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Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

- by Shaun

This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites. Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare. CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine. Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding. Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section. Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page. Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: Tuples and Tuple Factory Methods

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can really help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. This week, we look at the System.Tuple class and the handy factory methods for creating a Tuple by inferring the types. What is a Tuple? The System.Tuple is a class that tends to inspire a reaction in one of two ways: love or hate. Simply put, a Tuple is a data structure that holds a specific number of items of a specific type in a specific order. That is, a Tuple<int, string, int> is a tuple that contains exactly three items: an int, followed by a string, followed by an int. The sequence is important not only to distinguish between two members of the tuple with the same type, but also for comparisons between tuples. Some people tend to love tuples because they give you a quick way to combine multiple values into one result. This can be handy for returning more than one value from a method (without using out or ref parameters), or for creating a compound key to a Dictionary, or any other purpose you can think of. They can be especially handy when passing a series of items into a call that only takes one object parameter, such as passing an argument to a thread's startup routine. In these cases, you do not need to define a class, simply create a tuple containing the types you wish to return, and you are ready to go? On the other hand, there are some people who see tuples as a crutch in object-oriented design. They may view the tuple as a very watered down class with very little inherent semantic meaning. As an example, what if you saw this in a piece of code: 1: var x = new Tuple<int, int>(2, 5); What are the contents of this tuple? If the tuple isn't named appropriately, and if the contents of each member are not self evident from the type this can be a confusing question. The people who tend to be against tuples would rather you explicitly code a class to contain the values, such as: 1: public sealed class RetrySettings 2: { 3: public int TimeoutSeconds { get; set; } 4: public int MaxRetries { get; set; } 5: } Here, the meaning of each int in the class is much more clear, but it's a bit more work to create the class and can clutter a solution with extra classes. So, what's the correct way to go? That's a tough call. You will have people who will argue quite well for one or the other. For me, I consider the Tuple to be a tool to make it easy to collect values together easily. There are times when I just need to combine items for a key or a result, in which case the tuple is short lived and so the meaning isn't easily lost and I feel this is a good compromise. If the scope of the collection of items, though, is more application-wide I tend to favor creating a full class. Finally, it should be noted that tuples are immutable. That means they are assigned a value at construction, and that value cannot be changed. Now, of course if the tuple contains an item of a reference type, this means that the reference is immutable and not the item referred to. Tuples from 1 to N Tuples come in all sizes, you can have as few as one element in your tuple, or as many as you like. However, since C# generics can't have an infinite generic type parameter list, any items after 7 have to be collapsed into another tuple, as we'll show shortly. So when you declare your tuple from sizes 1 (a 1-tuple or singleton) to 7 (a 7-tuple or septuple), simply include the appropriate number of type arguments: 1: // a singleton tuple of integer 2: Tuple<int> x; 3: 4: // or more 5: Tuple<int, double> y; 6: 7: // up to seven 8: Tuple<int, double, char, double, int, string, uint> z; Anything eight and above, and we have to nest tuples inside of tuples. The last element of the 8-tuple is the generic type parameter Rest, this is special in that the Tuple checks to make sure at runtime that the type is a Tuple. This means that a simple 8-tuple must nest a singleton tuple (one of the good uses for a singleton tuple, by the way) for the Rest property. 1: // an 8-tuple 2: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, double, char, Tuple<string>> t8; 3: 4: // an 9-tuple 5: Tuple<int, int, int, int, double, int, char, Tuple<string, DateTime>> t9; 6: 7: // a 16-tuple 8: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int,int>>> t14; Notice that on the 14-tuple we had to have a nested tuple in the nested tuple. Since the tuple can only support up to seven items, and then a rest element, that means that if the nested tuple needs more than seven items you must nest in it as well. Constructing tuples Constructing tuples is just as straightforward as declaring them. That said, you have two distinct ways to do it. The first is to construct the tuple explicitly yourself: 1: var t3 = new Tuple<int, string, double>(1, "Hello", 3.1415927); This creates a triple that has an int, string, and double and assigns the values 1, "Hello", and 3.1415927 respectively. Make sure the order of the arguments supplied matches the order of the types! Also notice that we can't half-assign a tuple or create a default tuple. Tuples are immutable (you can't change the values once constructed), so thus you must provide all values at construction time. Another way to easily create tuples is to do it implicitly using the System.Tuple static class's Create() factory methods. These methods (much like C++'s std::make_pair method) will infer the types from the method call so you don't have to type them in. This can dramatically reduce the amount of typing required especially for complex tuples! 1: // this 4-tuple is typed Tuple<int, double, string, char> 2: var t4 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.1415927, "Love", 'X'); Notice how much easier it is to use the factory methods and infer the types? This can cut down on typing quite a bit when constructing tuples. The Create() factory method can construct from a 1-tuple (singleton) to an 8-tuple (octuple), which of course will be a octuple where the last item is a singleton as we described before in nested tuples. Accessing tuple members Accessing a tuple's members is simplicity itself… mostly. The properties for accessing up to the first seven items are Item1, Item2, …, Item7. If you have an octuple or beyond, the final property is Rest which will give you the nested tuple which you can then access in a similar matter. Once again, keep in mind that these are read-only properties and cannot be changed. 1: // for septuples and below, use the Item properties 2: var t1 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.14); 3: 4: Console.WriteLine("First item is {0} and second is {1}", 5: t1.Item1, t1.Item2); 6: 7: // for octuples and above, use Rest to retrieve nested tuple 8: var t9 = new Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, 9: Tuple<int, int>>(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,Tuple.Create(8,9)); 10: 11: Console.WriteLine("The 8th item is {0}", t9.Rest.Item1); Tuples are IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable Most of you know about IComparable and IEquatable, what you may not know is that there are two sister interfaces to these that were added in .NET 4.0 to help support tuples. These IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable make it easy to compare two tuples for equality and ordering. This is invaluable for sorting, and makes it easy to use tuples as a compound-key to a dictionary (one of my favorite uses)! Why is this so important? Remember when we said that some folks think tuples are too generic and you should define a custom class? This is all well and good, but if you want to design a custom class that can automatically order itself based on its members and build a hash code for itself based on its members, it is no longer a trivial task! Thankfully the tuple does this all for you through the explicit implementations of these interfaces. For equality, two tuples are equal if all elements are equal between the two tuples, that is if t1.Item1 == t2.Item1 and t1.Item2 == t2.Item2, and so on. For ordering, it's a little more complex in that it compares the two tuples one at a time starting at Item1, and sees which one has a smaller Item1. If one has a smaller Item1, it is the smaller tuple. However if both Item1 are the same, it compares Item2 and so on. For example: 1: var t1 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 2: var t2 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 3: var t3 = Tuple.Create(2, 2.72, "Bye"); 4: 5: // true, t1 == t2 because all items are == 6: Console.WriteLine("t1 == t2 : " + t1.Equals(t2)); 7: 8: // false, t1 != t2 because at least one item different 9: Console.WriteLine("t2 == t2 : " + t2.Equals(t3)); The actual implementation of IComparable, IEquatable, IStructuralComparable, and IStructuralEquatable is explicit, so if you want to invoke the methods defined there you'll have to manually cast to the appropriate interface: 1: // true because t1.Item1 < t3.Item1, if had been same would check Item2 and so on 2: Console.WriteLine("t1 < t3 : " + (((IComparable)t1).CompareTo(t3) < 0)); So, as I mentioned, the fact that tuples are automatically equatable and comparable (provided the types you use define equality and comparability as needed) means that we can use tuples for compound keys in hashing and ordering containers like Dictionary and SortedList: 1: var tupleDict = new Dictionary<Tuple<int, double, string>, string>(); 2: 3: tupleDict.Add(t1, "First tuple"); 4: tupleDict.Add(t2, "Second tuple"); 5: tupleDict.Add(t3, "Third tuple"); Because IEquatable defines GetHashCode(), and Tuple's IStructuralEquatable implementation creates this hash code by combining the hash codes of the members, this makes using the tuple as a complex key quite easy! For example, let's say you are creating account charts for a financial application, and you want to cache those charts in a Dictionary based on the account number and the number of days of chart data (for example, a 1 day chart, 1 week chart, etc): 1: // the account number (string) and number of days (int) are key to get cached chart 2: var chartCache = new Dictionary<Tuple<string, int>, IChart>(); Summary The System.Tuple, like any tool, is best used where it will achieve a greater benefit. I wouldn't advise overusing them, on objects with a large scope or it can become difficult to maintain. However, when used properly in a well defined scope they can make your code cleaner and easier to maintain by removing the need for extraneous POCOs and custom property hashing and ordering. They are especially useful in defining compound keys to IDictionary implementations and for returning multiple values from methods, or passing multiple values to a single object parameter. 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Web API, JavaScript, Chrome & Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

- by Brian Lanham

The team spent much of the week working through this issues related to Chrome running on Windows 8 consuming cross-origin resources using Web API. We thought it was resolved on day 2 but it resurfaced the next day. We definitely resolved it today though. I believe I do not fully understand the situation but I am going to explain what I know in an effort to help you avoid and/or resolve a similar issue. References We referenced many sources during our trial-and-error troubleshooting. These are the links we reference in order of applicability to the solution: Zoiner Tejada JavaScript and other material from -> http://www.devproconnections.com/content1/topic/microsoft-azure-cors-141869/catpath/windows-azure-platform2/page/3 WebDAV Where I learned about “Accept” –> http://www-jo.se/f.pfleger/cors-and-iis? IT Hit Tells about NOT using ‘*’ –> http://www.webdavsystem.com/ajax/programming/cross_origin_requests Carlos Figueira Sample back-end code (newer) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d (older version) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CORS-support-in-ASPNET-Web-01e9980a Background As a measure of protection, Web designers (W3C) and implementers (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) made it so that a request, especially a JSON request (but really any URL), sent from one domain to another will only work if the requestee “knows” about the requester and allows requests from it. So, for example, if you write a ASP.NET MVC Web API service and try to consume it from multiple apps, the browsers used may (will?) indicate that you are not allowed by showing an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error indicating the requester is not allowed to make requests. Internet Explorer (big surprise) is the odd-hair-colored step-child in this mix. It seems that running locally at least IE allows this for development purposes. Chrome and Firefox do not. In fact, Chrome is quite restrictive. Notice the images below. IE shows data (a tabular view with one row for each day of a week) while Chrome does not (trust me, neither does Firefox). Further, the Chrome developer console shows an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) error. Screen captures from IE (left) and Chrome (right). Note that Chrome does not display data and the console shows an XHR error. Why does this happen? The Web browser submits these requests and processes the responses and each browser is different. Okay, so, IE is probably the only one that’s truly different. However, Chrome has a specific process of performing a “pre-flight” check to make sure the service can respond to an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) request. So basically, the sequence is, if I understand correctly: 1)Page Loads –> 2)JavaScript Request Processed by Browser –> 3)Browsers Prepares to Submit Request –> 4)[Chrome] Browser Submits Pre-Flight Request –> 5)Server Responds with HTTP 200 –> 6)Browser Submits Request –> 7)Server Responds with Data –> 8)Page Shows Data This situation occurs for both GET and POST methods. Typically, GET methods are called with query string parameters so there is no data posted. Instead, the requesting domain needs to be permitted to request data but generally nothing more is required. POSTs on the other hand send form data. Therefore, more configuration is required (you’ll see the configuration below). AJAX requests are not friendly with this (POSTs) either because they don’t post in a form. How to fix it. The team went through many iterations of self-hair removal and we think we finally have a working solution. The trial-and-error approach eventually worked and we referenced many sources for the information. I indicate those references above. There are basically three (3) tasks needed to make this work. Assumptions: You are using Visual Studio, Web API, JavaScript, and have Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, and several browsers. 1. Configure the client Joel Cochran centralized our “cors-oriented” JavaScript (from here). There are two calls including one for GET and one for POST function(url, data, callback) { console.log(data); $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.post(url, data, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("post", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(data); } else { console.log(">" + jqXhHR.status); alert("corsAjax.post error: " + status + ", " + errorThrown); } }); }; The GET CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) function(url, callback) { $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.get(url, null, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("get", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(); } else { alert("CORS is not supported in this browser or from this origin."); } }); }; The POST CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) Now you need to call these functions to get and post your data (instead of, say, using $.Ajax). Here is a GET example: corsAjax.get(url, function(data) { if (data !== null && data.length !== undefined) { // do something with data } }); And here is a POST example: corsAjax.post(url, item); Simple…except…you’re not done yet. 2. Change Web API Controllers to Allow CORS There are actually two steps here. Do you remember above when we mentioned the “pre-flight” check? Chrome actually asks the server if it is allowed to ask it for cross-origin resource sharing access. So you need to let the server know it’s okay. This is a two-part activity. a) Add the appropriate response header Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and b) permit the API functions to respond to various methods including GET, POST, and OPTIONS. OPTIONS is the method that Chrome and other browsers use to ask the server if it can ask about permissions. Here is an example of a Web API controller thus decorated: NOTE: You’ll see a lot of references to using “*” in the header value. For security reasons, Chrome does NOT recognize this is valid. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "http://localhost:51234")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, COPY, MOVE, DELETE, MKCOL, LOCK, UNLOCK, PUT, GETLIB, VERSION-CONTROL, CHECKIN, CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT, REPORT, UPDATE, CANCELUPLOAD, HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, POST")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destination, Content-Type, Depth, User-Agent, X-File-Size, X-Requested-With, If-Modified-Since, X-File-Name, Cache-Control")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Max-Age", "3600")] public abstract class BaseApiController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [HttpOptions] public IEnumerable<foo> GetFooItems(int id) { return foo.AsEnumerable(); } [HttpPost] [HttpOptions] public void UpdateFooItem(FooItem fooItem) { // NOTE: The fooItem object may or may not // (probably NOT) be set with actual data. // If not, you need to extract the data from // the posted form manually. if (fooItem.Id == 0) // However you check for default... { // We use NewtonSoft.Json. string jsonString = context.Request.Form.GetValues(0)[0].ToString(); Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer js = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer(); fooItem = js.Deserialize<FooItem>(new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(jsonString))); } // Update the set fooItem object. } } Please note a few specific additions here: * The header attributes at the class level are required. Note all of those methods and headers need to be specified but we find it works this way so we aren’t touching it. * Web API will actually deserialize the posted data into the object parameter of the called method on occasion but so far we don’t know why it does and doesn’t. * [HttpOptions] is, again, required for the pre-flight check. * The “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” response header should NOT NOT NOT contain an ‘*’. 3. Headers and Methods and Such We had most of this code in place but found that Chrome and Firefox still did not render the data. Interestingly enough, Fiddler showed that the GET calls succeeded and the JSON data is returned properly. We learned that among the headers set at the class level, we needed to add “ACCEPT”. Note that I accidentally added it to methods and to headers. Adding it to methods worked but I don’t know why. We added it to headers also for good measure. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPA... [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destin... Next Steps That should do it. If it doesn’t let us know. What to do next? * Don’t hardcode the allowed domains. Note that port numbers and other domain name specifics will cause problems and must be specified. If this changes do you really want to deploy updated software? Consider Miguel Figueira’s approach in the following link to writing a custom HttpHeaderAttribute class that allows you to specify the domain names and then you can do it dynamically. There are, of course, other ways to do it dynamically but this is a clean approach. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d

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Making a Statement: How to retrieve the T-SQL statement that caused an event

- by extended_events

If you’ve done any troubleshooting of T-SQL, you know that sooner or later, probably sooner, you’re going to want to take a look at the actual statements you’re dealing with. In extended events we offer an action (See the BOL topic that covers Extended Events Objects for a description of actions) named sql_text that seems like it is just the ticket. Well…not always – sounds like a good reason for a blog post. When is a statement not THE statement? The sql_text action returns the same information that is returned from DBCC INPUTBUFFER, which may or may not be what you want. For example, if you execute a stored procedure, the sql_text action will return something along the lines of “EXEC sp_notwhatiwanted” assuming that is the statement you sent from the client. Often times folks would like something more specific, like the actual statements that are being run from within the stored procedure or batch. Enter the stack Extended events offers another action, this one with the descriptive name of tsql_stack, that includes the sql_handle and offset information about the statements being run when an event occurs. With the sql_handle and offset values you can retrieve the specific statement you seek using the DMV dm_exec_sql_statement. The BOL topic for dm_exec_sql_statement provides an example for how to extract this information, so I’ll cover the gymnastics required to get the sql_handle and offset values out of the tsql_stack data collected by the action. I’m the first to admit that this isn’t pretty, but this is what we have in SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. We will be making it easier to get statement level information in the next major release of SQL Server. The sample code For this example I have a stored procedure that includes multiple statements and I have a need to differentiate between those two statements in my tracing. I’m going to track two events: module_end tracks the completion of the stored procedure execution and sp_statement_completed tracks the execution of each statement within a stored procedure. I’m adding the tsql_stack events (since that’s the topic of this post) and the sql_text action for comparison sake. (If you have questions about creating event sessions, check out Pedro’s post Introduction to Extended Events.) USE AdventureWorks2008GO -- Test SPCREATE PROCEDURE sp_multiple_statementsASSELECT 'This is the first statement'SELECT 'this is the second statement'GO -- Create a session to look at the spCREATE EVENT SESSION track_sprocs ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.module_end (ACTION (sqlserver.tsql_stack, sqlserver.sql_text)),ADD EVENT sqlserver.sp_statement_completed (ACTION (sqlserver.tsql_stack, sqlserver.sql_text))ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS)GO -- Start the sessionALTER EVENT SESSION track_sprocs ON SERVERSTATE = STARTGO -- Run the test procedureEXEC sp_multiple_statementsGO -- Stop collection of events but maintain ring bufferALTER EVENT SESSION track_sprocs ON SERVERDROP EVENT sqlserver.module_end,DROP EVENT sqlserver.sp_statement_completedGO Aside: Altering the session to drop the events is a neat little trick that allows me to stop collection of events while keeping in-memory targets such as the ring buffer available for use. If you stop the session the in-memory target data is lost. Now that we’ve collected some events related to running the stored procedure, we need to do some processing of the data. I’m going to do this in multiple steps using temporary tables so you can see what’s going on; kind of like having to “show your work” on a math test. The first step is to just cast the target data into XML so I can work with it. After that you can pull out the interesting columns, for our purposes I’m going to limit the output to just the event name, object name, stack and sql text. You can see that I’ve don a second CAST, this time of the tsql_stack column, so that I can further process this data. -- Store the XML data to a temp tableSELECT CAST( t.target_data AS XML) xml_dataINTO #xml_event_dataFROM sys.dm_xe_sessions s INNER JOIN sys.dm_xe_session_targets t ON s.address = t.event_session_addressWHERE s.name = 'track_sprocs' SELECT * FROM #xml_event_data -- Parse the column data out of the XML blockSELECT event_xml.value('(./@name)', 'varchar(100)') as [event_name], event_xml.value('(./data[@name="object_name"]/value)[1]', 'varchar(255)') as [object_name], CAST(event_xml.value('(./action[@name="tsql_stack"]/value)[1]','varchar(MAX)') as XML) as [stack_xml], event_xml.value('(./action[@name="sql_text"]/value)[1]', 'varchar(max)') as [sql_text]INTO #event_dataFROM #xml_event_data CROSS APPLY xml_data.nodes('//event') n (event_xml) SELECT * FROM #event_data event_name object_name stack_xml sql_text sp_statement_completed NULL <frame level="1" handle="0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000" line="4" offsetStart="94" offsetEnd="172" /><frame level="2" handle="0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000" line="1" offsetStart="0" offsetEnd="-1" /> EXEC sp_multiple_statements sp_statement_completed NULL <frame level="1" handle="0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000" line="6" offsetStart="174" offsetEnd="-1" /><frame level="2" handle="0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000" line="1" offsetStart="0" offsetEnd="-1" /> EXEC sp_multiple_statements module_end sp_multiple_statements <frame level="1" handle="0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000" line="0" offsetStart="0" offsetEnd="0" /><frame level="2" handle="0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000" line="1" offsetStart="0" offsetEnd="-1" /> EXEC sp_multiple_statements After parsing the columns it’s easier to see what is recorded. You can see that I got back two sp_statement_completed events, which makes sense given the test procedure I’m running, and I got back a single module_end for the entire statement. As described, the sql_text isn’t telling me what I really want to know for the first two events so a little extra effort is required. -- Parse the tsql stack information into columnsSELECT event_name, object_name, frame_xml.value('(./@level)', 'int') as [frame_level], frame_xml.value('(./@handle)', 'varchar(MAX)') as [sql_handle], frame_xml.value('(./@offsetStart)', 'int') as [offset_start], frame_xml.value('(./@offsetEnd)', 'int') as [offset_end]INTO #stack_data FROM #event_data CROSS APPLY stack_xml.nodes('//frame') n (frame_xml) SELECT * from #stack_data event_name object_name frame_level sql_handle offset_start offset_end sp_statement_completed NULL 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 94 172 sp_statement_completed NULL 2 0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000 0 -1 sp_statement_completed NULL 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 174 -1 sp_statement_completed NULL 2 0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000 0 -1 module_end sp_multiple_statements 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 0 0 module_end sp_multiple_statements 2 0x01000500CF3F0331B05EC084000000000000000000000000 0 -1 Parsing out the stack information doubles the fun and I get two rows for each event. If you examine the stack from the previous table, you can see that each stack has two frames and my query is parsing each event into frames, so this is expected. There is nothing magic about the two frames, that’s just how many I get for this example, it could be fewer or more depending on your statements. The key point here is that I now have a sql_handle and the offset values for those handles, so I can use dm_exec_sql_statement to get the actual statement. Just a reminder, this DMV can only return what is in the cache – if you have old data it’s possible your statements have been ejected from the cache. “Old” is a relative term when talking about caches and can be impacted by server load and how often your statement is actually used. As with most things in life, your mileage may vary. SELECT qs.*, SUBSTRING(st.text, (qs.offset_start/2)+1, ((CASE qs.offset_end WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(st.text) ELSE qs.offset_end END - qs.offset_start)/2) + 1) AS statement_textFROM #stack_data AS qsCROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(CONVERT(varbinary(max),sql_handle,1)) AS st event_name object_name frame_level sql_handle offset_start offset_end statement_text sp_statement_completed NULL 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 94 172 SELECT 'This is the first statement' sp_statement_completed NULL 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 174 -1 SELECT 'this is the second statement' module_end sp_multiple_statements 1 0x03000500D0057C1403B79600669D00000100000000000000 0 0 C Now that looks more like what we were after, the statement_text field is showing the actual statement being run when the sp_statement_completed event occurs. You’ll notice that it’s back down to one row per event, what happened to frame 2? The short answer is, “I don’t know.” In SQL Server 2008 nothing is returned from dm_exec_sql_statement for the second frame and I believe this to be a bug; this behavior has changed in the next major release and I see the actual statement run from the client in frame 2. (In other words I see the same statement that is returned by the sql_text action or DBCC INPUTBUFFER) There is also something odd going on with frame 1 returned from the module_end event; you can see that the offset values are both 0 and only the first letter of the statement is returned. It seems like the offset_end should actually be –1 in this case and I’m not sure why it’s not returning this correctly. This behavior is being investigated and will hopefully be corrected in the next major version. You can workaround this final oddity by ignoring the offsets and just returning the entire cached statement. SELECT event_name, sql_handle, ts.textFROM #stack_data CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(CONVERT(varbinary(max),sql_handle,1)) as ts event_name sql_handle text sp_statement_completed 0x0300070025999F11776BAF006F9D00000100000000000000 CREATE PROCEDURE sp_multiple_statements AS SELECT 'This is the first statement' SELECT 'this is the second statement' sp_statement_completed 0x0300070025999F11776BAF006F9D00000100000000000000 CREATE PROCEDURE sp_multiple_statements AS SELECT 'This is the first statement' SELECT 'this is the second statement' module_end 0x0300070025999F11776BAF006F9D00000100000000000000 CREATE PROCEDURE sp_multiple_statements AS SELECT 'This is the first statement' SELECT 'this is the second statement' Obviously this gives more than you want for the sp_statement_completed events, but it’s the right information for module_end. I leave it to you to determine when this information is needed and use the workaround when appropriate. Aside: You might think it’s odd that I’m showing apparent bugs with my samples, but you’re going to see this behavior if you use this method, so you need to know about it.I’m all about transparency. Happy Eventing- Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

- by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com

Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are: The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications; The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1: Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2: Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3: Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers. These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

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Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response

- by Michael Stephenson

Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts. It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net web service which was exposed as a WSE 2 endpoint. In the process BizTalk will try to make a large number of concurrent web service calls to the application, and the backend application has more than enough infrastructure and capability to handle the load. We have configured the <ConnectionManagement> section of the BizTalk configuration file to support up to 100 concurrent connections from each of our 2 BizTalk send servers to the web servers of the application. The problem we were facing was that the BizTalk side was reporting a significant number of timeouts when calling the web service. One of the biggest issues was the challenge of being able to correlate a message from BizTalk to the IIS log in the .net application and the custom logs in the application especially when there was a fairly large number of servers hosting the web services. However the key moment came when we were able to identify a specific call which had taken 40 seconds to execute on the server (yes a long time I know but that's a different story!). Anyway we were able to identify that this had timed out on the BizTalk side. Based on the normal 2 minute timeout we knew something unexpected was going on. From here I decided to do some experimentation and I wanted to start outside of BizTalk because my hunch was this was not a BizTalk behaviour but something which was being highlighted by BizTalk because of our large load. Server-side - Sample Web Service To begin with I created a sample web service. Nothing special just a vanilla asmx web service hosted in IIS6 on Windows 2003 Standard Edition. The web service is just a hello world style web service as shown in the below picture. The only key feature is that the server side web method has a 30 second sleep in it and will trace out some information before and after the thread is set to sleep. In the configuration for this web service there again is nothing special it's pretty much the most plain simple web service you could build. Client-Side To begin looking at what was happening with our example I created a number of different ways to consume the web service. SoapHttpClientProtocol Example I created a small application which would use a normal proxy generated to call the web service. It would iterate around a loop and make calls using the begin/end methods so I can do this asynchronously. I would do a loop of 20 calls with the ConnectionManager configuration section supporting only 5 concurrent connections to the server. <connectionManagement> <remove address="*"/> <add address = "*" maxconnection = "12" /> <add address = "http://<ServerName>" maxconnection = "5" /> </connectionManagement> </system.net> The below picture shows an example of the service calling code, key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service The Test I would run the client and execute 21 calls to the web service. The Results Below is the client side trace showing what's happening on the client. In the below diagram is the web service side trace showing what's happening on the server Some observations on the results are: All of the calls were successful from the clients perspective You could see the next call starting on the server as soon as the previous one had completed Calls took significantly longer than 40 seconds from the start of our call to the return. In fact call 20 took 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the perspective of my code to execute even though I had set the timeout to 40 seconds WSE 2 Sample In the second example I used the exact same code to call the web service again with a single exception that I modified the web service proxy to derive from WebServiceClient protocol which is part of WSE 2 (using SP3). The below picture shows the basic code and the key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service The Test This test would execute 21 calls from the client to the web service. The Results The below trace is from the client side: The below trace is from the server side: Some observations on the trace results for this scenario are: With call 4 if you look at the server side trace it did not start executing on the server for a number of seconds after the other 4 initial calls which were accepted by the server. I re-ran the test and this happened a couple of times and not on most others so at this point I'm just putting this down to something unexpected happening on the development machine and we will leave this observation out of scope of this article. You can see that the client side trace statement executed almost immediately in all cases All calls after the initial few calls would timeout On the client side the calls that did timeout; timed out in a longer duration than the 40 seconds we set as the timeout You can see that as calls were completing on the server the next calls were starting to come through The calls that timed out on the client did actually connect to the server and their server side execution completed successfully Elaboration on the findings Based on the above observations I have drawn the below sequence diagram to illustrate conceptually what is happening. Everything except the final web service object is on the client side of the call. In the diagram below I've put two notes on the Web Service Proxy to show the two different places where the different base classes seem to start their timeout counters. From the earlier samples we can work out that the timeout counter for the WSE web service proxy starts before the one for the SoapHttpClientProtocol proxy and the WSE one includes the time to get a connection from the pool; whereas the Soap proxy timeout just covers the method execution. One interesting observation is if we rerun the above sample and increase the number of calls from 21 to 100,000 then for the WSE sample we will see a similar pattern where everything after the first few calls will timeout on the client as soon as it makes a connection to the server whereas the soap proxy will happily plug away and process all of the calls without a single timeout. I have actually set the sample running overnight and this did happen. At this point you are probably thinking the same thoughts I was at the time about the differences in behaviour and which is right and why are they different? I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this in the documentation, or at least not that I could find! I think you just have to consider that they are different and they could have different effects depending on your messaging solution. In lots of situations this is just not an issue as your concurrent requests doesn't get to the situation where you end up throttling the web service calls on the client side, however this is definitely more common with an integration broker such as BizTalk where you often have high throughput requirements. Some of the considerations you should make Based on this behaviour you should be aware of the following: In a .net application if you are making lots of concurrent web service calls from an application in an asynchronous manner your user may thing they are experiencing poor performance but you think your web service is working well. The problem could be that the client will have a default of 2 connections to remote servers so you should bear this in mind When you are developing a BizTalk solution or a .net solution with the WSE 2 stack you may experience timeouts under load and throttling the number of connections using the max connections element in the configuration file will not help you For an application using WSE2 or SoapHttpClientProtocol an expired timeout will not throw an error until after a connection to the server has been made so you should consider this in your transaction and durability patterns Our Work Around In the short term for our specific scenario we know that we can handle this by just increasing our timeout value. There is only a specific small window when we get lots of concurrent traffic that causes this scenario so we should be able to increase the timeout to take into consideration the additional client side wait, and on the odd occasion where we do get a timeout the BizTalk send port retry will handle this. What was causing our original problem was that for that short window we were getting a lot of retries which significantly increased the load on our send servers and highlighted the issue. Longer Term Solution As a longer term solution this really gives us more ammunition to argue a migration to WCF. The application we are calling has some factors which limit the protocols we can use but with WCF we would have more control on the various timeout options because in WCF you can configure specific parts of the timeout. Summary I've had this blog post on my to do list for ages but hopefully it will be useful to some people to just understand this behaviour and to possibly help you with some performance issues you may have. I do not believe there is too much in the way of documentation particularly around WSE2 and ASMX in this area so again another bit of ammunition for migrating to WCF. I'll try to do a follow up post with the sample for WCF to show how this changes things.

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Implementing a post-notification function to perform custom validation

- by Alejandro Sosa

Introduction Oracle Workflow Notification System can be extended to perform extra validation or processing via PLSQL procedures when the notification is being responded to. These PLSQL procedures are called post-notification functions since they are executed after a notification action such as Approve, Reject, Reassign or Request Information is performed. The standard signature for the post-notification function is procedure <procedure_name> (itemtype in varchar2, itemkey in varchar2, actid in varchar2, funcmode in varchar2, resultout in out nocopy varchar2); Modes The post-notification function provides the parameter 'funcmode' which will have the following values: 'RESPOND', 'VALIDATE, and 'RUN' for a notification is responded to (Approve, Reject, etc) 'FORWARD' for a notification being forwarded to another user 'TRANSFER' for a notification being transferred to another user 'QUESTION' for a request of more information from one user to another 'QUESTION' for a response to a request of more information 'TIMEOUT' for a timed-out notification 'CANCEL' when the notification is being re-executed in a loop. Context Variables Oracle Workflow provides different context information that corresponds to the current notification being acted upon to the post-notification function. WF_ENGINE.context_nid - The notification ID WF_ENGINE.context_new_role - The new role to which the action on the notification is directed WF_ENGINE.context_user_comment - Comments appended to the notification WF_ENGINE.context_user - The user who is responsible for taking the action that updated the notification's state WF_ENGINE.context_recipient_role - The role currently designated as the recipient of the notification. This value may be the same as the value of WF_ENGINE.context_user variable, or it may be a group role of which the context user is a member. WF_ENGINE.context_original_recipient - The role that has ownership of and responsibility for the notification. This value may differ from the value of the WF_ENGINE.context_recipient_role variable if the notification has previously been reassigned. Example Let us assume there is an EBS transaction that can only be approved by a certain people thus any attempt to transfer or delegate such notification should be allowed only to users SPIERSON or CBAKER. The way to implement this functionality would be as follows: Edit the corresponding workflow definition in Workflow Builder and open the notification. In the Function Name enter the name of the procedure where the custom code is handled, for instance, TEST_PACKAGE.Post_Notification In PLSQL create the corresponding package TEST_PACKAGE with a procedure named Post_Notification, as follows: procedure Post_Notification (itemtype in varchar2, itemkey in varchar2, actid in varchar2, funcmode in varchar2, resultout in out nocopy varchar2) is l_count number; begin if funcmode in ('TRANSFER','FORWARD') then select count(1) into l_count from WF_ROLES where WF_ENGINE.context_new_role in ('SPIERSON','CBAKER'); --and/or any other conditions if l_count<1 then WF_CORE.TOKEN('ROLE', WF_ENGINE.context_new_role); WF_CORE.RAISE('WFNTF_TRANSFER_FAIL'); end if; end if; end Post_Notification; Launch the workflow process with the changed notification and attempt to reassign or transfer it. When trying to reassign the notification to user CBROWN the screen would like like below: Check the Workflow API Reference Guide, section Post-Notification Functions, to see all the standard, seeded WF_ENGINE variables available for extending notifications processing.

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Can someone explain the "use-cases" for the default munin graphs?

- by exhuma

When installing munin, it activates a default set of plugins (at least on ubuntu). Alternatively, you can simply run munin-node-configure to figure out which plugins are supported on your system. Most of these plugins plot straight-forward data. My question is not to explain the nature of the data (well... maybe for some) but what is it that you look for in these graphs? It is easy to install munin and see fancy graphs. But having the graphs and not being able to "read" them renders them totally useless. I am going to list standard plugins which are enabled by default on my system. So it's going to be a long list. For completeness, I am also going to list plugins which I think to understand and give a short explanation as to what I think it's used for. Pleas correct if I am wrong with any of them. So let me split this questions in three parts: Plugins where I don't even understand the data Plugins where I understand the data but don't know what I should look out for Plugins which I think to understand Plugins where I don't even understand the data These may contain questions that are not necessarily aimed at munin alone. Not understanding the data usually mean a gap in fundamental knowledge on operating systems/hardware.... ;) Feel free to respond with a "giyf" answer. These are plugins where I can only guess what's going on... I hardly want to look at these "guessing"... Disk IOs per device (IOs/second)What's an IO. I know it stands for input/output. But that's as far as it goes. Disk latency per device (Average IO wait)Not a clue what an "IO wait" is... IO Service TimeThis one is a huge mess, and it's near impossible to see something in the graph at all. Plugins where I understand the data but don't know what I should look out for IOStat (blocks/second read/written)I assume, the thing to look out for in here are spikes? Which would mean that the device is in heavy use? Available entropy (bytes)I assume that this is important for random number generation? Why would I graph this? So far the value has always been near constant. VMStat (running/I/O sleep processes)What's the difference between this one and the "processes" graph? Both show running/sleeping processes, whereas the "Processes" graph seems to have more details. Disk throughput per device (bytes/second read/written) What's thedifference between this one and the "IOStat" graph? inode table usageWhat should I look for in this graph? Plugins which I think to understand I'll be guessing some things here... correct me if I am wrong. Disk usage in percent (percent)How much disk space is used/remaining. As this is approaching 100%, you should consider cleaning up or extend the partition. This is extremely important for the root partition. Firewall Throughput (packets/second)The number of packets passing through the firewall. If this is spiking for a longer period of time, it could be a sign of a DOS attack (or we are simply recieving a large file). It can also give you an idea about your firewall performance. If it's levelling out and you need more "power" you should consider load balancing. If it's levelling out and see a correlation with your CPU load, it could also mean that your hardware is not fast enough. Correlations with disk usage could point to excessive LOG targets in you FW config. eth0 errors (packets in/out)Network errors. If this value is increasing, it could be a sign of faulty hardware. eth0 traffic (bits/second in/out)Raw network traffic. This should correlate with Firewall throughput. number of threadsAn ever-increasing value might point to a process not properly closing threads. Investigate! processesBreakdown of active processes (including sleeping). A quick spike in here might point to a fork-bomb. A slowly, but ever-increasing value might point to an application spawning sub-processes but not properly closing them. Investigate using ps faux. process priorityThis shows the distribution of process priorities. Having only high-priority processes is not of much use. Consider de-prioritizing some. cpu usageFairly straight-forward. If this is spiking, you may have an attack going on, or a process is hogging the CPU. Idf it's slowly increasing and approaching max in normal operations, you should consider upgrading your hardware (or load-balancing). file table usageNumber of actively open files. If this is reaching max, you may have a process opening, but not properly releasing files. load averageShows an summarized value for the system load. Should correlate with CPU usage. Increasing values can come from a number of sources. Look for correlations with other graphs. memory usageA graphical representation of you memory. As long as you have a lot of unused+cache+buffers you are fine. swap in/outShows the activity on your swap partition. This should always be 0. If you see activity on this, you should add more memory to your machine!

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RHEL Cluster FAIL after changing time on system

- by Eugene S

I've encountered a strange issue. I had to change the time on my Linux RHEL cluster system. I've done it using the following command from the root user: date +%T -s "10:13:13" After doing this, some message appeared relating to <emerg> #1: Quorum Dissolved however I didn't capture it completely. In order to investigate the issue I looked at /var/log/messages and I've discovered the following: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering GATHER state from 0. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Creating commit token because I am the rep. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Storing new sequence id for ring 354 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering COMMIT state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering RECOVERY state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] position [0] member 192.168.1.49: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] previous ring seq 848 rep 192.168.1.49 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] aru 61 high delivered 61 received flag 1 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Did not need to originate any messages in recovery. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Sending initial ORF token Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] CLM CONFIGURATION CHANGE Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] New Configuration: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.49) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Left: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.51) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Joined: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CMAN ] quorum lost, blocking activity Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] CLM CONFIGURATION CHANGE Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] New Configuration: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.49) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Left: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Joined: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [SYNC ] This node is within the primary component and will provide service. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering OPERATIONAL state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a kernel: dlm: closing connection to node 2 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] got nodejoin message 192.168.1.49 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a clurgmgrd[25809]: <emerg> #1: Quorum Dissolved Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CPG ] got joinlist message from node 1 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Cluster is not quorate. Refusing connection. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Error while processing connect: Connection refused Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Invalid descriptor specified (-21). Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Someone may be attempting something evil. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Error while processing disconnect: Invalid request descriptor Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering GATHER state from 9. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Creating commit token because I am the rep. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Storing new sequence id for ring 358 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering COMMIT state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering RECOVERY state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] position [0] member 192.168.1.49: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] previous ring seq 852 rep 192.168.1.49 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] aru f high delivered f received flag 1 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] position [1] member 192.168.1.51: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] previous ring seq 852 rep 192.168.1.51 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] aru f high delivered f received flag 1 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Did not need to originate any messages in recovery. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] Sending initial ORF token Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] CLM CONFIGURATION CHANGE Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] New Configuration: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.49) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Left: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Joined: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] CLM CONFIGURATION CHANGE Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] New Configuration: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.49) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.51) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Left: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] Members Joined: Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] #011r(0) ip(192.168.1.51) Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [SYNC ] This node is within the primary component and will provide service. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [TOTEM] entering OPERATIONAL state. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [MAIN ] Node chb_sfe2a not joined to cman because it has existing state Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] got nodejoin message 192.168.1.49 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CLM ] got nodejoin message 192.168.1.51 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CPG ] got joinlist message from node 1 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a openais[25715]: [CPG ] got joinlist message from node 2 Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Cluster is not quorate. Refusing connection. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Error while processing connect: Connection refused Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Invalid descriptor specified (-111). Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Someone may be attempting something evil. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Error while processing get: Invalid request descriptor Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Invalid descriptor specified (-21). Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Someone may be attempting something evil. Mar 22 16:40:42 hsmsc50sfe1a ccsd[25705]: Error while processing disconnect: Invalid request descriptor How could this be related to the time change procedure I performed?

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GNOME PPP doesn't connect

- by Motorhead

I am a new ubuntu user and connect to the internet using wi-fi broadband on my notebook. But I need to setup a dial-up connection through my phone which can keep me online while I travel. I have tried connecting to dial-up using pppconfig, wvdial and gnome-ppp. I do not know whether they use the same files for connecting but I have only been able to connect using Gnome-ppp. But the connection is intermittent and disconnects every five seconds or so. The exit code is 16 which I checked in man and got to know that the modem hangs itself up. I am connecting my phone to ubuntu as a usb modem. And as I am new I might have skipped a step or two. Please suggest a solution or an alternative to this. I have put down the Gnome-ppp log. Thanks. --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.61 --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!}$} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*urW}'}"}(}"mX~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:55:55 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2459 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:01 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 5 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!Q} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*u69}'}"}(}"#W~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:56:07 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2470 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:09 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 10 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATM1L3DT*99***1# --> Waiting for carrier. ATM1L3DT*99***1# CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt. ~[7f]}#@!}!@} }=}!}$}%\}"}&} } } } }#}%B#}%}%}&}*uvM}'}"}(}"p}$~ --> PPP negotiation detected. --> Starting pppd at Sat Apr 28 21:56:20 2012 --> Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied --> --> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky. --> Pid of pppd: 2481 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> pppd: xu! --> Disconnecting at Sat Apr 28 21:56:25 2012 --> The PPP daemon has died: A modem hung up the phone (exit code = 16) --> man pppd explains pppd error codes in more detail. --> Try again and look into /var/log/messages and the wvdial and pppd man pages for more information. --> Auto Reconnect will be attempted in 20 seconds --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Modem initialized.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 15, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 15, 2012Popular ReleasesMVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.6: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. Added features to the Membership provider, a "lock out" feature to help fight brute force hacking of accounts. After a set number of log in attempts, the account is locked for a set time. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!Home Access Plus+: v8.4: This release only contains fixes for the 97576 release, you can download the v8.3 release files which aren't in this release from 97576 Changes: Fixed: Setup.aspx wrong jquery reference Fixed: Issue with loading the user's photo Changed: The JSON Urls to use a number of a date rather than a string Added: Code to hopefully, finally, fix the AD Browser not working some times File Changes: ~/bin/hap.ad.dll ~/bin/hap.web.dll ~/bin/hap.web.configuration.dll ~/bin/hap.web.livetiles.dl...OnTopReplica: Release 3.4: Update to the 3 version with major fixes and improvements. Compatible with Windows 8. Now runs (and requires) .NET Framework v.4.0. Added relative mode for region selection (allows the user to select regions as margins from the borders of the thumbnail, useful for windows which have a variable size but fixed size controls, like video players). Improved window seeking when restoring cloned thumbnail or cloning a window by title or by class. Improved settings persistence. Improved co...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.4: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Tutorials are available. Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components ...JSLint for Resharper: 0.2.4701 (Resharper 7.1): Added settings dialog. May now prioritize before Resharper JS messages JSLint settings may be set as default. (For example browser: true, indent: 2) Added support for JSLint directives in mixed language files. Upgraded to Resharper 7.1.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.5: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes Docum...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.6.1): This new version includes: - Fixes for some reported bugs. To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuAcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...SoftRenderer: SoftRenderer v0.2: SPONZA DEMO SoftRender is a CPU based renderer. It render 3D scene only on CPU. It's a project for learning purpose. SoftRender ????????，??????????。 http://i3.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=sr&DownloadId=528732 ?????????????，???compilehwshader.bat???????shader SoftRenderer.exe?vc10???????bin?? SoftRenderer_avx.exe?intel????????avx???cpu?????bin??WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.2.1: Version 1.2.1 Changes: Improved collage image distribution to overlap older images first. Set default collage background blur distance to 4 (provides a more gradual effect). Fixed issue where wallpaper not displayed on Windows Vista when Cross-Fade transitions enabled. Fixed issue with duplicated themes not updating history view correctly.????: ???? 1.0: ????Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office ??? ?????、Unicode IVS?????????????????Unicode IVS???????????????。??、??????????????、?????????????????????????????。Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.74: fix for issue #18836 - sometimes throws null-reference errors in ActivationObject.AnalyzeScope method. add back the Context object's 8-parameter constructor, since someone has code that's using it. throw a low-pri warning if an expression statement is == or ===; warn that the developer may have meant an assignment (=). if window.XXXX or window"XXXX" is encountered, add XXXX (as long as it's a valid JavaScript identifier) to the known globals so subsequent references to XXXX won't throw ...???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releasehttpclient?????????: httpclient??????? 1.0: httpclient??????? （1）?????????? （2）????????? （3）??2012-11-06??，???????。VidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadNew ProjectsCreatorRSS: CreatorRSS - A Simple Desktop tray RSS Reader This is a simple desktop RSS reader that will help in managing your feeds and get notifications. CreatorRSS is based on .NET framework 2.0 and is coded in C#. This was tested only on Windows Xp Professional Sp2 but it should work on any Windows operating systems that support .NET framework. Extensions Library: Extension Library adds several helpful extensions to your project including: - SharePoint Logging - Event Viewer Logging - Exception Handling - .Net ExtensionsHoliday Calendar: This project contains a holiday calendar user control to be used in Windows Form applications.InputSQL: C# InputSQLInstall Visual Basic 6 in Windows 8: Please see the home page.KaartenSolution: A very simple card game.MezanmiNet_TaxiReviews: just a review application on the mobile platformMSHelpMeHD: A Windows 8 Store App.ProjectSocial: This is just a project to try coding.Rabbit MQ Client for Windows Store apps: rabbitmq client support for windows apps storeRFC 822 DateTime: Parse or write a date and time formatted according to the RFC 822 specification. RxJS TypeScript difinition: TypeScript d.ts files for RxJS(ReactiveExtensions for JavaScript)Samurai Blades - Webapp: A mimic of a classic board game (Shogun) created for web using HTML5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 (including the new typescript js compiler). servicehook: testSIMS Bulk Import: SIMS .net is the most popular MIS system used by schools across the UK. This tool allows you to bulk import email addresses and information into UDF fields.SpaceFlight: This project is a browser for the SloanDigital Sky Survey Data sets that allows for unconstrained movement within the data set.Sparse matrix format converter: Convert matrix market files to CSR0, CSR1 format. SPAutoSuggestion: A JavaScript application to show auto-suggestions in SharePoint search site's text boxes like in Google.SpreadsheetLight by Vincent Tan: For the latest release of SpreadsheetLight always go to http://www.spreadsheetlight.com, Anele MbangaSSTU: SSTU - this is simple client for Russian "Saratov State Technical University" web-site.Username generator library: Helps generate usernamesVideoStream: First attempt at a Windows Store Style App, aims to make it easy to browse videos from links provided in social media streams.WP8 Async WebClient: Provides async/await (TPL) capability to WebClient within Windows Phone 8wsccprototype: this is a prototype of what the main website will look like. Every other customization will be made in time.wsubi: A spiced-up way to manage scripts. This is a Windows port of the the 'sub' project from 37signals (https://github.com/37signals/sub).??C#????????: ?????????????ROYcms?????????！ 1.?????????，?????? 2.????????，?????????? 3.?????，?????，????????????????,??????????? 4.???????????，????

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Reading OpenDocument spreadsheets using C#

- by DigiMortal

Excel with its file formats is not the only spreadsheet application that is widely used. There are also users on Linux and Macs and often they are using OpenOffice and other open-source office packages that use ODF instead of OpenXML. In this post I will show you how to read Open Document spreadsheet in C#. Importer as example My previous post about importers showed you how to build flexible importers support to your web application. This post introduces you practical example of one of my importers. Of course, sensitive code is omitted. We start with ODS importer class and we add new methods as we go. public class OdsImporter : ImporterBase { public OdsImporter() { } public override string[] SupportedFileExtensions { get { return new[] { "ods" }; } } public override ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, long companyId, short year) { string contentXml = GetContentXml(fileStream); var result = new ImportResult(); var doc = XDocument.Parse(contentXml); var rows = doc.Descendants("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-row").Skip(1); foreach (var row in rows) { ImportRow(row, companyId, year, result); } return result; } } The class given here just extends base class for importers (previous post uses interface but as I already told there you move to abstract base class when writing code for real projects). Import method reads data from *.ods file, parses it (it is XML), finds all data rows and imports data. As you may see then first row is skipped. This is because the first row on my sheet is always headers row. Reading ODS file Our import method starts with getting XML from *.ods file. ODS files like OpenXml files are zipped containers that contain different files. We need content.xml as all data is kept there. To get the contents of file we use SharpZipLib library to read uploaded file as *.zip file. private static string GetContentXml(Stream fileStream) { var contentXml = ""; using (var zipInputStream = new ZipInputStream(fileStream)) { ZipEntry contentEntry = null; while ((contentEntry = zipInputStream.GetNextEntry()) != null) { if (!contentEntry.IsFile) continue; if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() == "content.xml") break; } if (contentEntry.Name.ToLower() != "content.xml") { throw new Exception("Cannot find content.xml"); } var bytesResult = new byte[] { }; var bytes = new byte[2000]; var i = 0; while ((i = zipInputStream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length)) != 0) { var arrayLength = bytesResult.Length; Array.Resize<byte>(ref bytesResult, arrayLength + i); Array.Copy(bytes, 0, bytesResult, arrayLength, i); } contentXml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytesResult); } return contentXml; } If here is content.xml file then we stop browsing the file. We read this file to memory and return it as UTF-8 format string. Importing rows Our last task is to import rows. We use special method for this as we have to handle some tricks here. To keep files smaller the cell count on row is not always the same. If we have more than one empty cell one after another then ODS keeps only one cell for sequential empty cells. This cell has attribute called number-columns-repeated and it’s value is set to the number of sequential empty cells. This is why we use two indexers for cells collection. private void ImportRow(XElement row, ImportResult result) { var cells = (from c in row.Descendants() where c.Name == "{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}table-cell" select c).ToList(); var dto = new DataDto(); var count = cells.Count; var j = -1; for (var i = 0; i < count; i++) { j++; var cell = cells[i]; var attr = cell.Attribute("{urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:table:1.0}number-columns-repeated"); if (attr != null) { var numToSkip = 0; if (int.TryParse(attr.Value, out numToSkip)) { j += numToSkip - 1; } } if (i > 30) break; if (j == 0) { dto.SomeProperty = cells[i].Value; } if (j == 1) { dto.SomeOtherProperty = cells[i].Value; } // some more data reading } // save data } You can define your own class for import results and add there all problems found during data import. Your application gets the results and shows them to user. Conclusion Reading ODS files may seem to complex task but actually it is very easy if we need only data from those documents. We can use some zip-library to get the content file and then parse it to XML. It is not hard to go through the XML but there are some optimization tricks we have to know. The code here is safe to use in web applications as it is not using any API-s that may have special needs to server and infrastructure.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 26, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, August 26, 2012Popular ReleasesPhysics Helper XAML: Physics Helper XAML 1.1.0.0: This release supports creation of 2D Physics apps for Windows 8 RTM, Windows Phone 7.1 development, and Silverlight 5. It includes source code and samples in three separate solutions.TouchInjector: TouchInjector 1.0: Version 1.0BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.1: 2012.08.25 Ver5.7.1 (1)?????·?????LING?????????????? (2)SMTP???（????）????、?????\?????????????????????Peulot Heshbon: Peulot Heshbon version 3.0.0: Available quizzes:Plus for Natural, Real and fragments Minus for Natural, Real and fragments Multiplication for Natural, Real and fragments Divide for Natural, Real and fragments Random for Natural, Real and fragments Compare 2 percentages Compare 2 fragments (Just for easy difficulty) Check if a number can be divided with another number exactly. Available Languages:Hebrew English Russian What's NewAdded new quiz: Compare 2 fragments. It is available only if you are in Eas...Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - Visual Studio 2012: Welcome to the Branching and Merging Guide Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording team All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs Spelling, grammar and content revisions are in progress. Hotfix will be published.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.62: Fix for issue #18525 - escaped characters in CSS identifiers get double-escaped if the character immediately after the backslash is not normally allowed in an identifier. fixed symbol problem with nuget package. 4.62 should have nuget symbols available again.nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.65: As some of you may know we were planning to release version 2.70 much later (the end of September). But today we have to release this intermediate version (2.65). It fixes a critical issue caused by a third-party assembly when running nopCommerce on a server with .NET 4.5 installed. No major features have been introduced with this release as our development efforts were focused on further enhancements and fixing bugs. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes p...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.2.9: . Fix: Some missing changes for fixing the window subclassing crash. · Fix: fixed bug when Run MyRouter at the first Time. · Fix: Log File · Fix: improve performance speed application · fix: solve some Exception.eel Browser: eel 1.1.0.41 beta: Improved UI New features Bug fixesDynamics CRM 2011 Dummy Entity: First Release: This has been tested on CRM 2011 RU8 On-Premise IFD. Known Issue: The Test Dummy CRM page load event may throw an exception loading the first time as the iframe may not have finished loading. I have not been able to get the iframe OnReadyStateChange event to fire. But it is only a sample anyway. The zip file contains: Dummy Entity Visual studio solution. Test Dummy Visual Studio solution. Dummy Entity CRM Solution Test Dummy CRM Solution Installation: Unzip and import the CRM Solutions...Private cloud DMS: Essential server-client full package: Requirements: - SQL server >= 2008 (minimal Express - for Essential recommended) - .NET 4.0 (Server) - .NET 4.0 Client profile (Client) This version allow: - full file system functionality Restrictions: - Maximum 2 parallel users - No share spaces - No hosted business groups - No digital sign functionality - No ActiveDirectory connector - No Performance cache - No workflow - No messagingJavaScript Prototype Extensions: Release 1.1.0.0: Release 1.1.0.0 Add prototype extension for object. Add prototype extension for array.Glyphx: Version 1.2: This release includes the SdlDotNet.dll dependency in the setup, which you will need.TFS Project Test Migrator: TestPlanMigration v1.0.0: Release 1.0.0 This first version do not create the test cases in the target project because the goal was to restore a Test Plan + Test Suite hierarchy after a manual user deletion without restoring all the Project Collection Database. As I discovered, deleting a Test Plan will do the following : - Delete all TestSuiteEntry (the link between a Test Suite node and a Test Case) - Delete all TestSuite (the nodes in the test hierarchy), including root TestSuite - Delete the TestPlan Test c...ERPStore eCommerce FrontOffice: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM: ERPStore.Core V4.0.0.2 MVC4 RTM (Code Source)ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.8.0.0: sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved API, direct support for multiple barcode decoding, wrapper for barcode generating many other improvements and fixes encoder and decoder command line clients demo client for emguCV dev documentation startedScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5.1: This release has been built from the 2.5 branch. Issues closed: Issue # Title 32524 32524 32550 32550 32552 32552 25148 25148 32449 32449 32551 32551 32711 32711 MFCMAPI: August 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1035 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeDocument.Editor: 2013.2: Whats new for Document.Editor 2013.2: New save as Html document Improved Traslate support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsPulse: Pulse Beta 5: Whats new in this release? Well to start with we now have Wallbase.cc Authentication! so you can access favorites or NSFW. This version requires .NET 4.0, you probably already have it, but if you don't it's a free and easy download from Microsoft. Pulse can bet set to start on Windows startup now too. The Wallpaper setter has settings now, so you can change the background color of the desktop and the Picture Position (Tile/Center/Fill/etc...) I've switched to Windows Forms instead of WPF...New Projects508 Compliance Validator: This tool checks aspx and ascx pages against 508 Accessibilty guidelines and also allows you to add your own rules.BF for WP: BF for WP is a visual Brainfuck interpter for Windows Phone.Climate Control: App lets you vote on whether you're too hot or too cold so the dummy next to the air con controls can adjust the thermostat.Custom Captcha Plugin for Kooboo CMS for adding content or sending feedback: Custom Captcha Plugin for Kooboo CMS for adding content or sending feedbackGalleryDownloader: This project takes aim on downloading free photogalleries through the Internet. Highly Maintainable Web Services: The Highly Maintainable Web Services project is a reference architecture application for .NET that demonstrates how to build highly maintainable web services.Its.Validation: A C# DSL for writing rules in a composable, functional style.Kaku by wifi: The projects purpose: Make your phone a part of your house hold by being able to control certail elektric devices with your phone such as, light, electric curtaLogin with Google in ASP.Net MVC3 & Get data from Google User: ASP.Net developer can use this code: asp.net mvc3 web project which contains login with google and pull data from user's google accountMabiCommerce: MabiCommerce is an advanced Commerce Calculator for the MMORPG Mabinogi.Mapture the FLAG: A location based game for wp7mn: sumSharePoint 2010: SharePoint 2010 utilitiesSHIORI.NET: ???SHIORI????????????????????Temp and Stress: Tieni sotto controllo le temperature della tua CPU e effettua Stress Test e Benchmark!VisiblityControl – An Alternative to Converters: A templated content control hosting to remove the pain of using the BooleanToVisibilityConverter. The property IsTrue determines what is shown.Whatsnexx Integration for Orchard CMS: Orchard Whatsnexx makes it easier for Orchard users to send an event to the Whatsnexx Ticket Bus service API, of the Whatsnexx GatewayWINRT \ Metro Store \ open marketing solution: This project is aimed at creating a public shopping cart, that is available to all windows 8 users free. products are screened added by administrators

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Help me upgrade my pf.conf for OpenBSD 4.7

- by polemon

I'm planning on upgrading my OpenBSD to 4.7 (from 4.6) and as you may or may not know, they changed the syntax for pf.conf. This is the relevant portion from the upgrade guide: pf(4) NAT syntax change As described in more detail in this mailing list post, PF's separate nat/rdr/binat (translation) rules have been replaced with actions on regular match/filter rules. Simple rulesets may be converted like this: nat on $ext_if from 10/8 -> ($ext_if) rdr on $ext_if to ($ext_if) -> 1.2.3.4 becomes match out on $ext_if from 10/8 nat-to ($ext_if) match in on $ext_if to ($ext_if) rdr-to 1.2.3.4 and... binat on $ext_if from $web_serv_int to any -> $web_serv_ext becomes match on $ext_if from $web_serv_int to any binat-to $web_serv_ext nat-anchor and/or rdr-anchor lines, e.g. for relayd(8), ftp-proxy(8) and tftp-proxy(8), are no longer used and should be removed from pf.conf(5), leaving only the anchor lines. Translation rules relating to these and spamd(8) will need to be adjusted as appropriate. N.B.: Previously, translation rules had "stop at first match" behaviour, with binat being evaluated first, followed by nat/rdr depending on direction of the packet. Now the filter rules are subject to the usual "last match" behaviour, so care must be taken with rule ordering when converting. pf(4) route-to/reply-to syntax change The route-to, reply-to, dup-to and fastroute options in pf.conf move to filteropts; pass in on $ext_if route-to (em1 192.168.1.1) from 10.1.1.1 pass in on $ext_if reply-to (em1 192.168.1.1) to 10.1.1.1 becomes pass in on $ext_if from 10.1.1.1 route-to (em1 192.168.1.1) pass in on $ext_if to 10.1.1.1 reply-to (em1 192.168.1.1) Now, this is my current pf.conf: # $OpenBSD: pf.conf,v 1.38 2009/02/23 01:18:36 deraadt Exp $ # # See pf.conf(5) for syntax and examples; this sample ruleset uses # require-order to permit mixing of NAT/RDR and filter rules. # Remember to set net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 and/or net.inet6.ip6.forwarding=1 # in /etc/sysctl.conf if packets are to be forwarded between interfaces. ext_if="pppoe0" int_if="nfe0" int_net="192.168.0.0/24" polemon="192.168.0.10" poletopw="192.168.0.12" segatop="192.168.0.20" table <leechers> persist set loginterface $ext_if set skip on lo match on $ext_if all scrub (no-df max-mss 1440) altq on $ext_if priq bandwidth 950Kb queue {q_pri, q_hi, q_std, q_low} queue q_pri priority 15 queue q_hi priority 10 queue q_std priority 7 priq(default) queue q_low priority 0 nat-anchor "ftp-proxy/*" rdr-anchor "ftp-proxy/*" nat on $ext_if from !($ext_if) -> ($ext_if) rdr pass on $int_if proto tcp to port ftp -> 127.0.0.1 port 8021 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 2080 -> $segatop port 80 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 2022 -> $segatop port 22 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 4000 -> $polemon port 4000 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 6600 -> $polemon port 6600 anchor "ftp-proxy/*" block pass on $int_if queue(q_hi, q_pri) pass out on $ext_if queue(q_std, q_pri) pass out on $ext_if proto icmp queue q_pri pass out on $ext_if proto {tcp, udp} to any port ssh queue(q_hi, q_pri) pass out on $ext_if proto {tcp, udp} to any port http queue(q_std, q_pri) #pass out on $ext_if proto {tcp, udp} all queue(q_low, q_hi) pass out on $ext_if proto {tcp, udp} from <leechers> queue(q_low, q_std) pass in on $ext_if proto tcp to ($ext_if) port ident queue(q_hi, q_pri) pass in on $ext_if proto tcp to ($ext_if) port ssh queue(q_hi, q_pri) pass in on $ext_if proto tcp to ($ext_if) port http queue(q_hi, q_pri) pass in on $ext_if inet proto icmp all icmp-type echoreq queue q_pri If someone has experience with porting the 4.6 pf.conf to 4.7, please help me do the correct changes. OK, this is how far I've got: I commented out nat-anchor and rdr-anchor, as describted in the guide: #nat-anchor "ftp-proxy/*" #rdr-anchor "ftp-proxy/*" And this is how I've "converted" the rdr rules: #nat on $ext_if from !($ext_if) -> ($ext_if) match out on $ext_if from !($ext_if) nat-to ($ext_if) #rdr pass on $int_if proto tcp to port ftp -> 127.0.0.1 port 8021 match in on $int_if proto tcp to port ftp rdr-to 127.0.0.1 port 8021 #rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 2080 -> $segatop port 80 match in on $ext_if proto tcp tp port 2080 rdr-to $segatop port 80 #rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 2022 -> $segatop port 22 match in on $ext_if proto tcp tp port 2022 rdr-to $segatop port 22 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 4000 -> $polemon port 4000 match in on $ext_if proto tcp tp port 4000 rdr-to $polemon port 4000 rdr pass on $ext_if proto tcp to port 6600 -> $polemon port 6600 match in on $ext_if proto tcp tp port 6600 rdr-to $polemon port 6600 Did I miss anything? Is the anchor for ftp-proxy OK as it is now? Do I need to change something in the other pass in on... lines?

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WCF timeouts are a nightmare

- by Greg

We have a bunch of WCF services that work almost all of the time, using various bindings, ports, max sizes, etc. The super-frustrating thing about WCF is that when it (rarely) fails, we are powerless to find out why it failed. Sometimes you will get a message that looks like this: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local socket timeout was '01:00:00'. --- System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. The problem is that the local socket timeout it's giving you is merely an attempt to be convenient. It may or may not be the cause of the problem. But OK, sometimes networks have issues. No big deal. We can retry or something. But here's the huge problem. On top of failing to tell you which precisely which timeout (if any) resulted in the failure ("your server-side receive timeout was exceeded," or something, would be helpful), WCF seems to have two types of timeouts. Timeout Type #1) A timeout, that, if increased, would increase the chance of your operation's success. So, the pertinent timeout is an hour, you are uploading a huge file that will take an hour and twenty minutes. It fails. You increase the timeout, it succeeds. I have no no problem with this type of timeout. Timeout Type #2) A timeout which merely defines how long you have to wait for the service to actually fail and give you an error, but modifying the value of this timeout has no impact on the chance of success. Basically, something happens during the first second of the service request which mucks things up. It will never recover. WCF doesn't magically retry the network connection for you. Fine, sometimes establishing a network connection doesn't go well. But, if your timeout is 2 hours, you have to wait 2 whole hours with no chance of it ever working before it finally acknowledges that it didn't work and gives you the error. But the error you see in both cases looks the same. With timeout Type #2, it still looks like you are running into a timeout. But, you could increase all of your timeouts to 4 years, and all it would do is make it take 4 years to get an error message. I know that Type #2 exists because I can do an operation that is known to complete in less than a minute when successful, and have it take 2 hours to fail. But, if I kill it and retry, it succeeds quickly. (If you are wondering why there might be a 2 hour timeout on an operation that takes less than a minute, there are times I run the operation with a much larger file and it could take over an hour.) So, to combat the problem with Type #2, you'd want your timeout to be really quick so you immediately know if there is a problem. Then you can retry. But the insurmountable problem is that because I don't know which timeouts are the cause of failure, I don't know what timeouts are Type #1 and which ones are Type #2. There may be one timeout (let's say the client-side send timeout) that acts like Type #1 in some cases and Type #2 in others. I have no idea, and I have no way of finding out. Does anyone know how to track down Type #2 timeouts so I can set them to low values without having to shorten actual (read: Type #1) timeouts and lower the chance of success? Thank you.

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error LNK2019 for ZLib sample compare.

- by Nano HE

Hello. I created win32 console application in vs2010 (without select the option of precompiled header). And I inserted the code below. but *.obj link failed. Could you provide me more information about the error. I searched MSDN, but still can't understand it. #include <stdio.h> #include "zlib.h" // Demonstration of zlib utility functions unsigned long file_size(char *filename) { FILE *pFile = fopen(filename, "rb"); fseek (pFile, 0, SEEK_END); unsigned long size = ftell(pFile); fclose (pFile); return size; } int decompress_one_file(char *infilename, char *outfilename) { gzFile infile = gzopen(infilename, "rb"); FILE *outfile = fopen(outfilename, "wb"); if (!infile || !outfile) return -1; char buffer[128]; int num_read = 0; while ((num_read = gzread(infile, buffer, sizeof(buffer))) > 0) { fwrite(buffer, 1, num_read, outfile); } gzclose(infile); fclose(outfile); } int compress_one_file(char *infilename, char *outfilename) { FILE *infile = fopen(infilename, "rb"); gzFile outfile = gzopen(outfilename, "wb"); if (!infile || !outfile) return -1; char inbuffer[128]; int num_read = 0; unsigned long total_read = 0, total_wrote = 0; while ((num_read = fread(inbuffer, 1, sizeof(inbuffer), infile)) > 0) { total_read += num_read; gzwrite(outfile, inbuffer, num_read); } fclose(infile); gzclose(outfile); printf("Read %ld bytes, Wrote %ld bytes, Compression factor %4.2f%%\n", total_read, file_size(outfilename), (1.0-file_size(outfilename)*1.0/total_read)*100.0); } int main(int argc, char **argv) { compress_one_file(argv[1],argv[2]); decompress_one_file(argv[2],argv[3]);} Output: 1>------ Build started: Project: zlibApp, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ 1> zlibApp.cpp 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(15): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(25): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(40): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(36): warning C4715: 'decompress_one_file' : not all control paths return a value 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(57): warning C4715: 'compress_one_file' : not all control paths return a value 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzclose referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzread referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzopen referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzwrite referenced in function "int __cdecl compress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?compress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>D:\learning\cpp\cppVS2010\zlibApp\Debug\zlibApp.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 4 unresolved externals ========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

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How to get IMediaControl.Run() to start a file playing with no delay

- by MusiGenesis

I am attempting to use DirectShow to play two AVI files consecutively (one after the other) so that there is no interruption in the audio or video when the player transitions from one file to the next. I have two custom controls on my form. Each one is pre-loaded with an AVI file, and before playback begins I set up all the DirectShow interfaces, set the video windows and resize them, call IMediaControl.Run(), then IMediaControl.Pause(), then IMediaSeeking.SetPositions to reset to frame 0, on both controls. On the form, you can see that both files are paused at their initial frames. I then call IMediaControl.Run() on the first control, and wait for it to complete before calling Run() on the second control. Initially, I hooked into the first video's EC_COMPLETE notification message, and used this to start the second. Thinking that this event might be slow to arrive (turns out it is, but for a weird reason), I tried two other approaches: Check the first video's current position inside a timer that goes off every second or so (using IMediaPosition.get_CurrentPosition). When the current position is within a second of the video's stop time (known in advance from IMediaPosition.get_StopTime), I go into a tight while loop and wait for the current position to equal the stop time, and then call Run() on the second video. Same as the first, except I replace the while loop with a call to timeSetEvent from winmm.dll, with a delay set so that it fires right when the first file is supposed to end. I use the callback to Run() the second file. Either of these two methods substantially cuts down the delay between the end of the first file and the beginning of the second, indicating that the EC_COMPLETE message doesn't arrive immediately after the file is complete (I also tried hooking the EC_SEGMENT_COMPLETE message, which is supposed to be used for looping within a file, but apparently nobody supports this - it never occurs on my machine, at least). Doing all of the above has cut the transition delay from as much as a second, down to a barely perceptible glitch; about a third of the time the files transition with no interruption at all, which suggests there's no fundamental reason I can't get this to work all the time. The slight delay is still unacceptable, unfortunately. I assume (and I could easily be wrong) that the remaining delay is due to a slight variable delay between the call to IMediaControl.Run() and when the video actually starts playing. Does anybody know anything I can do to eliminate this little lag? It would also help to be told this is fundamentally impossible for whatever reason, which wouldn't surprise me. I've never encountered a video player in Windows that doesn't have this problem, so it may not be doable. More info: the AVI files I'm playing are completely uncompressed (video and audio are uncompressed), so I don't think the lag is due to DirectShow's having to uncompress the video ahead of play start, although it may still buffer ahead as matter of course (and this may be the source of the problem). I would have though that starting play, pausing and then rewinding to the beginning would fix this. Also, the way I'm handling the transition is to actually have the second control underneath the first; when the first completes playing, I start the second and then call BringToFront on it, creating the appearance of a single video transitioning between the two originals. I don't think the glitch is due to this, because it works perfectly some of the time, and even if this were problematic, it wouldn't explain the matching audio glitch. Even more: I just tried starting the second video 30-50 milliseconds "early" and that seemed to eliminate even more of the gap, so I'm guessing that the lag in Run() is about that long. It appears to be variable, though, so this is still not where I need it to be.

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FaceBook Login Problem

- by toman

Hi All, I am for an application which extracts information from facebook search, hence i require to login facebook. i have registered my application in facebook developers site and have got api key and secret key. in my code i am getting an exception when i am trying to login. Here is my code for login to facebook: import com.facebook.api.FacebookRestClient; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpState; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.NameValuePair; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod; import org.apache.commons.httpclient.params.HttpClientParams; public class FaceLogin { public FaceLogin(){ getUserID("username", "password"); } private static void getUserID(String email, String password) { String session = null; try { HttpClient http = new HttpClient(); http.setParams(new HttpClientParams()); //http.getHostConfiguration().setHost("http://www.facebook.com/"); http.setState(new HttpState()); String api_key = "****some key****"; String secret = "****some key****"; FacebookRestClient client = new FacebookRestClient(api_key, secret); client.setIsDesktop(true); String token = client.auth_createToken(); final String loginId = "http://www.facebook.com/login.php"; GetMethod get = new GetMethod(loginId + "?api_key=" + api_key + "&v=1.0&auth_token=" +token); System.out.println("Get="+get); http.executeMethod(get); PostMethod post = new PostMethod(loginId); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("api_key", api_key)); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("v", "1.0")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("auth_token", token)); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("fbconnect","true")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("return_session","true")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("session_key_only","true")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("req_perms","read_stream,publish_stream")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("lsd","8HYdi")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("locale","en_US")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("persistent","1")); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("email", email)); post.addParameter(new NameValuePair("pass", password)); System.out.println("Token ="+token); int postStatus = http.executeMethod(post); System.out.println("Response : " + postStatus); session = client.auth_getSession(token); // Here I am getting error System.out.println("Session string: " + session); long userid = client.users_getLoggedInUser(); System.out.println("User Id is : " + userid); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } public static void main(String k[]) { FaceLogin facebookLoginObj=new FaceLogin(); } } I am getting the following exception: org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase processResponseHeaders WARNING: Cookie rejected: "$Version=0; $Domain=deleted; $Path=/; $Domain=.facebook.com". Cookie name may not start with $ Response : 200 Jun 8, 2010 2:07:36 PM org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase processResponseHeaders WARNING: Cookie rejected: "$Version=0; $Path=deleted; $Path=/; $Domain=.facebook.com". Cookie name may not start with $ Facebook returns error code 100 com.facebook.api.FacebookException: Invalid parameter - v - 1.0 at com.facebook.api.FacebookRestClient.callMethod(FacebookRestClient.java:828) - auth_token - 004e90dc8818d5f0921d1065d24508d3 at com.facebook.api.FacebookRestClient.callMethod(FacebookRestClient.java:606) - method - facebook.auth.getSession - call_id - 1275986256796 - api_key - f7cb1e48c383ef599da9021fc4dec322 at com.facebook.api.FacebookRestClient.auth_getSession(FacebookRestClient.java:1891) at facebookcrawler.FacebookLogin.getUserID(FacebookLogin.java:81) at facebookcrawler.FacebookLogin.( - sig - 9344ec75b74a0a87bcae645046d45da8 FacebookLogin.java:24) at facebookcrawler.FaceLogin.main(FaceLogin.java:80) Here may be the problem is for creating session, i searched for all the solutions on net but could not helped me to get login. Please help me if you can suggest me some way to resolve this problem. i thanks to all your valuable suggestion.

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File Fix-it codegolf (GCJ 2010 1B-A)

- by KirarinSnow

Last year (2009), the Google Code Jam featured an interesting problem as the first problem in Round 1B: Decision Tree As the problem seemed tailored for Lisp-like languages, we spontaneously had an exciting codegolf here on SO, in which a few languages managed to solve the problem in fewer characters than any Lisp variety, using quite a number of different techniques. This year's Round 1B Problem A (File Fix-it) also seems tailored for a particular family of languages, Unix shell scripts. So continuing the "1B-A tradition" would be appropriate. :p But which language will end up with the shortest code? Let us codegolf and see! Problem description (adapted from official page): You are given T test cases. Each test case contains N lines that list the full path of all directories currently existing on your computer. For example: /home/awesome /home/awesome/wheeeeeee /home/awesome/wheeeeeee/codegolfrocks /home/thecakeisalie Next, you are given M lines that list the full path of directories you would like to create. They are in the same format as the previous examples. You can create a directory using the mkdir command, but you can only do so if the parent directory already exists. For example, to create the directories /pyonpyon/fumufumu/yeahyeah and /pyonpyon/fumufumu/yeahyeahyeah, you would need to use mkdir four times: mkdir /pyonpyon mkdir /pyonpyon/fumufumu mkdir /pyonpyon/fumufumu/yeahyeah mkdir /pyonpyon/fumufumu/yeahyeahyeah For each test case, return the number of times you have to call mkdir to create all the directories you would like to create. Input Input consists of a text file whose first line contains the integer T, the number of test cases. The rest of the file contains the test cases. Each test case begins with a line containing the integers N and M, separated by a space. The next N lines contain the path of each directory currently existing on your computer (not including the root directory /). This is a concatenation of one or more non-empty lowercase alphanumeric strings, each preceded by a single /. The following M lines contain the path of each directory you would like to create. Output For each case, print one line containing Case #X: Y, where X is the case number and Y is the solution. Limits 1 = T = 100. 0 = N = 100. 1 = M = 100. Each path contains at most 100 characters. Every path appears only once in the list of directories already on your computer, or in the list of desired directories. However, a path may appear on both lists, as in example case #3 below. If a directory is in the list of directories already on your computer, its parent directory will also be listed, with the exception of the root directory /. The input file is at most 100,000 bytes long. Example Larger sample test cases may be downloaded here. Input: 3 0 2 /home/sparkle/pyon /home/sparkle/cakes 1 3 /z /z/y /z/x /y/y 2 1 /moo /moo/wheeeee /moo Output: Case #1: 4 Case #2: 4 Case #3: 0 Code Golf Please post your shortest code in any language that solves this problem. Input and output may be handled via stdin and stdout or by other files of your choice. Please include a disclaimer if your code has the potential to modify or delete existing files when executed. Winner will be the shortest solution (by byte count) in a language with an implementation existing prior to the start of Round 1B 2010.

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A format for storing personal contacts in a database

- by Gart

I'm thinking of the best way to store personal contacts in a database for a business application. The traditional and straightforward approach would be to create a table with columns for each element, i.e. Name, Telephone Number, Job title, Address, etc... However, there are known industry standards for this kind of data, like for example vCard, or hCard, or vCard-RDF/XML or even Windows Contacts XML Schema. Utilizing an standard format would offer some benefits, like inter-operablilty with other systems. But how can I decide which method to use? The requirements are mainly to store the data. Search and ordering queries are highly unlikely but possible. The volume of the data is 100,000 records at maximum. My database engine supports native XML columns. I have been thinking to use some XML-based format to store the personal contacts. Then it will be possible to utilize XML indexes on this data, if searching and ordering is needed. Is this a good approach? Which contacts format and schema would you recommend for this? Edited after first answers Here is why I think the straightforward approach is bad. This is due to the nature of this kind of data - it is not that simple. The personal contacts it is not well-structured data, it may be called semi-structured. Each contact may have different data fields, maybe even such fields which I cannot anticipate. In my opinion, each piece of this data should be treated as important information, i.e. no piece of data could be discarded just because there was no relevant column in the database. If we took it further, assuming that no data may be lost, then we could create a big text column named Comment or Description or Other and put there everything which cannot be fitted well into table columns. But then again - the data would lose structure - this might be bad. If we wanted structured data then - according to the database design principles - the data should be decomposed into entities, and relations should be established between the entities. But this adds complexity - there are just too many entities, and lots of design desicions should be made, like "How do we store Address? Personal Name? Phone number? How do we encode home phone numbers and mobile phone numbers? How about other contact info?.." The relations between entities are complex and multiple, and each relation is a table in the database. Each relation needs to be documented in the design papers. That is a lot of work to do. But it is possible to avoid the complexity entirely - just document that the data is stored according to such and such standard schema, period. Then anybody who would be reading that document should easily understand what it was all about. Finally, this is all about using an industry standard. The standard is, hopefully, designed by some clever people who anticipated and described the structure of personal contacts information much better than I ever could. Why should we all reinvent the wheel?? It's much easier to use a standard schema. The problem is, there are just too many standards - it's not easy to decide which one to use!

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Keyboard for programming

- by exhuma

This may seem a bit a tangential topic. It's not directly related to actual code, but is important for our line of work nevertheless. Over the years, I've switched keyboards a few times. All of them had slightly different key layouts. And I'm not talking about the language/locale layout, but the physical layout! Why not the locale layout? Well, quite frankly, that's easy to change via software. I personally have a German keyboard but have it set to the UK layout. Why? It's quite hard to find different layouts in the shops where I live. Even ordering is not always easy in the shops. So that leaves me with Internet shops. But I prefer to "test" my keyboards before buying. The most notable changes are: Mangled "Home Key Block" I've seen this first on a Logitech keyboard, but it may have originated elsewhere. Shape of the "Enter" key I've seen three different cases so far: Two lines high, wider at the top Two lines high, wider at the bottom One line high Shape of the Backspace button I've seen two types so far: One "character" wide Two "characters" wide OS Keys For Macs, you have the Option and Command buttons, for Windows you have the Windows and Context Menu buttons. Cherry even produced a Linux keyboard once (unfortunately I cannot find many details except news results). I assume a dedicated Linux keyboard would sport a Compose key and had the SysRq always labelled as well (note that some standard layouts do this already). Obviously... .. all these differences entail that some keys have to be moved around the board a lot. Which means, if you are used to one and have to work on another one, you happen to hit the wrong keys quite often. As it happens, this is much more annoying for programmers as it is for people who write texts. Mainly because the keys which are moved around are special character keys, often used in programming. Often these hardware layouts depend also indirectly on where you buy the keyboards. Honestly, I haven't seen a keyboard with a one-line "Enter" key in Germany, nor Luxembourg. I may just have missed it but that's how it looks to me at least. A survey I've seen some attempts at surveys in the style "which keyboard is best for programming". But they all - in my opinion - are not using comparable sets. So I was wondering if it was possible to concoct a survey taking the above criteria into account. But ignoring key dimensions that one would be a bit overkill I guess ;) From what I can see there are the following types of physical layout: Backspace: 2-characters wide Enter: 2-Lines, wider top Backspace: 2-characters wide Enter: 1-Line Backspace: 1-character wide Enter: 2-Lines, wider bottom Then there are the other possible permutations (home-key block, os-keys), which in total makes for quite a large list of categories. Now, I wonder... Would anyone be interested in such a survey? I personally would. Because I am looking for the perfect fit for me. If yes, then I could really use the help of anyone here to propose some models to include in the survey. Once I have some models for each category (I'd say at least 3 per category) I could go ahead and write up a survey, put it on-line and let the it collect data for a while. What do you think?

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Did I find a bug in PHP's `crypt()`?

- by Nathan Long

I think I may have found a bug in PHP's crypt() function under Windows. However: I recognize that it's probably my fault. PHP is used by millions and worked on by thousands; my code is used by tens and worked on by me. (This argument is best explained on Coding Horror.) So I'm asking for help: show me my fault. I've been trying to find it for a few days now, with no luck. The setup I'm using a Windows server installation with Apache 2.2.14 (Win32) and PHP 5.3.2. My development box runs Windows XP Professional; the 'production' server (this is an intranet setup) runs Windows Storage Server 2003. The problem happens on both. I don't see anything in php.ini related to crypt(), but will happily answer questions about my config. The problem Several scripts in my PHP app occasionally hang: the page sits there on 'waiting for localhost' and never finishes. Each of these scripts uses crypt to hash a user's password before storing it in the database, or, in the case of the login page, to hash the entered password before comparing it to the version stored in the database. Since the login page is the simplest, I focused on it for testing. I repeatedly logged in, and found that it would hang maybe 4 out of 10 times. As an experiment, I changed the login page to use the plain text password and changed my password in the database to its plain text version. The page stopped hanging. I saw that PHP's latest version lists this bugfix: Fixed bug #51059 (crypt crashes when invalid salt are [sic] given). So I created a very simple test script, as follows, using the same salt given in an official example: $foo = crypt('rasmuslerdorf','r1'); echo $foo; This page, too, will hang, if I reload it like crazy. I only see it hanging in Chrome, but regardless of browser, the effect on Apache is the same. Effect on Apache When these pages hang, Apache's server-status page (which I explained here, regarding a different problem) increments the number of requests being processed and decrements the number of idle workers. The requests being processed almost all have a status of 'Sending Reply,' though sometimes for a moment they will show either 'Reading request' or 'keepalive (read).' Eventually, Apache may crash. When it does, the Windows crash report looks like this: szAppName: httpd.exe szAppVer: 2.2.14.0 szModName: php5ts.dll szModVer: 5.3.1.0 // OK, this report was before I upgraded to PHP 5.3.2, // but that didn't fix it offset: 00a2615 Is it my fault? I'm tempted to file a bug report to PHP on this. The argument against it is, as stated above, that bugs are nearly always my fault. However, my argument in favor of 'it's PHP's fault' is: I'm using Windows, whereas most servers use Linux (I don't get to choose this), so the chances are greater that I've found an edge case There was recently a bug with crypt(), so maybe it still has issues I have made the simplest test case I can, and I still have the problem Can anyone duplicate this? Can you suggest where I've gone wrong? Should I file the bug after all? Thanks in advance for any help you may give.

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error LNK2019 for ZLib sample code compiling.

- by Nano HE

Hello. I created win32 console application in vs2010 (without select the option of precompiled header). And I inserted the code below. but *.obj link failed. Could you provide me more information about the error. I searched MSDN, but still can't understand it. #include <stdio.h> #include "zlib.h" // Demonstration of zlib utility functions unsigned long file_size(char *filename) { FILE *pFile = fopen(filename, "rb"); fseek (pFile, 0, SEEK_END); unsigned long size = ftell(pFile); fclose (pFile); return size; } int decompress_one_file(char *infilename, char *outfilename) { gzFile infile = gzopen(infilename, "rb"); FILE *outfile = fopen(outfilename, "wb"); if (!infile || !outfile) return -1; char buffer[128]; int num_read = 0; while ((num_read = gzread(infile, buffer, sizeof(buffer))) > 0) { fwrite(buffer, 1, num_read, outfile); } gzclose(infile); fclose(outfile); } int compress_one_file(char *infilename, char *outfilename) { FILE *infile = fopen(infilename, "rb"); gzFile outfile = gzopen(outfilename, "wb"); if (!infile || !outfile) return -1; char inbuffer[128]; int num_read = 0; unsigned long total_read = 0, total_wrote = 0; while ((num_read = fread(inbuffer, 1, sizeof(inbuffer), infile)) > 0) { total_read += num_read; gzwrite(outfile, inbuffer, num_read); } fclose(infile); gzclose(outfile); printf("Read %ld bytes, Wrote %ld bytes, Compression factor %4.2f%%\n", total_read, file_size(outfilename), (1.0-file_size(outfilename)*1.0/total_read)*100.0); } int main(int argc, char **argv) { compress_one_file(argv[1],argv[2]); decompress_one_file(argv[2],argv[3]);} Output: 1>------ Build started: Project: zlibApp, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ 1> zlibApp.cpp 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(15): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(25): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(40): warning C4996: 'fopen': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details. 1> c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 10.0\vc\include\stdio.h(234) : see declaration of 'fopen' 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(36): warning C4715: 'decompress_one_file' : not all control paths return a value 1>d:\learning\cpp\cppvs2010\zlibapp\zlibapp\zlibapp.cpp(57): warning C4715: 'compress_one_file' : not all control paths return a value 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzclose referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzread referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzopen referenced in function "int __cdecl decompress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?decompress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>zlibApp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gzwrite referenced in function "int __cdecl compress_one_file(char *,char *)" (?compress_one_file@@YAHPAD0@Z) 1>D:\learning\cpp\cppVS2010\zlibApp\Debug\zlibApp.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 4 unresolved externals ========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

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Intrinsics program (SSE) - g++ - help needed

- by Sriram

Hi all, This is the first time I am posting a question on stackoverflow, so please try and overlook any errors I may have made in formatting my question/code. But please do point the same out to me so I may be more careful. I was trying to write some simple intrinsics routines for the addition of two 128-bit (containing 4 float variables) numbers. I found some code on the net and was trying to get it to run on my system. The code is as follows: //this is a sample Intrinsics program to add two vectors. #include <iostream> #include <iomanip> #include <xmmintrin.h> #include <stdio.h> using namespace std; struct vector4 { float x, y, z, w; }; //functions to operate on them. vector4 set_vector(float x, float y, float z, float w = 0) { vector4 temp; temp.x = x; temp.y = y; temp.z = z; temp.w = w; return temp; } void print_vector(const vector4& v) { cout << " This is the contents of vector: " << endl; cout << " > vector.x = " << v.x << endl; cout << " vector.y = " << v.y << endl; cout << " vector.z = " << v.z << endl; cout << " vector.w = " << v.w << endl; } vector4 sse_vector4_add(const vector4&a, const vector4& b) { vector4 result; asm volatile ( "movl $a, %eax" //move operands into registers. "\n\tmovl $b, %ebx" "\n\tmovups (%eax), xmm0" //move register contents into SSE registers. "\n\tmovups (%ebx), xmm1" "\n\taddps xmm0, xmm1" //add the elements. addps operates on single-precision vectors. "\n\t movups xmm0, result" //move result into vector4 type data. ); return result; } int main() { vector4 a, b, result; a = set_vector(1.1, 2.1, 3.2, 4.5); b = set_vector(2.2, 4.2, 5.6); result = sse_vector4_add(a, b); print_vector(a); print_vector(b); print_vector(result); return 0; } The g++ parameters I use are: g++ -Wall -pedantic -g -march=i386 -msse intrinsics_SSE_example.C -o h The errors I get are as follows: intrinsics_SSE_example.C: Assembler messages: intrinsics_SSE_example.C:45: Error: too many memory references for movups intrinsics_SSE_example.C:46: Error: too many memory references for movups intrinsics_SSE_example.C:47: Error: too many memory references for addps intrinsics_SSE_example.C:48: Error: too many memory references for movups I have spent a lot of time on trying to debug these errors, googled them and so on. I am a complete noob to Intrinsics and so may have overlooked some important things. Any help is appreciated, Thanks, Sriram.

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How to design a C / C++ library to be usable in many client languages?

- by Brian Schimmel

I'm planning to code a library that should be usable by a large number of people in on a wide spectrum of platforms. What do I have to consider to design it right? To make this questions more specific, there are four "subquestions" at the end. Choice of language Considering all the known requirements and details, I concluded that a library written in C or C++ was the way to go. I think the primary usage of my library will be in programs written in C, C++ and Java SE, but I can also think of reasons to use it from Java ME, PHP, .NET, Objective C, Python, Ruby, bash scrips, etc... Maybe I cannot target all of them, but if it's possible, I'll do it. Requirements It would be to much to describe the full purpose of my library here, but there are some aspects that might be important to this question: The library itself will start out small, but definitely will grow to enormous complexity, so it is not an option to maintain several versions in parallel. Most of the complexity will be hidden inside the library, though The library will construct an object graph that is used heavily inside. Some clients of the library will only be interested in specific attributes of specific objects, while other clients must traverse the object graph in some way Clients may change the objects, and the library must be notified thereof The library may change the objects, and the client must be notified thereof, if it already has a handle to that object The library must be multi-threaded, because it will maintain network connections to several other hosts While some requests to the library may be handled synchronously, many of them will take too long and must be processed in the background, and notify the client on success (or failure) Of course, answers are welcome no matter if they address my specific requirements, or if they answer the question in a general way that matters to a wider audience! My assumptions, so far So here are some of my assumptions and conclusions, which I gathered in the past months: Internally I can use whatever I want, e.g. C++ with operator overloading, multiple inheritance, template meta programming... as long as there is a portable compiler which handles it (think of gcc / g++) But my interface has to be a clean C interface that does not involve name mangling Also, I think my interface should only consist of functions, with basic/primitive data types (and maybe pointers) passed as parameters and return values If I use pointers, I think I should only use them to pass them back to the library, not to operate directly on the referenced memory For usage in a C++ application, I might also offer an object oriented interface (Which is also prone to name mangling, so the App must either use the same compiler, or include the library in source form) Is this also true for usage in C# ? For usage in Java SE / Java EE, the Java native interface (JNI) applies. I have some basic knowledge about it, but I should definitely double check it. Not all client languages handle multithreading well, so there should be a single thread talking to the client For usage on Java ME, there is no such thing as JNI, but I might go with Nested VM For usage in Bash scripts, there must be an executable with a command line interface For the other client languages, I have no idea For most client languages, it would be nice to have kind of an adapter interface written in that language. I think there are tools to automatically generate this for Java and some others For object oriented languages, it might be possible to create an object oriented adapter which hides the fact that the interface to the library is function based - but I don't know if its worth the effort Possible subquestions is this possible with manageable effort, or is it just too much portability? are there any good books / websites about this kind of design criteria? are any of my assumptions wrong? which open source libraries are worth studying to learn from their design / interface / souce? meta: This question is rather long, do you see any way to split it into several smaller ones? (If you reply to this, do it as a comment, not as an answer)

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