fields on every page load. Fixed extension replacing on creating target url (threw it out)...ShoutcastStast for DotNetNuke: DNN_ShoutcastStats alpha 05.00.495: First Alpha release of ShoutcastStats Module for DotNetNuke This first alpha version of the ShoutcastStats Module for DotNetNuke is still in devel...SilverPart 2.1: SilverPart 2.1: SilverPart 2.1 This interim release fixes some major bugs related to Firefox and anonymous access. - Fix for Issue ID 4005 - SilverPart does not w...sMAPtool: sMAPedit v0.7c (Base Release with Maps): Fixed: force a gargabe collection update to prevent pictureBox's memory leak Added: essential map pack with all basic maps in jpg format Added:...SQL Trim: Trim: Initial releaseSSIS Multiple Hash: Multiple Hash V1.2.1: This is version 1.2.1 of the Multiple Hash SSIS Component. It supports SQL 2005 and SQL 2008, although you have to download the correct install pa...StreamInsight Yahoo Finance input adapter example: StockTicker_v1_0_RTM: Updated for StreamInsight RTM.Update Controls .NET: 2.1.0.0: Automatic dependency management for WPF and Silverlight data binding. This release combines both the WPF and Silverlight assemblies into one insta...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30514.0: Automatic drop of latest buildMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersShake - C# MakeStyleCop

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• Highlight Row in GridView with Colored Columns

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  I wrote a blog post a while back before here that demonstrate how to highlight a GridView row on mouseover and as you can see its very easy to highlight rows in GridView. One of my colleague uses the same technique for implemeting gridview row highlighting but the problem is that if a Column has background color on it that cell will not be highlighted anymore. To make it more clear then let's build up a sample application. ASPX:   1: <asp:GridView runat="server" id="GridView1" onrowcreated="GridView1_RowCreated" 2: onrowdatabound="GridView1_RowDataBound"> 3: </asp:GridView>   CODE BEHIND:   1: private DataTable FillData() { 2:   3: DataTable dt = new DataTable(); 4: DataRow dr = null; 5:   6: //Create DataTable columns 7: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); 8: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col1", typeof(string))); 9: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col2", typeof(string))); 10: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col3", typeof(string))); 11:   12: //Create Row for each columns 13: dr = dt.NewRow(); 14: dr["RowNumber"] = 1; 15: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 16: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 17: dr["Col3"] = "C"; 18: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 19:   20: dr = dt.NewRow(); 21: dr["RowNumber"] = 2; 22: dr["Col1"] = "AA"; 23: dr["Col2"] = "BB"; 24: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 25: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 26:   27: dr = dt.NewRow(); 28: dr["RowNumber"] = 3; 29: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 30: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 31: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 32: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 33:   34: dr = dt.NewRow(); 35: dr["RowNumber"] = 4; 36: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 37: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 38: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 39: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 40:   41: dr = dt.NewRow(); 42: dr["RowNumber"] = 5; 43: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 44: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 45: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 46: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 47:   48: return dt; 49: } 50:   51: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { 52: if (!IsPostBack) { 53: GridView1.DataSource = FillData(); 54: GridView1.DataBind(); 55: } 56: }   As you can see there's nothing fancy in the code above. It just contain a method that fills a DataTable with a dummy data on it. Now here's the code for row highlighting:   1: protected void GridView1_RowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 2: //Set Background Color for Columns 1 and 3 3: e.Row.Cells[1].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Beige; 4: e.Row.Cells[3].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red; 5:   6: //Attach onmouseover and onmouseout for row highlighting 7: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "this.style.backgroundColor='Blue'"); 8: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "this.style.backgroundColor=''"); 9: }   Running the code above will show something like this in the browser: On initial load: On mouseover of GridView row:   Noticed that Col1 and Col3 are not highlighted. Why? the reason is that Col1 and Col3 cells has background color set on it and we only highlight the rows (TR) and not the columns (TD) that's why on mouseover only the rows will be highlighted. To fix the issue we will create a javascript method that would remove the background color of the columns when highlighting a row and on mouseout set back the original color that is set on Col1 and Col3. Here are the codes below: JavaScript   1: <script type="text/javascript"> 2: function HighLightRow(rowIndex, colIndex,colIndex2, flag) { 3: var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); 4: var selRow = gv.rows[rowIndex]; 5: if (rowIndex > 0) { 6: if (flag == "sel") { 7: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.backgroundColor = 'Blue'; 8: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.color = "White"; 9: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex].style.backgroundColor = ''; 10: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex2].style.backgroundColor = ''; 11: } 12: else { 13: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.backgroundColor = ''; 14: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.color = "Black"; 15: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex].style.backgroundColor = 'Beige'; 16: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex2].style.backgroundColor = 'Red'; 17: } 18: } 19: } 20: </script>   The HighLightRow method is a javascript function that accepts four (4) parameters which are the rowIndex,colIndex,colIndex2 and the flag. The rowIndex is the current row index of the selected row in GridView. The colIndex is the index of Col1 and colIndex2 is the index of col3. We are passing these index because these columns has background color on it and we need to toggle its backgroundcolor when highlighting the row in GridView. Finally the flag is something that would determine if its selected or not. Now here's the code for calling the JavaScript function above.     1: protected void GridView1_RowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 2:   3: //Set Background Color for Columns 1 and 3 4: e.Row.Cells[1].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Beige; 5: e.Row.Cells[3].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red; 6:   7: //Attach onmouseover and onmouseout for row highlighting 8: //and call the HighLightRow method with the required parameters 9: int index = e.Row.RowIndex + 1; 10: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "HighLightRow(" + index + "," + 1 + "," + 3 + ",'sel')"); 11: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "HighLightRow(" + index + "," + 1 + "," + 3 + ",'dsel')"); 12: 13: }   Running the code above will display something like this: On initial load:   On mouseover of GridView row:   That's it! I hope someone find this post useful!

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• Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project. Orchard is a very modular CMS, so the translation mechanism needs to account for the core as well as first and third party modules and themes. Another issue is that every new version of Orchard or of a module changes some localizable strings and adds new ones as others enter obsolescence. In order to address those problems, I've built a small Orchard module that automates some of the most complex tasks that maintaining a translation implies. In this post, I'll walk you through the operations I had to do to update the French translation for Orchard 1.0. In order to make sure you translate all the first party modules, I would recommend that you start from a full source code enlistment. The reason is that I'll show how you can extract the default en-US translation from any source code enlistment. That enables you to create a translation that is even more up-to-date than what is currently on the site. Alternatively, you could start by downloading the current en-US translation. If you decide to do so, just skip the relevant paragraphs. First, let's install the Orchard Translation Manager. I'm starting from a vanilla clone of the latest in the code repository. After you've setup the site, go into the dashboard and click on Gallery. Locate the Orchard Translation Manager in the list of modules and click "Install". Once the module is installed, you need to enable its one feature by going into Configuration/Features and clicking "Enable" next to Vandelay.TranslationManager. We're done with the setup that we need in order to start our translation work. We'll now switch to the command-line and to our favorite text editor. Open a command-line on the Orchard web site folder. I found the easiest way to do this is to do a SHIFT+right-click on the Orchard.Web folder in Windows Explorer and to click "Open command window here". Type bin\orchard to enter the Orchard command-line environment. If you do a "help commands" you should see four commands in the list that came from the module we just installed: extract default translation, install translation, package translation and sync translation. First, we're going to generate the default translation. Note that it is possible to generate that default translation for a specific list of modules and themes by using the /Extensions: switch, which should facilitate the translation of third party extensions, but in this tutorial we're going to generate it for the whole of the Orchard source code. extract default translation /Output:\temp .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This should have created an Orchard.en-us.po.zip file in the temp directory. Extract that archive into an orchard.po folder under \temp. The next step depends on whether you have an existing translation that you want to update or not. If you do have an existing translation, just extract it into the same \temp\orchard.po directory. That should result in a file structure where you have the default en-US translation alongside your own. If you don't have an existing translation, just continue, the commands will be the same. We are now going to synchronize those translations (or generate the stub for a new one if you didn't start from an existing translation). sync translation /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Culture:fr-FR After this command (where you should of course substitute fr-FR with the culture you're working on), we now have updated files that contain a few useful flags. Open each of the .po files under the culture you are working on (there should be around 36) with your favorite text editor. For all the strings that are still valid in the latest version, nothing changes and you don't need to do anything. For all the strings that disappeared from the default culture, the old translation will still be there but they will be prefixed with the following comment: # Obsolete translation Conveniently, all the obsolete strings will be grouped at the end of the file. You can select all those and delete them. For all the new strings, you will see the following comment: # Untranslated string This is where the hard work begins. You'll need to translate each of those new strings by entering the translation between the quotes in: msgstr "" Don't introduce hard carriage returns in the strings, just stay on one line (your text editor should do some reasonable wrapping so this shouldn't be a big deal). Once you're done with a file, save it. Make sure, and this is very important, that your text editor is saving using the UTF-8 encoding. In Notepad, that setting can be found in the file saving dialog by doing a "Save As" rather than a plain "Save": When all the po files have been edited, you are ready to package the translation for submission (a.k.a. sending e-mail to the localization mailing list). package translation /Culture:fr-FR /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Output:\temp You should now see a Orchard.fr-FR.po.zip file in temp that is ready to be submitted. That is, once you've tested it, which can be done by deploying it into the site: install translation \temp\orchard.fr-fr.po.zip Once this is done you can go into the dashboard under Configuration/Settings and click on "Add or remove supported cultures for the site". Choose your culture and click "Add". You can go back to settings and set the default culture. Save. You may now take a tour of the application and verify that everything works as expected: And that's it really. Creating a translation for Orchard is a matter of a few hours. If you don't see a translation for your culture, please consider creating it.

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• Using Radio Button in GridView with Validation

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A developer is asking how to select one radio button at a time if the radio button is inside the GridView.  As you may know setting the group name attribute of radio button will not work if the radio button is located within a Data Representation control like GridView. This because the radio button inside the gridview bahaves differentely. Since a gridview is rendered as table element , at run time it will assign different "name" to each radio button. Hence you are able to select multiple rows. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how select one radio button at a time in gridview and add a simple validation on it. To get started let's go ahead and fire up visual studio and the create a new web application / website project. Add a WebForm and then add gridview. The mark up would look something like this: <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" > <Columns> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:RadioButton ID="rb" runat="server" /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Col1" HeaderText="First Column" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Col2" HeaderText="Second Column" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> Noticed that I've added a templatefield column so that we can add the radio button there. Also I have set up some BoundField columns and set the DataFields as RowNumber, Col1 and Col2. These columns are just dummy columns and i used it for the simplicity of this example. Now where these columns came from? These columns are created by hand at the code behind file of the ASPX. Here's the code below: private DataTable FillData() { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); DataRow dr = null; //Create DataTable columns dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col1", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col2", typeof(string))); //Create Row for each columns dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 1; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 2; dr["Col1"] = "AA"; dr["Col2"] = "BB"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 3; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 4; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 5; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); return dt; } And here's the code for binding the GridView with the dummy data above. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { GridView1.DataSource = FillData(); GridView1.DataBind(); } } Okay we have now a GridView data with a radio button on each row. Now lets go ahead and switch back to ASPX mark up. In this example I'm going to use a JavaScript for validating the radio button to select one radio button at a time. Here's the javascript code below: function CheckOtherIsCheckedByGVID(rb) { var isChecked = rb.checked; var row = rb.parentNode.parentNode; if (isChecked) { row.style.backgroundColor = '#B6C4DE'; row.style.color = 'black'; } var currentRdbID = rb.id; parent = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var items = parent.getElementsByTagName('input'); for (i = 0; i < items.length; i++) { if (items[i].id != currentRdbID && items[i].type == "radio") { if (items[i].checked) { items[i].checked = false; items[i].parentNode.parentNode.style.backgroundColor = 'white'; items[i].parentNode.parentNode.style.color = '#696969'; } } } } The function above sets the row of the current selected radio button's style to determine that the row is selected and then loops through the radio buttons in the gridview and then de-select the previous selected radio button and set the row style back to its default. You can then call the javascript function above at onlick event of radio button like below: <asp:RadioButton ID="rb" runat="server" onclick="javascript:CheckOtherIsCheckedByGVID(this);" /> Here's the output below: On Load: After Selecting a Radio Button: As you have noticed, on initial load there's no default selected radio in the GridView. Now let's add a simple validation for that. We will basically display an error message if a user clicks a button that triggers a postback without selecting  a radio button in the GridView. Here's the javascript for the validation: function ValidateRadioButton(sender, args) { var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var items = gv.getElementsByTagName('input'); for (var i = 0; i < items.length ; i++) { if (items[i].type == "radio") { if (items[i].checked) { args.IsValid = true; return; } else { args.IsValid = false; } } } } The function above loops through the rows in gridview and find all the radio buttons within it. It will then check each radio button checked property. If a radio is checked then set IsValid to true else set it to false.  The reason why I'm using IsValid is because I'm using the ASP validator control for validation. Now add the following mark up below under the GridView declaration: <br /> <asp:Label ID="lblMessage" runat="server" /> <br /> <asp:Button ID="btn" runat="server" Text="POST" onclick="btn_Click" ValidationGroup="GroupA" /> <asp:CustomValidator ID="CustomValidator1" runat="server" ErrorMessage="Please select row in the grid." ClientValidationFunction="ValidateRadioButton" ValidationGroup="GroupA" style="display:none"></asp:CustomValidator> <asp:ValidationSummary ID="ValidationSummary1" runat="server" ValidationGroup="GroupA" HeaderText="Error List:" DisplayMode="BulletList" ForeColor="Red" /> And then at Button Click event add this simple code below just to test if  the validation works: protected void btn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblMessage.Text = "Postback at: " + DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss tt"); } Here's the output below that you can see in the browser:   That's it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JavaScript,GridView

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• Feedback on IE9 developer tool

  - by anirudha

  if you already love IE9 this post really not for you. but still you need something more this post for you and want to know about IE9 why not use product guide they give you IE9 product guide well i already put the bad experience into many post here but a little practice more to show what IE9 actually is or what they show. well i believe that their is no one on MSDN can sure that IE9 is another thing for developer to struggle with. because they never thing about the thing they make. the thinking they have that we product windows who are best so everything we do are best and best. come to the point i means Web browsing we can divide them in two parts 1. someone who are developer and use browser mainly for development , debugging and testing what they produced and make better software. 2. user who are not know things more technically but use the web as their passion. so as a developer what developer want. are IE9 is really for developer now make a comparison. commonly every developer have a twitter account to follow the link of someone else to learn and read the best article on web and share to all follower of themselves. chrome and Firefox have many utilities for that but IE still have nothing. social networking is a good way to communicate with others. in IE their is no plug-in to make experience better as firefox and chrome have a list of plug-in to use browser with more comfort. their are a huge list of plug-in on Firefox and chrome is available for making experience better. but IE9 still have no plug-in for that. if you see http://ieaddons.com/ you still see that they are joking yeah white joke who believe on them. they still have no plug-in. are they fool or making other fool. on 2011 whenever Firefox and chrome claim many thing on the plug-in IE9 still have no plug-in. not for developer not for everyone else. yeah a list of useless stuff you can see their. IE9 developer tool maybe better if they copycat the firebug as they copycat Google’s search result for Bing. well it’ not sure but Google claim that. but what is in IE9 developer tool so great that MSDN developer talking about. i found nothing in IE9 developer tool still feel frustrated their is a big trouble to edit css. means you never can change the css without going to CSS tab. but i thing great many thing they make better their but they still produce not better option in IE9 developer tool. as a comparison firebug is great we all know but chrome is a good option if someone want to try their hands on new things. in firebug their is a list of plugin inside firebug available also to make task easier. like firepicker in firebug make colorpicking easier. firebug autocomplete make console script writing better and yslow show you the performance step you need to take for making site better. IE9 still have no plugin or that. IE9 maybe useful stuff whenever the interface they thing to make better. the problem with MSFT these days that they want to ship next version of every softare in WPF. yeah they make live 2011 in wpf. many of user go for someone else or downgrade their 2011 live. the problem they have that they never want to spent the time on learning to use a software again. IE9 not have the serius problem like live have but still IE9 is not so great as chrome. like in chrome their is smooth tabbing. IE9 ditto copycat the things for tabbing. but a little step more in IE have a problem that IE9 tab slip whenever you want to use them. in chrome never slip the tab without user want. well as user someone also want to paint their browser in the style they want or like. in firefox the sollution called personas or themes. same in chrome the things called themes but in IE they still believe that their is no need for them. means use same themes everytime no customization in 2011 yeah great joke. well i read a post [written in 2008] of developer who still claim that they never used Firefox because they have a license for visual studio and some other software and have IE in their system. i not what they want to show. means they always want or thing to show that firefox and chrome is pity and IE is great as all do. but what’s true we all know. when MSFT release IE9 RC they show the ads with comparison of IE9 RC with chrome6 but why not today with chrome 11 developer version. the many things on IE testdrive now work perfect on chrome. well what’s performance matter when a silly browser never give a better experience. yeah performance have matter in useful software. anyone can prove many things whenever they produce a featureless software. well IE9 is looking great in blogger’s post on many kind of website where developer not independently write. actually they are mentally forced to write for IE9 better and show blah blah even blah is very small as they show. i am not believe on some blogger when they write in a style who are easily known that the post in favor of IE9. if you thing of mine then i am not want to hide myself i am one of the lover of open source so i love Firefox and chrome both. but i am not wrong you find yourself that what is difference between IE9 and Firefox and chrome. so don’t believe on someone who are not mentally independent because most of them are write about IE9 because they want to show them better they are forced themselves to show IE9 as a tool and chrome and firefox as pity. well read everything but never believe on everyone without any confident of them. they actually all want to show the things they have as i have with chrome and firefox is better then IE9. so my feedback on IE9 is :- without any plugin , customization or many thing i described in the post make no sense of use of IE9. i still fall in love of firefox and chrome they both give a better support and things to make experience better on the web. so conclusion is that i not forced you to other not IE9. you need to use the tool who save your time. means if your IE9 save your time you should use them because time was more subjective then others. so use the software who save the time as i save my time in chrome and in firefox. i still found nothing inIE9 who save time of mine.

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• New Features in ASP.NET Web API 2 - Part I

  - by dwahlin

  I’m a big fan of ASP.NET Web API. It provides a quick yet powerful way to build RESTful HTTP services that can easily be consumed by a variety of clients. While it’s simple to get started using, it has a wealth of features such as filters, formatters, and message handlers that can be used to extend it when needed. In this post I’m going to provide a quick walk-through of some of the key new features in version 2. I’ll focus on some two of my favorite features that are related to routing and HTTP responses and cover additional features in a future post.   Attribute Routing Routing has been a core feature of Web API since it’s initial release and something that’s built into new Web API projects out-of-the-box. However, there are a few scenarios where defining routes can be challenging such as nested routes (more on that in a moment) and any situation where a lot of custom routes have to be defined. For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to define the following nested route:   /customers/1/orders   This type of route would select a customer with an Id of 1 and then return all of their orders. Defining this type of route in the standard WebApiConfig class is certainly possible, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do for people who don’t understand routing well. Here’s an example of how the route shown above could be defined:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "CustomerOrdersApiGet", routeTemplate: "api/customers/{custID}/orders", defaults: new { custID = 0, controller = "Customers", action = "Orders" } ); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonpFormatter()); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   With attribute based routing, defining these types of nested routes is greatly simplified. To get started you first need to make a call to the new MapHttpAttributeRoutes() method in the standard WebApiConfig class (or a custom class that you may have created that defines your routes) as shown next:   public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { // Allow for attribute based routes config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes(); config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); } } Once attribute based routes are configured, you can apply the Route attribute to one or more controller actions. Here’s an example:   [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; }   This example maps the custId route parameter to the custId parameter in the Orders() method and also ensures that the route parameter is typed as an integer. The Orders() method can be called using the following route: /customers/2/orders   While this is extremely easy to use and gets the job done, it doesn’t include the default “api” string on the front of the route that you might be used to seeing. You could add “api” in front of the route and make it “api/customers/{custId:int}/orders” but then you’d have to repeat that across other attribute-based routes as well. To simply this type of task you can add the RoutePrefix attribute above the controller class as shown next so that “api” (or whatever the custom starting point of your route is) is applied to all attribute routes: [RoutePrefix("api")] public class CustomersController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [Route("customers/{custId:int}/orders")] public List<Order> Orders(int custId) { var orders = _Repository.GetOrders(custId); if (orders == null) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound)); } return orders; } }   There’s much more that you can do with attribute-based routing in ASP.NET. Check out the following post by Mike Wasson for more details.   Returning Responses with IHttpActionResult The first version of Web API provided a way to return custom HttpResponseMessage objects which were pretty easy to use overall. However, Web API 2 now wraps some of the functionality available in version 1 to simplify the process even more. A new interface named IHttpActionResult (similar to ActionResult in ASP.NET MVC) has been introduced which can be used as the return type for Web API controller actions. To return a custom response you can use new helper methods exposed through ApiController such as: Ok NotFound Exception Unauthorized BadRequest Conflict Redirect InvalidModelState Here’s an example of how IHttpActionResult and the helper methods can be used to cleanup code. This is the typical way to return a custom HTTP response in version 1:   public HttpResponseMessage Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); } } With version 2 we can replace HttpResponseMessage with IHttpActionResult and simplify the code quite a bit:   public IHttpActionResult Delete(int id) { var status = _Repository.DeleteCustomer(id); if (status) { //return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); return Ok(); } else { //throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); return NotFound(); } } You can also cleanup post (insert) operations as well using the helper methods. Here’s a version 1 post action:   public HttpResponseMessage Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { var msg = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Created); msg.Headers.Location = new Uri(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString()); return msg; } else { throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.Conflict); } } This is what the code looks like in version 2:   public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]Customer cust) { var newCust = _Repository.InsertCustomer(cust); if (newCust != null) { return Created<Customer>(Request.RequestUri + newCust.ID.ToString(), newCust); } else { return Conflict(); } } More details on IHttpActionResult and the different helper methods provided by the ApiController base class can be found here. Conclusion Although there are several additional features available in Web API 2 that I could cover (CORS support for example), this post focused on two of my favorites features. If you have .NET 4.5.1 available then I definitely recommend checking the new features out. Additional articles that cover features in ASP.NET Web API 2 can be found here.

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• Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week.  When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one.  At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently  -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1  And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}  ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web.  Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

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• Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you don’t have SARGability in play, you need to scan the whole index (or table if you don’t have an index). For example, I can find myself in the phonebook easily, because it’s sorted by LastName and I can find Farley in there by moving to the Fs, and so on. I can’t find everyone in my suburb easily, because the phonebook isn’t sorted that way. I can’t even find people who have six letters in their last name, because also the book is sorted by LastName, it’s not sorted by LEN(LastName). This is all stuff I’ve looked at before, including in the talk I gave at SQLBits in October 2010. If I try to find everyone who’s names start with F, I can do that using a query a bit like: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F'; Unfortunately, the Query Optimizer doesn’t realise that all the entries that satisfy LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F' will be together, and it has to scan the whole table to find them. But if I write: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LastName LIKE 'F%'; then SQL is smart enough to understand this, and performs an Index Seek instead. To see why, I look further into the plan, in particular, the properties of the Index Seek operator. The ToolTip shows me what I’m after: You’ll see that it does a Seek to find any entries that are at least F, but not yet G. There’s an extra Predicate in there (a Residual Predicate if you like), which checks that each LastName is really LIKE F% – I suppose it doesn’t consider that the Seek Predicate is quite enough – but most of the benefit is seen by its working out the Seek Predicate, filtering to just the “at least F but not yet G” section of the data. This got me curious though, particularly about where the G comes from, and whether I could leverage it to create the Swedish alphabet. I know that in the Swedish language, there are three extra letters that appear at the end of the alphabet. One of them is ä that appears in the word Västerås. It turns out that Västerås is quite hard to find in an index when you’re looking it up in a Swedish map. I talked about this briefly in my five-minute talk on Collation from SQLPASS (the one which was slightly less than serious). So by looking at the plan, I can work out what the next letter is in the alphabet of the collation used by the column. In other words, if my alphabet were Swedish, I’d be able to tell what the next letter after F is – just in case it’s not G. It turns out it is… Yes, the Swedish letter after F is G. But I worked this out by using a copy of my PhoneBook table that used the Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI collation. I couldn’t find how the Query Optimizer calculates the G, and my friend Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) tells me that it’s frustratingly internal to the QO. He’s particularly smart, even if he is from New Zealand. To investigate further, I decided to do some PowerShell, leveraging the Get-SqlPlan function that I blogged about recently (make sure you also have the SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 snap-in added). I started by indicating that I was going to use Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI as my collation of choice, and that I’d start whichever letter cam straight after the number 9. I figure that this is a cheat’s way of guessing the first letter of the alphabet (but it doesn’t actually work in Unicode – luckily I’m using varchar not nvarchar. Actually, there are a few aspects of this code that only work using ASCII, so apologies if you were wanting to apply it to Greek, Japanese, etc). I also initialised my $alphabet variable. $collation = 'Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI'; $firstletter = '9'; $alphabet = ''; Now I created the table for my test. A single field would do, and putting a Clustered Index on it would suffice for the Seeks. Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "create table dbo.collation_test (col varchar(10) collate $collation primary key);" Now I get into the looping. $c = $firstletter; $stillgoing = $true; while ($stillgoing) { I construct the query I want, seeking for entries which start with whatever $c has reached, and get the plan for it: $query = "select col from dbo.collation_test where col like '$($c)%';"; [xml] $pl = get-sqlplan $query "." "tempdb"; At this point, my $pl variable is a scary piece of XML, representing the execution plan. A bit of hunting through it showed me that the EndRange element contained what I was after, and that if it contained NULL, then I was done. $stillgoing = ($pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange -ne $null); Now I could grab the value out of it (which came with apostrophes that needed stripping), and append that to my $alphabet variable.   if ($stillgoing)   {  $c=$pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange.RangeExpressions.ScalarOperator.ScalarString.Replace("'","");     $alphabet += $c;   } Finally, finishing the loop, dropping the table, and showing my alphabet! } Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "drop table dbo.collation_test;"; $alphabet; When I run all this, I see that the Swedish alphabet is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZÅÄÖ, which matches what I see at Wikipedia. Interesting to see that the letters on the end are still there, even with Case Insensitivity. Turns out they’re not just “letters with accents”, they’re letters in their own right. I’m sure you gave up reading long ago, and really aren’t that fazed about the idea of doing this using PowerShell. I chose PowerShell because I’d already come up with an easy way of grabbing the estimated plan for a query, and PowerShell does allow for easy navigation of XML. I find the most interesting aspect of this as the fact that the Query Optimizer uses the next letter of the alphabet to maintain the SARGability of LIKE. I’m hoping they do something similar for a whole bunch of operations. Oh, and the fact that you know how to find stuff in the IKEA catalogue. Footnote: If you are interested in whether this works in other languages, you might want to consider the following screenshot, which shows that in principle, it should work with Japanese. It might be a bit harder to run this in PowerShell though, as I’m not sure how it translates. In Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet starts ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ...

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• Adding RSS to tags in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  A year ago, I wrote a scary post about RSS in Orchard. RSS was one of the first features we implemented in our CMS, and it has stood the test of time rather well, but the post was explaining things at a level that was probably too abstract whereas my readers were expecting something a little more practical. Well, this post is going to correct this by showing how I built a module that adds RSS feeds for each tag on the site. Hopefully it will show that it's not very complicated in practice, and also that the infrastructure is pretty well thought out. In order to provide RSS, we need to do two things: generate the XML for the feed, and inject the address of that feed into the existing tag listing page, in order to make the feed discoverable. Let's start with the discoverability part. One might be tempted to replace the controller or the view that are responsible for the listing of the items under a tag. Fortunately, there is no need to do any of that, and we can be a lot less obtrusive. Instead, we can implement a filter: public class TagRssFilter : FilterProvider, IResultFilter .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } On this filter, we can implement the OnResultExecuting method and simply check whether the current request is targeting the list of items under a tag. If that is the case, we can just register our new feed: public void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext) { var routeValues = filterContext.RouteData.Values; if (routeValues["area"] as string == "Orchard.Tags" && routeValues["controller"] as string == "Home" && routeValues["action"] as string == "Search") { var tag = routeValues["tagName"] as string; if (! string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(tag)) { var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); _feedManager.Register( workContext.CurrentSite + " – " + tag, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "tag", tag } } ); } } } The registration of the new feed is just specifying the title of the feed, its format (RSS) and the parameters that it will need (the tag). _wca and _feedManager are just instances of IWorkContextAccessor and IFeedManager that Orchard injected for us. That is all that's needed to get the following tag to be added to the head of our page, without touching an existing controller or view: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="VuLu - Science" href="/rss?tag=Science"/> Nifty. Of course, if we navigate to the URL of that feed, we'll get a 404. This is because no implementation of IFeedQueryProvider knows about the tag parameter yet. Let's build one that does: public class TagFeedQuery : IFeedQueryProvider, IFeedQuery IFeedQueryProvider has one method, Match, that we can implement to take over any feed request that has a tag parameter: public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var tagName = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagName == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } This is just saying that if there is a tag parameter, we will handle it. All that remains to be done is the actual building of the feed now that we have accepted to handle it. This is done by implementing the Execute method of the IFeedQuery interface: public void Execute(FeedContext context) { var tagValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("tag"); if (tagValue == null) return; var tagName = (string)tagValue.ConvertTo(typeof (string)); var tag = _tagService.GetTagByName(tagName); if (tag == null) return; var site = _services.WorkContext.CurrentSite; var link = new XElement("link"); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("title", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Element.Add(link); context.Response.Element.SetElementValue("description", site.SiteName + " - " + tagName); context.Response.Contextualize(requestContext => link.Add(GetTagUrl(tagName, requestContext))); var items = _tagService.GetTaggedContentItems(tag.Id, 0, 20); foreach (var item in items) { context.Builder.AddItem(context, item.ContentItem); } } This code is resolving the tag content item from its name and then gets content items tagged with it, using the tag services provided by the Orchard.Tags module. Then we add those items to the feed. And that is it. To summarize, we handled the request unobtrusively in order to inject the feed's link, then handled requests for feeds with a tag parameter and generated the list of items for that tag. It remains fairly simple and still it is able to handle arbitrary content types. That makes me quite happy about our little piece of over-engineered code from last year. The full code for this can be found in the Vandelay.TagCloud module: http://orchardproject.net/gallery/List/Modules/ Orchard.Module.Vandelay.TagCloud/1.2

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