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• Regression testing with Selenium GRID

  - by Ben Adderson

  A lot of software teams out there are tasked with supporting and maintaining systems that have grown organically over time, and the web team here at Red Gate is no exception. We're about to embark on our first significant refactoring endeavour for some time, and as such its clearly paramount that the code be tested thoroughly for regressions. Unfortunately we currently find ourselves with a codebase that isn't very testable - the three layers (database, business logic and UI) are currently tightly coupled. This leaves us with the unfortunate problem that, in order to confidently refactor the code, we need unit tests. But in order to write unit tests, we need to refactor the code :S To try and ease the initial pain of decoupling these layers, I've been looking into the idea of using UI automation to provide a sort of system-level regression test suite. The idea being that these tests can help us identify regressions whilst we work towards a more testable codebase, at which point the more traditional combination of unit and integration tests can take over. Ending up with a strong battery of UI tests is also a nice bonus :) Following on from my previous posts (here, here and here) I knew I wanted to use Selenium. I also figured that this would be a good excuse to put my xUnit [Browser] attribute to good use. Pretty quickly, I had a raft of tests that looked like the following (this particular example uses Reflector Pro). In a nut shell the test traverses our shopping cart and, for a particular combination of number of users and months of support, checks that the price calculations all come up with the correct values. [BrowserTheory] [Browser(Browsers.Firefox3_6, "http://www.red-gate.com")] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport(SeleniumProvider seleniumProvider) {     //Arrange     _browser = seleniumProvider.GetBrowser();     _browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                  //Act     _browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(_browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");     //Assert     var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);         Assert.Equal(priceResult.Price, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Tax, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Total, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } These tests are pretty concise, with much of the common code in the TraverseShoppingCart() and GetNewPurchasePrice() methods. The (inevitable) problem arose when it came to execute these tests en masse. Selenium is a very slick tool, but it can't mask the fact that UI automation is very slow. To give you an idea, the set of cases that covers all of our products, for all combinations of users and support, came to 372 tests (for now only considering purchases in dollars). In the world of automated integration tests, that's a very manageable number. For unit tests, it's a trifle. However for UI automation, those 372 tests were taking just over two hours to run. Two hours may not sound like a lot, but those cases only cover one of the three currencies we deal with, and only one of the many different ways our systems can be asked to calculate a price. It was already pretty clear at this point that in order for this approach to be viable, I was going to have to find a way to speed things up. Up to this point I had been using Selenium Remote Control to automate Firefox, as this was the approach I had used previously and it had worked well. Fortunately,  the guys at SeleniumHQ also maintain a tool for executing multiple Selenium RC tests in parallel: Selenium Grid. Selenium Grid uses a central 'hub' to handle allocation of Selenium tests to individual RCs. The Remote Controls simply register themselves with the hub when they start, and then wait to be assigned work. The (for me) really clever part is that, as far as the client driver library is concerned, the grid hub looks exactly the same as a vanilla remote control. To create a new browser session against Selenium RC, the following C# code suffices: new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.red-gate.com"); This assumes that the RC is running on the local machine, and is listening on port 4444 (the default). Assuming the hub is running on your local machine, then to create a browser session in Selenium Grid, via the hub rather than directly against the control, the code is exactly the same! Behind the scenes, the hub will take this request and hand it off to one of the registered RCs that provides the "*firefox" execution environment. It will then pass all communications back and forth between the test runner and the remote control transparently. This makes running existing RC tests on a Selenium Grid a piece of cake, as the developers intended. For a more detailed description of exactly how Selenium Grid works, see this page. Once I had a test environment capable of running multiple tests in parallel, I needed a test runner capable of doing the same. Unfortunately, this does not currently exist for xUnit (boo!). MbUnit on the other hand, has the concept of concurrent execution baked right into the framework. So after swapping out my assembly references, and fixing up the resulting mismatches in assertions, my example test now looks like this: [Test] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport() {    //Arrange    ISelenium browser = BrowserHelpers.GetBrowser();    var db = DbHelpers.GetWebsiteDBDataContext();    browser.Start();    browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                 //Act     browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");    var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);    //Assert     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Price, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Tax, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Total, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } This is pretty much the same as the xUnit version. The exceptions are that the attributes have changed,  the //Arrange phase now has to handle setting up the ISelenium object, as the attribute that previously did this has gone away, and the test now sets up its own database connection. Previously I was using a shared database connection, but this approach becomes more complicated when tests are being executed concurrently. To avoid complexity each test has its own connection, which it is responsible for closing. For the sake of readability, I snipped out the code that closes the browser session and the db connection at the end of the test. With all that done, there was only one more step required before the tests would execute concurrently. It is necessary to tell the test runner which tests are eligible to run in parallel, via the [Parallelizable] attribute. This can be done at the test, fixture or assembly level. Since I wanted to run all tests concurrently, I marked mine at the assembly level in the AssemblyInfo.cs using the following: [assembly: DegreeOfParallelism(3)] [assembly: Parallelizable(TestScope.All)] The second attribute marks all tests in the assembly as [Parallelizable], whilst the first tells the test runner how many concurrent threads to use when executing the tests. I set mine to three since I was using 3 RCs in separate VMs. With everything now in place, I fired up the Icarus* test runner that comes with MbUnit. Executing my 372 tests three at a time instead of one at a time reduced the running time from 2 hours 10 minutes, to 55 minutes, that's an improvement of about 58%! I'd like to have seen an improvement of 66%, but I can understand that either inefficiencies in the hub code, my test environment or the test runner code (or some combination of all three most likely) contributes to a slightly diminished improvement. That said, I'd love to hear about any experience you have in upping this efficiency. Ultimately though, it was a saving that was most definitely worth having. It makes regression testing via UI automation a far more plausible prospect. The other obvious point to make is that this approach scales far better than executing tests serially. So if ever we need to improve performance, we just register additional RC's with the hub, and up the DegreeOfParallelism. *This was just my personal preference for a GUI runner. The MbUnit/Gallio installer also provides a command line runner, a TestDriven.net runner, and a Resharper 4.5 runner. For now at least, Resharper 5 isn't supported.

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• Big Data&rsquo;s Killer App&hellip;

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  Recently Keith spent  some time talking about the cloud on this blog and I will spare you my thoughts on the whole thing. What I do want to write down is something about the Big Data movement and what I think is the killer app for Big Data... Where is this coming from, ok, I confess... I spent 3 days in cloud land at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara and it was quite a lot of fun. One of the nice things at Cloud Connect was that there was a track dedicated to Big Data, which prompted me to some extend to write this post. What is Big Data anyways? The most valuable point made in the Big Data track was that Big Data in itself is not very cool. Doing something with Big Data is what makes all of this cool and interesting to a business user! The other good insight I got was that a lot of people think Big Data means a single gigantic monolithic system holding gazillions of bytes or documents or log files. Well turns out that most people in the Big Data track are talking about a lot of collections of smaller data sets. So rather than thinking "big = monolithic" you should be thinking "big = many data sets". This is more than just theoretical, it is actually relevant when thinking about big data and how to process it. It is important because it means that the platform that stores data will most likely consist out of multiple solutions. You may be storing logs on something like HDFS, you may store your customer information in Oracle and you may store distilled clickstream information in some distilled form in MySQL. The big question you will need to solve is not what lives where, but how to get it all together and get some value out of all that data. NoSQL and MapReduce Nope, sorry, this is not the killer app... and no I'm not saying this because my business card says Oracle and I'm therefore biased. I think language is important, but as with storage I think pragmatic is better. In other words, some questions can be answered with SQL very efficiently, others can be answered with PERL or TCL others with MR. History should teach us that anyone trying to solve a problem will use any and all tools around. For example, most data warehouses (Big Data 1.0?) get a lot of data in flat files. Everyone then runs a bunch of shell scripts to massage or verify those files and then shoves those files into the database. We've even built shell script support into external tables to allow for this. I think the Big Data projects will do the same. Some people will use MapReduce, although I would argue that things like Cascading are more interesting, some people will use Java. Some data is stored on HDFS making Cascading the way to go, some data is stored in Oracle and SQL does do a good job there. As with storage and with history, be pragmatic and use what fits and neither NoSQL nor MR will be the one and only. Also, a language, while important, does in itself not deliver business value. So while cool it is not a killer app... Vertical Behavioral Analytics This is the killer app! And you are now thinking: "what does that mean?" Let's decompose that heading. First of all, analytics. I would think you had guessed by now that this is really what I'm after, and of course you are right. But not just analytics, which has a very large scope and means many things to many people. I'm not just after Business Intelligence (analytics 1.0?) or data mining (analytics 2.0?) but I'm after something more interesting that you can only do after collecting large volumes of specific data. That all important data is about behavior. What do my customers do? More importantly why do they behave like that? If you can figure that out, you can tailor web sites, stores, products etc. to that behavior and figure out how to be successful. Today's behavior that is somewhat easily tracked is web site clicks, search patterns and all of those things that a web site or web server tracks. that is where the Big Data lives and where these patters are now emerging. Other examples however are emerging, and one of the examples used at the conference was about prediction churn for a telco based on the social network its members are a part of. That social network is not about LinkedIn or Facebook, but about who calls whom. I call you a lot, you switch provider, and I might/will switch too. And that just naturally brings me to the next word, vertical. Vertical in this context means per industry, e.g. communications or retail or government or any other vertical. The reason for being more specific than just behavioral analytics is that each industry has its own data sources, has its own quirky logic and has its own demands and priorities. Of course, the methods and some of the software will be common and some will have both retail and service industry analytics in place (your corner coffee store for example). But the gist of it all is that analytics that can predict customer behavior for a specific focused group of people in a specific industry is what makes Big Data interesting. Building a Vertical Behavioral Analysis System Well, that is going to be interesting. I have not seen much going on in that space and if I had to have some criticism on the cloud connect conference it would be the lack of concrete user cases on big data. The telco example, while a step into the vertical behavioral part is not really on big data. It used a sample of data from the customers' data warehouse. One thing I do think, and this is where I think parts of the NoSQL stuff come from, is that we will be doing this analysis where the data is. Over the past 10 years we at Oracle have called this in-database analytics. I guess we were (too) early? Now the entire market is going there including companies like SAS. In-place btw does not mean "no data movement at all", what it means that you will do this on data's permanent home. For SAS that is kind of the current problem. Most of the inputs live in a data warehouse. So why move it into SAS and back? That all worked with 1 TB data warehouses, but when we are looking at 100TB to 500 TB of distilled data... Comments? As it is still early days with these systems, I'm very interested in seeing reactions and thoughts to some of these thoughts...

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• Run Your Tests With Any NUnit Version

  - by Alois Kraus

  I always thought that the NUnit test runners and the test assemblies need to reference the same NUnit.Framework version. I wanted to be able to run my test assemblies with the newest GUI runner (currently 2.5.3). Ok so all I need to do is to reference both NUnit versions the newest one and the official for the current project. There is a nice article form Kent Bogart online how to reference the same assembly multiple times with different versions. The magic works by referencing one NUnit assembly with an alias which does prefix all types inside it. Then I could decorate my tests with the TestFixture and Test attribute from both NUnit versions and everything worked fine except that this was ugly. After playing a little bit around to make it simpler I found that I did not need to reference both NUnit.Framework assemblies. The test runners do not require the TestFixture and Test attribute in their specific version. That is really neat since the test runners are instructed by attributes what to do in a declarative way there is really no need to tie the runners to a specific version. At its core NUnit has this little method hidden to find matching TestFixtures and Tests   public bool CanBuildFrom(Type type) {     if (!(!type.IsAbstract || type.IsSealed))     {         return false;     }     return (((Reflect.HasAttribute(type,           "NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute", true) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute"       , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestCaseAttribute"   , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TheoryAttribute"     , true)); } That is versioning and backwards compatibility at its best. I tell NUnit what to do by decorating my tests classes with NUnit Attributes and the runner executes my intent without the need to bind me to a specific version. The contract between NUnit versions is actually a bit more complex (think of AssertExceptions) but this is also handled nicely by using not the concrete type but simply to check for the catched exception type by string. What can we learn from this? Versioning can be easy if the contract is small and the users of your library use it in a declarative way (Attributes). Everything beyond it will force you to reference several versions of the same assembly with all its consequences. Type equality is lost between versions so none of your casts will work. That means that you cannot simply use IBigInterface in two versions. You will need a wrapper to call the correct versioned one. To get out of this mess you can use one (and only one) version agnostic driver to encapsulate your business logic from the concrete versions. This is of course more work but as NUnit shows it can be easy. Simplicity is therefore not a nice thing to have but also requirement number one if you intend to make things more complex in version two and want to support any version (older and newer). Any interaction model above easy will not be maintainable. There are different approached to versioning. Below are my own personal observations how versioning works within the  .NET Framwork and NUnit.   Versioning Models 1. Bug Fixing and New Isolated Features When you only need to fix bugs there is no need to break anything. This is especially true when you have a big API surface. Microsoft did this with the .NET Framework 3.0 which did leave the CLR as is but delivered new assemblies for the features WPF, WCF and Windows Workflow Foundations. Their basic model was that the .NET 2.0 assemblies were declared as red assemblies which must not change (well mostly but each change was carefully reviewed to minimize the risk of breaking changes as much as possible) whereas the new green assemblies of .NET 3,3.5 did not have such obligations since they did implement new unrelated features which did not have any impact on the red assemblies. This is versioning strategy aimed at maximum compatibility and the delivery of new unrelated features. If you have a big API surface you should strive hard to do the same or you will break your customers code with every release. 2. New Breaking Features There are times when really new things need to be added to an existing product. The .NET Framework 4.0 did change the CLR in many ways which caused subtle different behavior although the API´s remained largely unchanged. Sometimes it is possible to simply recompile an application to make it work (e.g. changed method signature void Func() –> bool Func()) but behavioral changes need much more thought and cannot be automated. To minimize the impact .NET 2.0,3.0,3.5 applications will not automatically use the .NET 4.0 runtime when installed but they will keep using the “old” one. What is interesting is that a side by side execution model of both CLR versions (2 and 4) within one process is possible. Key to success was total isolation. You will have 2 GCs, 2 JIT compilers, 2 finalizer threads within one process. The two .NET runtimes cannot talk  (except via the usual IPC mechanisms) to each other. Both runtimes share nothing and run independently within the same process. This enables Explorer plugins written for the CLR 2.0 to work even when a CLR 4 plugin is already running inside the Explorer process. The price for isolation is an increased memory footprint because everything is loaded and running two times.   3. New Non Breaking Features It really depends where you break things. NUnit has evolved and many different Assert, Expect… methods have been added. These changes are all localized in the NUnit.Framework assembly which can be easily extended. As long as the test execution contract (TestFixture, Test, AssertException) remains stable it is possible to write test executors which can run tests written for NUnit 10 because the execution contract has not changed. It is possible to write software which executes other components in a version independent way but this is only feasible if the interaction model is relatively simple.   Versioning software is hard and it looks like it will remain hard since you suddenly work in a severely constrained environment when you try to innovate and to keep everything backwards compatible at the same time. These are contradicting goals and do not play well together. The easiest way out of this is to carefully watch what your customers are doing with your software. Minimizing the impact is much easier when you do not need to guess how many people will be broken when this or that is removed.

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• SQL SERVER – Extending SQL Azure with Azure worker role – Guest Post by Paras Doshi

  - by pinaldave

  This is guest post by Paras Doshi. Paras Doshi is a research Intern at SolidQ.com and a Microsoft student partner. He is currently working in the domain of SQL Azure. SQL Azure is nothing but a SQL server in the cloud. SQL Azure provides benefits such as on demand rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability and reduced management overhead. To see an introduction on SQL Azure, check out the post by Pinal here In this article, we are going to discuss how to extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. In other words, we will attempt to write a custom code and host it in the Azure worker role; the aim is to add some features that are not available with SQL Azure currently or features that need to be customized for flexibility. This way we extend the SQL Azure capability by building some solutions that run on Azure as worker roles. To understand Azure worker role, think of it as a windows service in cloud. Azure worker role can perform background processes, and to handle processes such as synchronization and backup, it becomes our ideal tool. First, we will focus on writing a worker role code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. Before we do so, let’s see some scenarios in which synchronization between SQL Azure databases is beneficial: scaling out access over multiple databases enables us to handle workload efficiently As of now, SQL Azure database can be hosted in one of any six datacenters. By synchronizing databases located in different data centers, one can extend the data by enabling access to geographically distributed data Let us see some scenarios in which SQL server to SQL Azure database synchronization is beneficial To backup SQL Azure database on local infrastructure Rather than investing in local infrastructure for increased workloads, such workloads could be handled by cloud Ability to extend data to different datacenters located across the world to enable efficient data access from remote locations Now, let us develop cloud-based app that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. For an Introduction to developing cloud based apps, click here Now, in this article, I aim to provide a bird’s eye view of how a code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases look like and then list resources that can help you develop the solution from scratch. Now, if you newly add a worker role to the cloud-based project, this is how the code will look like. (Note: I have added comments to the skeleton code to point out the modifications that will be required in the code to carry out the SQL Azure synchronization. Note the placement of Setup() and Sync() function.) Click here (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-1-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role1.pdf ) Enabling SQL Azure databases synchronization through sync framework is a two-step process. In the first step, the database is provisioned and sync framework creates tracking tables, stored procedures, triggers, and tables to store metadata to enable synchronization. This is one time step. The code for the same is put in the setup() function which is called once when the worker role starts. Now, the second step is continuous (or on demand) synchronization of SQL Azure databases by propagating changes between databases. This is done on a continuous basis by calling the sync() function in the while loop. The code logic to synchronize changes between SQL Azure databases should be put in the sync() function. Discussing the coding part step by step is out of the scope of this article. Therefore, let me suggest you a resource, which is given here. Also, note that before you start developing the code, you will need to install SYNC framework 2.1 SDK (download here). Further, you will reference some libraries before you start coding. Details regarding the same are available in the article that I just pointed to. You will be charged for data transfers if the databases are not in the same datacenter. For pricing information, go here Currently, a tool named DATA SYNC, which is built on top of sync framework, is available in CTP that allows SQL Azure <-> SQL server and SQL Azure <-> SQL Azure synchronization (without writing single line of code); however, in some cases, the custom code shown in this blogpost provides flexibility that is not available with Data SYNC. For instance, filtering is not supported in the SQL Azure DATA SYNC CTP2; if you wish to have such a functionality now, then you have the option of developing a custom code using SYNC Framework. Now, this code can be easily extended to synchronize at some schedule. Let us say we want the databases to get synchronized every day at 10:00 pm. This is what the code will look like now: (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-2-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role.pdf) Don’t you think that by writing such a code, we are imitating the functionality provided by the SQL server agent for a SQL server? Think about it. We are scheduling our administrative task by writing custom code – in other words, we have developed a “Light weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure!” Since the SQL server agent is not currently available in cloud, we have developed a solution that enables us to schedule tasks, and thus we have extended SQL Azure with the Azure worker role! Now if you wish to track jobs, you can do so by storing this data in SQL Azure (or Azure tables). The reason is that Windows Azure is a stateless platform, and we will need to store the state of the job ourselves and the choice that you have is SQL Azure or Azure tables. Note that this solution requires custom code and also it is not UI driven; however, for now, it can act as a temporary solution until SQL server agent is made available in the cloud. Moreover, this solution does not encompass functionalities that a SQL server agent provides, but it does open up an interesting avenue to schedule some of the tasks such as backup and synchronization of SQL Azure databases by writing some custom code in the Azure worker role. Now, let us see one more possibility – i.e., running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services and then uploading the backup files either locally or on blobs. If you upload it locally, then consider the data transfer cost. If you upload it to blobs residing in the same datacenter, then no transfer cost applies but the cost on blob size applies. So, before choosing the option, you need to evaluate your preferences keeping the cost associated with each option in mind. In this article, I have shown that Azure worker role solution could be developed to synchronize SQL Azure databases. Moreover, a light-weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure can be developed. Also we discussed the possibility of running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services for backing up our precious SQL Azure data. Thus, we can extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. But remember: you will be charged for running Azure worker roles. So at the end of the day, you need to ask – am I willing to build a custom code and pay money to achieve this functionality? I hope you found this blog post interesting. If you have any questions/feedback, you can comment below or you can mail me at Paras[at]student-partners[dot]com Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Azure, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 30, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 30, 2010New ProjectsAviva Solutions C# Coding Guidelines: A set of C# coding guidelines, coding standards, layout rules, FxCop rulesets and (upcoming) custom FxCop and StyleCop rules for improving the over...BKWork: private project.classbook: du an trong vong 10 ngay. Nhom (Do Bao Linh, Phan Thanh Tai, Nguyen Dang Loc)Du an - 01: Du an mon thay LuongEndNote助手: EndNote Helper is a assistant tool for EndNote, which make your task of reference management more convinent. EndNote 助手是一个用于辅助EndNote进行文献管理的小工具，它可...Evoucher: Simple Evoucher Sales SystemFiddler Delayed Responses Extension: A fiddler extension that help developers delay the delivery of HTML Responses to applications. Some delay user stories: - Delivery of css to HTML ...Generic Entity Model 2: GEM2 is lightweight entity framework for building custom business solutions. It enables rapid approach to entity logic design, while offering out o...GY06: 这个是长大工院于2009年发起的项目，因为种种原因没有完成。JoshDOS: JoshDOS is a command line operating system kernel based off COSMOS. It can be booted from actual hardware and built in Visual Studio using .NET la...PhysicsFMUDeluxe.NET: Este projeto é desenvolvido com o intuíto de treinar o desenvolvimento de aplicações em C#. Ele contém ferramentas para cálculos de física e matemá...Reactor Services Platform: Reactor is a service composition and deployment grid that streamlines developing, composing, deploying and managing services. Reactor Services are ...SerafinApartment: Simple MVC 2 application for apartment rental. It is multingual booking system, that allows users to register, book and subscribe for notifications...Silverlight Audio Effect Box: This is a C# Silverlight 4 sample application which process audio sample in near real time. It allows to capture the default audio input device and...Smart Voice: Smart Voice let's you control Skype using your voice. It allows you to write messages, issue phone calls, etc. This application was developed think...WebDotNet - The minimalist web framework inspired by web.py: WebDotNet is an experiment in web frameworks. Inspired by the python web framework, web.py, it is an exercise in extreme minimalism in a framework...New ReleasesAcies: Acies - Alpha Build 0.0.7: Alpha release. Requires Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249-4560-...AdventureWorksLT 2008 Sample Database Script: AdventureWorksLT 2008 R2 DB Script: This script is based on latest download from the Sample database for SQL Server 2008 R2. The original download from the sample is approx 84 MB and ...ASP.NET Wiki Control: Release 1.3.1: - Removed ASP.NET Session dependency. BreadCrumbs will now work with sessions disabled. Can now also share a URL and have the breadcrumb appropriat...Aviva Solutions C# Coding Guidelines: Visual Studio 2010 Rule Sets: Rule Sets targetting different styles of projects.bvcms - Bellevue Church Management System: Source: This source was used to build the latest {church}.bvcms.comCC.Yacht: CC.Yacht 1.0.10.529: This is the initial release of CC.Yacht. Marked as beta since I don't have any testing/feedback beyond that of myself and my wife.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V14: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has add...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V15: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has add...Coronasoft Cryostasis scripting engine: CCSE v0.0.1.0 BETA: This is the 0.0.1.0 Beta Release. If you find any bugs Post them as a comment or in the Discussions tabEndNote助手: EndNote助手2.1.0..0: 去除了注册验证机制。Fiddler Delayed Responses Extension: v0.1: Version 0.1 of Fiddler Delayed Responses Extension. See ChangeLog for more information.Generic Entity Model 2: GEM2 build 52510: This is first BETA release of GEM2! Following implementation is still missing from initial plan: Detailed documentation MySQL operational databa...JoshDOS: JoshDOS Souce: This is the souce for the JoshDOS 1.0 OS kernel. You need the COSMOS user kit to use.JoshDOS: Shell Version 1.0: Whats in this download *JoshDOS user kit *JoshDOS VStudio starter kit *JoshDOS documentation Note: You will need the COSMOS user kit to start deve...miniTodo: mini Todo version 0.3: Todo完了時に音が出なかったのを修正Model Virtual Casting - ASPItalia.com: Model Virtual Casting 0.2: Model Virtual Casting 0.2Questa seconda release di ModelVC è corrispondente a quella mostrata in occasione della Real Code Conference 4.0 tenutasi ...PhysicsFMUDeluxe.NET: PhysicsFMUDeluxe.NET - Setup: Primeira versão pública do PhysicsFMUDeluxe.NETSilverlight Audio Effect Box: Echo Box 1.0: First realease - zip contains : web page + xap file :Smart Voice: Smart Voice 0.1: Here is the first alpha release of Smart Voice. Please remember this was done for a curricular unit project at my university and i understand that ...StyleCop Contrib: Custom rules v0.2: This release of the custom rules target StyleCop 4.3.3. Included rules are: Spacing Rules - NoTrailingWhiteSpace - IndentUsingTabs Ordering Rules ...System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations Contrib: 0.2.46280.0: Built with Visual Studio 2010/.Net 4.0. Compiled from source code changeset 46280.VB Styler: VB Styler Suite V 1.3.0.0: This is the newest version of the VB Styler. Here are the new features. New Imaging ColorPicker A template for getting colors via sliders ColorR...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30529.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.90 RC: Version: 1.0.0.90 (Release Candidate): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. ...XNA Collision Detection: XNA Collision Detection Sample Program: I have coded a compact program which shows the collision detection working, and provides a camera class for rendering and moving the "player." Agai...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active ProjectsAStar.netpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeBlogEngine.NETGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterRawrCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMFacebook Developer ToolkitPAP

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• The last MVVM you'll ever need?

  - by Nuri Halperin

  As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: grouping model elements

  - by FransBouma

  (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) When working with an entity model which has more than a few entities, it's often convenient to be able to group entities together if they belong to a semantic sub-model. For example, if your entity model has several entities which are about 'security', it would be practical to group them together under the 'security' moniker. This way, you could easily find them back, yet they can be left inside the complete entity model altogether so their relationships with entities outside the group are kept. In other situations your domain consists of semi-separate entity models which all target tables/views which are located in the same database. It then might be convenient to have a single project to manage the complete target database, yet have the entity models separate of each other and have them result in separate code bases. LLBLGen Pro can do both for you. This blog post will illustrate both situations. The feature is called group usage and is controllable through the project settings. This setting is supported on all supported O/R mapper frameworks. Situation one: grouping entities in a single model. This situation is common for entity models which are dense, so many relationships exist between all sub-models: you can't split them up easily into separate models (nor do you likely want to), however it's convenient to have them grouped together into groups inside the entity model at the project level. A typical example for this is the AdventureWorks example database for SQL Server. This database, which is a single catalog, has for each sub-group a schema, however most of these schemas are tightly connected with each other: adding all schemas together will give a model with entities which indirectly are related to all other entities. LLBLGen Pro's default setting for group usage is AsVisualGroupingMechanism which is what this situation is all about: we group the elements for visual purposes, it has no real meaning for the model nor the code generated. Let's reverse engineer AdventureWorks to an entity model. By default, LLBLGen Pro uses the target schema an element is in which is being reverse engineered, as the group it will be in. This is convenient if you already have categorized tables/views in schemas, like which is the case in AdventureWorks. Of course this can be switched off, or corrected on the fly. When reverse engineering, we'll walk through a wizard which will guide us with the selection of the elements which relational model data should be retrieved, which we can later on use to reverse engineer to an entity model. The first step after specifying which database server connect to is to select these elements. below we can see the AdventureWorks catalog as well as the different schemas it contains. We'll include all of them. After the wizard completes, we have all relational model data nicely in our catalog data, with schemas. So let's reverse engineer entities from the tables in these schemas. We select in the catalog explorer the schemas 'HumanResources', 'Person', 'Production', 'Purchasing' and 'Sales', then right-click one of them and from the context menu, we select Reverse engineer Tables to Entity Definitions.... This will bring up the dialog below. We check all checkboxes in one go by checking the checkbox at the top to mark them all to be added to the project. As you can see LLBLGen Pro has already filled in the group name based on the schema name, as this is the default and we didn't change the setting. If you want, you can select multiple rows at once and set the group name to something else using the controls on the dialog. We're fine with the group names chosen so we'll simply click Add to Project. This gives the following result:   (I collapsed the other groups to keep the picture small ;)). As you can see, the entities are now grouped. Just to see how dense this model is, I've expanded the relationships of Employee: As you can see, it has relationships with entities from three other groups than HumanResources. It's not doable to cut up this project into sub-models without duplicating the Employee entity in all those groups, so this model is better suited to be used as a single model resulting in a single code base, however it benefits greatly from having its entities grouped into separate groups at the project level, to make work done on the model easier. Now let's look at another situation, namely where we work with a single database while we want to have multiple models and for each model a separate code base. Situation two: grouping entities in separate models within the same project. To get rid of the entities to see the second situation in action, simply undo the reverse engineering action in the project. We still have the AdventureWorks relational model data in the catalog. To switch LLBLGen Pro to see each group in the project as a separate project, open the Project Settings, navigate to General and set Group usage to AsSeparateProjects. In the catalog explorer, select Person and Production, right-click them and select again Reverse engineer Tables to Entities.... Again check the checkbox at the top to mark all entities to be added and click Add to Project. We get two groups, as expected, however this time the groups are seen as separate projects. This means that the validation logic inside LLBLGen Pro will see it as an error if there's e.g. a relationship or an inheritance edge linking two groups together, as that would lead to a cyclic reference in the code bases. To see this variant of the grouping feature, seeing the groups as separate projects, in action, we'll generate code from the project with the two groups we just created: select from the main menu: Project -> Generate Source-code... (or press F7 ;)). In the dialog popping up, select the target .NET framework you want to use, the template preset, fill in a destination folder and click Start Generator (normal). This will start the code generator process. As expected the code generator has simply generated two code bases, one for Person and one for Production: The group name is used inside the namespace for the different elements. This allows you to add both code bases to a single solution and use them together in a different project without problems. Below is a snippet from the code file of a generated entity class. //... using System.Xml.Serialization; using AdventureWorks.Person; using AdventureWorks.Person.HelperClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.FactoryClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.RelationClasses; using SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses; namespace AdventureWorks.Person.EntityClasses { //... /// <summary>Entity class which represents the entity 'Address'.<br/><br/></summary> [Serializable] public partial class AddressEntity : CommonEntityBase //... The advantage of this is that you can have two code bases and work with them separately, yet have a single target database and maintain everything in a single location. If you decide to move to a single code base, you can do so with a change of one setting. It's also useful if you want to keep the groups as separate models (and code bases) yet want to add relationships to elements from another group using a copy of the entity: you can simply reverse engineer the target table to a new entity into a different group, effectively making a copy of the entity. As there's a single target database, changes made to that database are reflected in both models which makes maintenance easier than when you'd have a separate project for each group, with its own relational model data. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a flexible way to work with entities in sub-models and control how the sub-models end up in the generated code.

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• Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

  The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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• API Message Localization

  - by Jesse Taber

  In my post, “Keep Localizable Strings Close To Your Users” I talked about the internationalization and localization difficulties that can arise when you sprinkle static localizable strings throughout the different logical layers of an application. The main point of that post is that you should have your localizable strings reside as close to the user-facing modules of your application as possible. For example, if you’re developing an ASP .NET web forms application all of the localizable strings should be kept in .resx files that are associated with the .aspx views of the application. In this post I want to talk about how this same concept can be applied when designing and developing APIs. An API Facilitates Machine-to-Machine Interaction You can typically think about a web, desktop, or mobile application as a collection “views” or “screens” through which users interact with the underlying logic and data. The application can be designed based on the assumption that there will be a human being on the other end of the screen working the controls. You are designing a machine-to-person interaction and the application should be built in a way that facilitates the user’s clear understanding of what is going on. Dates should be be formatted in a way that the user will be familiar with, messages should be presented in the user’s preferred language, etc. When building an API, however, there are no screens and you can’t make assumptions about who or what is on the other end of each call. An API is, by definition, a machine-to-machine interaction. A machine-to-machine interaction should be built in a way that facilitates a clear and unambiguous understanding of what is going on. Dates and numbers should be formatted in predictable and standard ways (e.g. ISO 8601 dates) and messages should be presented in machine-parseable formats. For example, consider an API for a time tracking system that exposes a resource for creating a new time entry. The JSON for creating a new time entry for a user might look like: 1: { 2: "userId": 4532, 3: "startDateUtc": "2012-10-22T14:01:54.98432Z", 4: "endDateUtc": "2012-10-22T11:34:45.29321Z" 5: }   Note how the parameters for start and end date are both expressed as ISO 8601 compliant dates in UTC. Using a date format like this in our API leaves little room for ambiguity. It’s also important to note that using ISO 8601 dates is a much, much saner thing than the \/Date(<milliseconds since epoch>)\/ nonsense that is sometimes used in JSON serialization. Probably the most important thing to note about the JSON snippet above is the fact that the end date comes before the start date! The API should recognize that and disallow the time entry from being created, returning an error to the caller. You might inclined to send a response that looks something like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   While this may seem like an appropriate thing to do there are a few problems with this approach: What if there is a user somewhere on the other end of the API call that doesn’t speak English?  What if the message provided here won’t fit properly within the UI of the application that made the API call? What if the verbiage of the message isn’t consistent with the rest of the application that made the API call? What if there is no user directly on the other end of the API call (e.g. this is a batch job uploading time entries once per night unattended)? The API knows nothing about the context from which the call was made. There are steps you could take to given the API some context (e.g.allow the caller to send along a language code indicating the language that the end user speaks), but that will only get you so far. As the designer of the API you could make some assumptions about how the API will be called, but if we start making assumptions we could very easily make the wrong assumptions. In this situation it’s best to make no assumptions and simply design the API in such a way that the caller has the responsibility to convey error messages in a manner that is appropriate for the context in which the error was raised. You would work around some of these problems by allowing callers to add metadata to each request describing the context from which the call is being made (e.g. accepting a ‘locale’ parameter denoting the desired language), but that will add needless clutter and complexity. It’s better to keep the API simple and push those context-specific concerns down to the caller whenever possible. For our very simple time entry example, this can be done by simply changing our error message response to look like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100}] 3: }   By changing our error error from exposing a string to a numeric code that is easily parseable by another application, we’ve placed all of the responsibility for conveying the actual meaning of the error message on the caller. It’s best to have the caller be responsible for conveying this meaning because the caller understands the context much better than the API does. Now the caller can see error code 100, know that it means that the end date submitted falls before the start date and take appropriate action. Now all of the problems listed out above are non-issues because the caller can simply translate the error code of ‘100’ into the proper action and message for the current context. The numeric code representation of the error is a much better way to facilitate the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate. An API Does Have Human Users While APIs should be built for machine-to-machine interaction, people still need to wire these interactions together. As a programmer building a client application that will consume the time entry API I would find it frustrating to have to go dig through the API documentation every time I encounter a new error code (assuming the documentation exists and is accurate). The numeric error code approach hurts the discoverability of the API and makes it painful to integrate with. We can help ease this pain by merging our two approaches: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100, "message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   Now we have an easily parseable numeric error code for the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate and a human-readable message for programmers working with the API. The human-readable message here is not intended to be viewed by end-users of the API and as such is not really a “localizable string” in my opinion. We could opt to expose a locale parameter for all API methods and store translations for all error messages, but that’s a lot of extra effort and overhead that doesn’t add a lot real value to the API. I might be a bit of an “ugly American”, but I think it’s probably fine to have the API return English messages when the target for those messages is a programmer. When resources are limited (which they always are), I’d argue that you’re better off hard-coding these messages in English and putting more effort into building more useful features, improving security, tweaking performance, etc.

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• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas.  We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon. Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step. Getting Started If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up for a no-obligation Free Trial.  Once you are signed-up, click the “preview features” section under the “account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com website and enable your account to support the “Mobile Services” preview.   Instructions on how to enable this can be found here. Once you have the mobile services preview enabled, log into the Windows Azure Portal, click the “New” button and choose the new “Mobile Services” icon to create your first mobile backend.  Once created, you’ll see a quick-start page like below with instructions on how to connect your mobile service to an existing Windows 8 client app you have already started working on, or how to create and connect a brand-new Windows 8 client app with it: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app  that stores data in Windows Azure. Storing Data in the Cloud Storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure Mobile Services is incredibly easy.  When you create a Windows Azure Mobile Service, we automatically associate it with a SQL Database inside Windows Azure.  The Windows Azure Mobile Service backend then provides built-in support for enabling remote apps to securely store and retrieve data from it (using secure REST end-points utilizing a JSON-based ODATA format) – without you having to write or deploy any custom server code.  Built-in management support is provided within the Windows Azure portal for creating new tables, browsing data, setting indexes, and controlling access permissions. This makes it incredibly easy to connect client applications to the cloud, and enables client developers who don’t have a server-code background to be productive from the very beginning.  They can instead focus on building the client app experience, and leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide the cloud backend services they require.  Below is an example of client-side Windows 8 C#/XAML code that could be used to query data from a Windows Azure Mobile Service.  Client-side C# developers can write queries like this using LINQ and strongly typed POCO objects, which are then translated into HTTP REST queries that run against a Windows Azure Mobile Service.   Developers don’t have to write or deploy any custom server-side code in order to enable client-side code below to execute and asynchronously populate their client UI: Because Mobile Services is part of Windows Azure, developers can later choose to augment or extend their initial solution and add custom server functionality and more advanced logic if they want.  This provides maximum flexibility, and enables developers to grow and extend their solutions to meet any needs. User Authentication and Push Notifications Windows Azure Mobile Services also make it incredibly easy to integrate user authentication/authorization and push notifications within your applications.  You can use these capabilities to enable authentication and fine grain access control permissions to the data you store in the cloud, as well as to trigger push notifications to users/devices when the data changes.  Windows Azure Mobile Services supports the concept of “server scripts” (small chunks of server-side script that executes in response to actions) that make it really easy to enable these scenarios. Below are some tutorials that walkthrough common authentication/authorization/push scenarios you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows 8 apps: Enabling User Authentication Authorizing Users  Get Started with Push Notifications Push Notifications to multiple Users Manage and Monitor your Mobile Service Just like with every other service in Windows Azure, you can monitor usage and metrics of your mobile service backend using the “Dashboard” tab within the Windows Azure Portal. The dashboard tab provides a built-in monitoring view of the API calls, Bandwidth, and server CPU cycles of your Windows Azure Mobile Service.   You can also use the “Logs” tab within the portal to review error messages.  This makes it easy to monitor and track how your application is doing. Scale Up as Your Business Grows Windows Azure Mobile Services now allows every Windows Azure customer to create and run up to 10 Mobile Services in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where your mobile backend will be one of multiple apps running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost beyond the database you connect your Windows Azure Mobile Service to (note: each Windows Azure free trial account also includes a 1GB SQL Database that you can use with any number of apps or Windows Azure Mobile Services). If your client application becomes popular, you can click the “Scale” tab of your Mobile Service and switch from “Shared” to “Reserved” mode.  Doing so allows you to isolate your apps so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine.  This allows you to elastically scale the amount of resources your apps use – allowing you to scale-up (or scale-down) your capacity as your traffic grows: With Windows Azure you pay for compute capacity on a per-hour basis – which allows you to scale up and down your resources to match only what you need.  This enables a super flexible model that is ideal for new mobile app scenarios, as well as startups who are just getting going.  Summary I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services – there are a lot more features to explore.  With Windows Azure Mobile Services you’ll be able to build mobile app experiences faster than ever, and enable even better user experiences – by connecting your client apps to the cloud. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Services development center to learn more, and build your first Windows 8 app connected with Windows Azure today.  And read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 4 - Navigation and Modules

  After our brief intermission (and the craziness of Q1 2010 release week), we're back on track here and today we get to dive into how we are going to navigate through our applications as well as how to set up our modules. That way, as I start adding the functionality- adding Jobs and Applicants, Interview Scheduling, and finally a handy Dashboard- you'll see how everything is communicating back and forth. This is all leading up to an eventual webinar, in which I'll dive into this process and give a honest look at the current story for MVVM vs. Code-Behind applications. (For a look at the future with SL4 and a little thing called MEF, check out what Ross is doing over at his blog!) Preamble... Before getting into really talking about this app, I've done a little bit of work ahead of time to create a ton of files that I'll need. Since the webinar is going to cover the Dashboard, it's not here, but otherwise this is a look at what the project layout looks like (and remember, this is both projects since they share the .Web): So as you can see, from an architecture perspective, the code-behind app is much smaller and more streamlined- aka a better fit for the one man shop that is me. Each module in the MVVM app has the same setup, which is the Module class and corresponding Views and ViewModels. Since the code-behind app doesn't need a go-between project like Infrastructure, each MVVM module is instead replaced by a single Silverlight UserControl which will contain all the logic for each respective bit of functionality. My Very First Module Navigation is going to be key to my application, so I figured the first thing I would setup is my MenuModule. First step here is creating a Silverlight Class Library named MenuModule, creatingthe View and ViewModel folders, and adding the MenuModule.cs class to handle module loading. The most important thing here is that my MenuModule inherits from IModule, which runs an Initialize on each module as it is created that, in my case, adds the views to the correct regions. Here's the MenuModule.cs code: public class MenuModule : IModule { private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; private readonly IUnityContainer container; public MenuModule(IUnityContainer container, IRegionManager regionmanager) { this.container = container; this.regionManager = regionmanager; } public void Initialize() { var addMenuView = container.Resolve<MenuView>(); regionManager.Regions["MenuRegion"].Add(addMenuView); } } Pretty straightforward here... We inject a container and region manager from Prism/Unity, then upon initialization we grab the view (out of our Views folder) and add it to the region it needs to live in. Simple, right? When the MenuView is created, the only thing in the code-behind is a reference to the set the MenuViewModel as the DataContext. I'd like to achieve MVVM nirvana and have zero code-behind by placing the viewmodel in the XAML, but for the reasons listed further below I can't. Navigation - MVVM Since navigation isn't the biggest concern in putting this whole thing together, I'm using the Button control to handle different options for loading up views/modules. There is another reason for this- out of the box, Prism has command support for buttons, which is one less custom command I had to work up for the functionality I would need. This comes from the Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Presentation assembly and looks as follows when put in code: <Button x:Name="xGoToJobs" Style="{StaticResource menuStyle}" Content="Jobs" cal:Click.Command="{Binding GoModule}" cal:Click.CommandParameter="JobPostingsView" /> For quick reference, 'menuStyle' is just taking care of margins and spacing, otherwise it looks, feels, and functions like everyone's favorite Button. What MVVM's this up is that the Click.Command is tying to a DelegateCommand (also coming fromPrism) on the backend. This setup allows you to tie user interaction to a command you setup in your viewmodel, which replaces the standard event-based setup you'd see in the code-behind app. Due to databinding magic, it all just works. When we get looking at the DelegateCommand in code, it ends up like this: public class MenuViewModel : ViewModelBase { private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; public DelegateCommand<object> GoModule { get; set; } public MenuViewModel(IRegionManager regionmanager) { this.regionManager = regionmanager; this.GoModule = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.goToView); } public void goToView(object obj) { MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", obj.ToString()); } } Another for reference, ViewModelBase takes care of iNotifyPropertyChanged and MakeMeActive, which switches views in the MainRegion based on the parameters. So our public DelegateCommand GoModule ties to our command on the view, that in turn calls goToView, and the parameter on the button is the name of the view (which we pass with obj.ToString()) to activate. And how do the views get the names I can pass as a string? When I called regionManager.Regions[regionname].Add(view), there is an overload that allows for .Add(view, "viewname"), with viewname being what I use to activate views. You'll see that in action next installment, just wanted to clarify how that works. With this setup, I create two more buttons in my MenuView and the MenuModule is good to go. Last step is to make sure my MenuModule loads in my Bootstrapper: protected override IModuleCatalog GetModuleCatalog() { ModuleCatalog catalog = new ModuleCatalog(); // add modules here catalog.AddModule(typeof(MenuModule.MenuModule)); return catalog; } Clean, simple, MVVM-delicious. Navigation - Code-Behind Keeping with the history of significantly shorter code-behind sections of this series, Navigation will be no different. I promise. As I explained in a prior post, due to the one-project setup I don't have to worry about the same concerns so my menu is part of MainPage.xaml. So I can cheese-it a bit, though, since I've already got three buttons all set I'm just copying that code and adding three click-events instead of the command/commandparameter setup: <!-- Menu Region --> <StackPanel Grid.Row="1" Orientation="Vertical"> <Button x:Name="xJobsButton" Content="Jobs" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xJobsButton_Click" /> <Button x:Name="xApplicantsButton" Content="Applicants" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xApplicantsButton_Click" /> <Button x:Name="xSchedulingModule" Content="Scheduling" Style="{StaticResource menuStyleCB}" Click="xSchedulingModule_Click" /> </StackPanel> Simple, easy to use events, and no extra assemblies required! Since the code for loading each view will be similar, we'll focus on JobsView for now.The code-behind with this setup looks something like... private JobsView _jobsView; public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); } private void xJobsButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (MainRegion.Content.GetType() != typeof(JobsView)) { if (_jobsView == null) _jobsView = new JobsView(); MainRegion.Content = _jobsView; } } What am I doing here? First, for each 'view' I create a private reference which MainPage will hold on to. This allows for a little bit of state-maintenance when switching views. When a button is clicked, first we make sure the 'view' typeisn't active (why load it again if it is already at center stage?), then we check if the view has been created and create if necessary, then load it up. Three steps to switching views and is easy as pie. Part 4 Results The end result of all this is that I now have a menu module (MVVM) and a menu section (code-behind) that load their respective views. Since I'm using the same exact XAML (except with commands/events depending on the project), the end result for both is again exactly the same and I'll show a slightly larger image to show it off: Next time, we add the Jobs Module and wire up RadGridView and a separate edit page to handle adding and editing new jobs. That's when things get fun. And somewhere down the line, I'll make the menu look slicker. :) Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Rolling with Razor in MVC v3 Preview

  - by mbridge

  Razor is an alternate view engine for asp.net MVC.  It was introduced in the “WebMatrix” tool and has now been released as part of the asp.net MVC 3 preview 1.  Basically, Razor allows us to replace the clunky <% %> syntax with a much cleaner coding model, which integrates very nicely with HTML.  Additionally, it provides some really nice features for master page type scenarios and you don’t lose access to any of the features you are currently familiar with, such as HTML helper methods. First, download and install the ASP.NET MVC Preview 1.  You can find this at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cb42f741-8fb1-4f43-a5fa-812096f8d1e8&displaylang=en. Now, follow these steps to create your first asp.net mvc project using Razor: 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 2. Create a new project.  Select File->New->Project (Shift Control N) 3. You will see the list of project types which should look similar to what’s shown:   4. Select “ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application (Razor).”  Set the application name to RazorTest and the path to c:projectsRazorTest for this tutorial. If you select accidently select ASPX, you will end up with the standard asp.net view engine and template, which isn’t what you want. 5. For this tutorial, and ONLY for this tutorial, select “No, do not create a unit test project.”  In general, you should create and use a unit test project.  Code without unit tests is kind of like diet ice cream.  It just isn’t very good. Now, once we have this done, our brand new project will be created.    In all likelihood, Visual Studio will leave you looking at the “HomeController.cs” class, as shown below: Immediately, you should notice one difference.  The Index action used to look like: public ActionResult Index () { ViewData[“Message”] = “Welcome to ASP.Net MVC!”; Return View(); } While this will still compile and run just fine, ASP.Net MVC 3 has a much nicer way of doing this: public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = “Welcome to ASP.Net MVC!”; Return View(); } Instead of using ViewData we are using the new ViewModel object, which uses the new dynamic data typing of .Net 4.0 to allow us to express ourselves much more cleanly.  This isn’t a tutorial on ALL of MVC 3, but the ViewModel concept is one we will need as we dig into Razor. What comes in the box? When we create a project using the ASP.Net MVC 3 Template with Razor, we get a standard project setup, just like we did in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 but with some differences.  Instead of seeing “.aspx” view files and “.ascx” files, we see files with the “.cshtml” which is the default razor extension.  Before we discuss the details of a razor file, one thing to keep in mind is that since this is an extremely early preview, intellisense is not currently enabled with the razor view engine.  This is promised as an updated before the final release.  Just like with the aspx view engine, the convention of the folder name for a set of views matching the controller name without the word “Controller” still stands.  Similarly, each action in the controller will usually have a corresponding view file in the appropriate view directory.  Remember, in asp.net MVC, convention over configuration is key to successful development! The initial template organizes views in the following folders, located in the project under Views: - Account – The default account management views used by the Account controller.  Each file represents a distinct view. - Home – Views corresponding to the appropriate actions within the home controller. - Shared – This contains common view objects used by multiple views.  Within here, master pages are stored, as well as partial page views (user controls).  By convention, these partial views are named “_XXXPartial.cshtml” where XXX is the appropriate name, such as _LogonPartial.cshtml.  Additionally, display templates are stored under here. With this in mind, let us take a look at the index.cshtml file under the home view directory.  When you open up index.cshtml you should see 1:   @inherits System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage 2:  @{ 3:          View.Title = "Home Page"; 4:       LayoutPage = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; 5:   } 6:  <h2>@View.Message</h2> 7:  <p> 8:     To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC     9:    Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. 10:  </p> So looking through this, we observe the following facts: Line 1 imports the base page that all views (using Razor) are based on, which is System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.  Note that this is different than System.Web.MVC.ViewPage which is used by asp.net MVC 2.0 Also note that instead of the <% %> syntax, we use the very simple ‘@’ sign.  The View Engine contains enough context sensitive logic that it can even distinguish between @ in code and @ in an email.  It’s a very clean markup.  Line 2 introduces the idea of a code block in razor.  A code block is a scoping mechanism just like it is in a normal C# class.  It is designated by @{… }  and any C# code can be placed in between.  Note that this is all server side code just like it is when using the aspx engine and <% %>.  Line 3 allows us to set the page title in the client page’s file.  This is a new feature which I’ll talk more about when we get to master pages, but it is another of the nice things razor brings to asp.net mvc development. Line 4 is where we specify our “master” page, but as you can see, you can place it almost anywhere you want, because you tell it where it is located.  A Layout Page is similar to a master page, but it gains a bit when it comes to flexibility.  Again, we’ll come back to this in a later installment.  Line 6 and beyond is where we display the contents of our view.  No more using <%: %> intermixed with code.  Instead, we get to use very clean syntax such as @View.Message.  This is a lot easier to read than <%:@View.Message%> especially when intermixed with html.  For example: <p> My name is @View.Name and I live at @View.Address </p> Compare this to the equivalent using the aspx view engine <p> My name is <%:View.Name %> and I live at <%: View.Address %> </p> While not an earth shaking simplification, it is easier on the eyes.  As  we explore other features, this clean markup will become more and more valuable.

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• Using Table-Valued Parameters in SQL Server

  - by Jesse

  I work with stored procedures in SQL Server pretty frequently and have often found myself with a need to pass in a list of values at run-time. Quite often this list contains a set of ids on which the stored procedure needs to operate the size and contents of which are not known at design time. In the past I’ve taken the collection of ids (which are usually integers), converted them to a string representation where each value is separated by a comma and passed that string into a VARCHAR parameter of a stored procedure. The body of the stored procedure would then need to parse that string into a table variable which could be easily consumed with set-based logic within the rest of the stored procedure. This approach works pretty well but the VARCHAR variable has always felt like an un-wanted “middle man” in this scenario. Of course, I could use a BULK INSERT operation to load the list of ids into a temporary table that the stored procedure could use, but that approach seems heavy-handed in situations where the list of values is usually going to contain only a few dozen values. Fortunately SQL Server 2008 introduced the concept of table-valued parameters which effectively eliminates the need for the clumsy middle man VARCHAR parameter. Example: Customer Transaction Summary Report Let’s say we have a report that can summarize the the transactions that we’ve conducted with customers over a period of time. The report returns a pretty simple dataset containing one row per customer with some key metrics about how much business that customer has conducted over the date range for which the report is being run. Sometimes the report is run for a single customer, sometimes it’s run for all customers, and sometimes it’s run for a handful of customers (i.e. a salesman runs it for the customers that fall into his sales territory). This report can be invoked from a website on-demand, or it can be scheduled for periodic delivery to certain users via SQL Server Reporting Services. Because the report can be created from different places and the query to generate the report is complex it’s been packed into a stored procedure that accepts three parameters: @startDate – The beginning of the date range for which the report should be run. @endDate – The end of the date range for which the report should be run. @customerIds – The customer Ids for which the report should be run. Obviously, the @startDate and @endDate parameters are DATETIME variables. The @customerIds parameter, however, needs to contain a list of the identity values (primary key) from the Customers table representing the customers that were selected for this particular run of the report. In prior versions of SQL Server we might have made this parameter a VARCHAR variable, but with SQL Server 2008 we can make it into a table-valued parameter. Defining And Using The Table Type In order to use a table-valued parameter, we first need to tell SQL Server about what the table will look like. We do this by creating a user defined type. For the purposes of this stored procedure we need a very simple type to model a table variable with a single integer column. We can create a generic type called ‘IntegerListTableType’ like this: CREATE TYPE IntegerListTableType AS TABLE (Value INT NOT NULL) Once defined, we can use this new type to define the @customerIds parameter in the signature of our stored procedure. The parameter list for the stored procedure definition might look like: 1: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 2: @starDate datetime, 3: @endDate datetime, 4: @customerIds IntegerListTableTableType READONLY   Note the ‘READONLY’ statement following the declaration of the @customerIds parameter. SQL Server requires any table-valued parameter be marked as ‘READONLY’ and no DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) statements can be performed on a table-valued parameter within the routine in which it’s used. Aside from the DML restriction, however, you can do pretty much anything with a table-valued parameter as you could with a normal TABLE variable. With the user defined type and stored procedure defined as above, we could invoke like this: 1: DECLARE @cusomterIdList IntegerListTableType 2: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (1) 3: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (2) 4: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (3) 5:  6: EXEC dbo.rpt_CustomerTransationSummary 7: @startDate = '2012-05-01', 8: @endDate = '2012-06-01' 9: @customerIds = @customerIdList   Note that we can simply declare a variable of type ‘IntegerListTableType’ just like any other normal variable and insert values into it just like a TABLE variable. We could also populate the variable with a SELECT … INTO or INSERT … SELECT statement if desired. Using The Table-Valued Parameter With ADO .NET Invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET is as simple as building a DataTable and passing it in as the Value of a SqlParameter. Here’s some example code for how we would construct the SqlParameter for the @customerIds parameter in our stored procedure: 1: var customerIdsParameter = new SqlParameter(); 2: customerIdParameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input; 3: customerIdParameter.TypeName = "IntegerListTableType"; 4: customerIdParameter.Value = selectedCustomerIds.ToIntegerListDataTable("Value");   All we’re doing here is new’ing up an instance of SqlParameter, setting the pamameters direction, specifying the name of the User Defined Type that this parameter uses, and setting its value. We’re assuming here that we have an IEnumerable<int> variable called ‘selectedCustomerIds’ containing all of the customer Ids for which the report should be run. The ‘ToIntegerListDataTable’ method is an extension method of the IEnumerable<int> type that looks like this: 1: public static DataTable ToIntegerListDataTable(this IEnumerable<int> intValues, string columnName) 2: { 3: var intergerListDataTable = new DataTable(); 4: intergerListDataTable.Columns.Add(columnName); 5: foreach(var intValue in intValues) 6: { 7: var nextRow = intergerListDataTable.NewRow(); 8: nextRow[columnName] = intValue; 9: intergerListDataTable.Rows.Add(nextRow); 10: } 11:  12: return intergerListDataTable; 13: }   Since the ‘IntegerListTableType’ has a single int column called ‘Value’, we pass that in for the ‘columnName’ parameter to the extension method. The method creates a new single-columned DataTable using the provided column name then iterates over the items in the IEnumerable<int> instance adding one row for each value. We can then use this SqlParameter instance when invoking the stored procedure just like we would use any other parameter. Advanced Functionality Using passing a list of integers into a stored procedure is a very simple usage scenario for the table-valued parameters feature, but I’ve found that it covers the majority of situations where I’ve needed to pass a collection of data for use in a query at run-time. I should note that BULK INSERT feature still makes sense for passing large amounts of data to SQL Server for processing. MSDN seems to suggest that 1000 rows of data is the tipping point where the overhead of a BULK INSERT operation can pay dividends. I should also note here that table-valued parameters can be used to deal with more complex data structures than single-columned tables of integers. A User Defined Type that backs a table-valued parameter can use things like identities and computed columns. That said, using some of these more advanced features might require the use the SqlDataRecord and SqlMetaData classes instead of a simple DataTable. Erland Sommarskog has a great article on his website that describes when and how to use these classes for table-valued parameters. What About Reporting Services? Earlier in the post I referenced the fact that our example stored procedure would be called from both a web application and a SQL Server Reporting Services report. Unfortunately, using table-valued parameters from SSRS reports can be a bit tricky and warrants its own blog post which I’ll be putting together and posting sometime in the near future.

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• Portal And Content - Content Integration - Best Practices

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have seen an increase in projects that have failed to either get user friendly content integration or non satisfactory performance. Our intention is to mitigate any knowledge gap that our previous post might have left you with, therefore this post will repeat some recommendation or reference back to old useful post. Moreover this post will help you understand ground up how to design, architect and implement business enabled, responsive and performing portals with complex requirements on business centric information publishing. Design the Information Model The key to successful portal deployments is Information modeling, it's a key task to understand the use case you designing for, therefore I have designed a set of question you need to ask yourself or your customer: Question: Who will own the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Who will publish the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Will there be multiple publishers? Answer: YesQuestion: Are the publishers computer scientist?Answer: NoQuestion: How often do the information changes, daily, weekly, monthly?Answer: Daily, weekly If your answers to the questions matches at least 2, we strongly recommend you design your content with following principles: Divide your pages in to logical sections, where each section is marked with its purpose Assign capabilities to each section, does it contain text, images, formatting and/or is it static and is populated through other contextual information Select editor/design element type WYSIWYG - Rich Text Plain Text - non-format text Image - Image object Static List - static list of formatted informationDynamic Data List - assembled information from multiple data files through CMIS query The result of such design map could look like following below examples: Based on the outcome of the required elements in the design column 3 from the left you will now simply design a data model in WebCenter Content - Site Studio by creating a Region Definition structure matching your design requirements.For more information on how to create a Region definition see following post: Region Definition Post - note see instruction 7 for details. Each region definition can now be used to instantiate data files, a data file will hold the actual data for each element in the region definition. Another way you can see this is to compare the region definition as an extension to the metadata model in WebCenter Content for each data file item. Design content templates With a solid dependable information model we can now proceed to template creation and page design, in this phase focuses on how to place the content sections from the region definition on the page via a Content Presenter template. Remember by creating content presenter templates you will leverage the latest and most integrated technology WebCenter has to offer. This phase is much easier since the you already have the information model and design wire-frames to base the logic on, however there is still few considerations to pay attention to: Base the template on ADF and make only necessary exceptions to markup when required Leverage ADF design components for Tabs, Accordions and other similar components, this way the design in the content published areas will comply with other design areas based on custom ADF taskflows There is no performance impact when using meta data or region definition based data All data access regardless of type, metadata or xml data it can be accessed via the Content Presenter - Node. See below for applied examples on how to access data Access metadata property from Document - #{node.propertyMap['myProp'].value}myProp in this example can be for instance (dDocName, dDocTitle, xComments or any other available metadata) Access element data from data file xml - #{node.propertyMap['[Region Definition Name]:[Element name]'].asTextHtml}Region Definition Name is the expect region definition that the current data file is instantiatingElement name is the element value you like to grab from the data file I recommend you read following  useful post on content template topic:CMIS queries and template creation - note see instruction 9 for detailsStatic List template rendering For more information on templates:Single Item Content TemplateMulti Item Content TemplateExpression Language Internationalization Considerations When integrating content assets via content presenter you by now probably understand that the content item/data file is wired to the page, what is also pretty common at this stage is that the content item/data file only support one language since its not practical or business friendly to mix that into a complex structure. Therefore you will be left with a very common dilemma that you will have to either build a complete new portal for each locale, which is not an good option! However with little bit of information modeling and clear naming convention this can be addressed. Basically you can simply make sure that all content item/data file are named with a predictable naming convention like "Content1_EN" for the English rendition and "Content1_ES" for the Spanish rendition. This way through simple none complex customizations you will be able to dynamically switch the actual content item/data file just before rendering. By following proposed approach above you not only enable a simple mechanism for internationalized content you also preserve the functionality in the content presenter to support business accessible run-time publishing of information on existing and new pages. I recommend you read following useful post on Internationalization topics:Internationalize with Content Presenter Integrate with Review & Approval processes Today the Review and approval functionality and configuration is based out of WebCenter Content - Criteria Workflows. Criteria Workflows uses the metadata of the checked in document to evaluate if the document is under any review/approval process. So for instance if a Criteria Workflow is configured to force any documents with Version = "2" or "higher" and Content Type is "Instructions", any matching content item version on check in will now enter the workflow before getting released for general access. Few things to consider when configuring Criteria Workflows: Make sure to not trigger on version one for Content Items that are Data Files - if you trigger on version 1 you will not only approve an empty document you will also have a content presenter pointing to a none existing document - since the document will only be available after successful completion of the workflow Approval workflows sometimes requires more complex criteria, the recommendation if that is the case is that the meta data triggering such criteria is automatically populated, this can be achieved through many approaches including Content Profiles Criteria workflows are configured and managed in WebCenter Content Administration Applets where you can configure one or more workflows. When you configured Criteria workflows the Content Presenter will support the editors with the approval process directly inline in the "Contribution mode" of the portal. In addition to approve/reject and details of the task, the content presenter natively support the user to view the current and future version of the change he/she is approving. See below for example: Architectural recommendation To support review&approval processes - minimize the amount of data files per page Each CMIS query can consume significant time depending on the complexity of the query - minimize the amount of CMIS queries per page Use Content Presenter Templates based on ADF - this way you minimize the design considerations and optimize the usage of caching Implement the page in as few Data files as possible - simplifies publishing process, increases performance and simplifies release process Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages increases performance vs. querying for data Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages enables business centric page creation and publishing and reduces the need for IT department interaction Summary Just because one architectural decision solves a business problem it doesn't mean its the right one, when designing portals all architecture has to be in harmony and not impacting each other. For instance the most technical complex solution is not always the best since it will most likely defeat the business accessibility, performance or both, therefore the best approach is to first design for simplicity that even a non-technical user can operate, after that consider the performance impact and final look at the technology challenges these brings and workaround them first with out-of-the-box features, after that design and develop functions to complement the short comings.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010New Projects3D Calculator: 3D Calc is a simple calculator application for Windows Phone 7, the purpose of this project is to demo the 3D animations capabilities of WP7 and sh...azaleas: AzaleasBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Breck: A Phoenix and Jumper Moneky Production: Breck is a first person non-violent shooter developed in C++ and Dark GDK. After the main game is developed we are looking into making a sequel or...Discuz! Forum SDK: This project is use to login in and post or reply topic on discuz forum.Dominion.NET: Evolving Dominion source code originally written in VB6 and posted by "jatill" on Collectible Card Game Headquarters. Migration of the design and s...EkspSys2010-ITR: A mini project for the course Experimental System devolopment in spring 2010Facebook Graph Toolkit: This project is a .Net implementation of the Facebook Graph API. The aim of this project is to be a replacement to the existing Facebook Toolkit (h...iFree: This is a solution for Vietnamese network socialInfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor for developer allows user to modify the html text directly inside InfoPath designer or filler and push the change back to InfoPath ...iZeit: Run your own online calendar, with blog integration, recurrence, todo list and categories.machgos dotNet Tests: Just some little test-projects for learningmim: TBAMinePost: MinePost is a game made for the first 48 hour Reddit Game Jam.Mockina: Mockina is a mock framework. Expression tree syntax is used to specify which members to mock, both public and non-public. The code is easy to under...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): This is just another shell extension for MSBuild to enable quick execution of MSBuild scripts via Windows Explorer context menu. (C) 2010 Lex LiPeacock: A browser like tabbed applicationPrimeCalculation: PrimeCalculation is a .NET app to calculate primes in a given range. Speed on Core2Duo 2,4GHZ: Found all primes from 0 to 1 billion in 35 seconds (...Slightly Silverlight: A Framework that leverages Silverlight for processing, business logic but standard HTML for the presentation layer.Stopwatch: Stopwatch is a tool for measuring the time. To start and pause stopwatch you only need to press a key on the keyboard. An additional context menu a...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib is an XML Serialization library which helps you structure freely the XML result, choose among private and public fields to be serialized, an...New ReleasesActivate Your Glutes: v1.0.3.0: This release is a migration to VS2010, .Net 4, MVC2 and Entity Framework 4. The code has also been considerably cleaned up - taking advantage of E...AnyCAD: AnyCAD.Free.ENU.v1.1: http://www.anycad.net Modeling •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extrude, Loft, Chamfer, Sweep, Revol •Boolean: ...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 多功能计算器 3.5: 稳定版本。Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Ver 1.0.0.0: First release of a Static LLBLGen Pro Data Context Driver for LINQPad I recommend LINQPad 4 as it seems more stable with this driver than LINQPad 2.DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: Release 1.2. Some behaviour has changed!!: Attention. Some behaviour has changed! Now its necessary to use WildCards in the pattern-parameter for DSQLT.AllSourceContains DSQLT.Databases DSQ...FDS AutoCAD plug-in: FDS to AutoCAD plug-in: Basic functionality was implemented. Some routines like setting fds executable location are still not automated.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX 2 - Standalone FX: Background: The Feature Builder Guidance is extensible and displays guidance content supplied by all the Feature Builder Guidance Extensions (FBGX...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R3: - You can now right click on the input box to get options for toggling bold, underline, colors, etc. - The size of the nickname column is now saved...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R4: - A user's channel status now appears next to their nick when they talk (e.g. @Nick or +Nick) - Fixed an error where certain kinds of network probl...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET Downloader v1.0: Version 1.0 Thanks to Wolfgang for all his help. I let this project languish for too long while focusing on other things, but his involvement has ...InfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor Beta 1: Intial Release: Can load InfoPath inner html. Can edit InfoPath inner html. InfoPath 2007 only.LinkSharp: LinkSharp 0.1.0: First release of LinkSharp. Set up iis, and use the sql script to create a new database.PowerAuras: PowerAuras V3.0.0F: This version adds better integration with GTFO New Flags Added PvP flag In 5-Man Instance In Raid Instance In Battleground In ArenaRx Contrib: V1.4: Add the ability to catch internal exception and the ability to publish error by queue adaptersSEO SiteMap: SEO SiteMap RC1: -SevenZipLib Library: v9.13.2: Stable release associated with 7z.dll 9.13 beta. Ability to create and update archives not implemente yet.Silverlight / WPF Controls: Upload, FlipPanel, DeepZoom, Animation, Encryption: Code Camp Demonstration: This code example demonstrates MVVM/MEF with WPF with attached properties,security and custom ICommand class.SQL Data Capture - Black Box Application Testing: SQLDataCapture V1.2: Added Entity Framework Support to CRUD generator (Insert Stored Procedure) and switched to VS 2010 for development.Stopwatch: Stopwatch 0.1: Stopwatch Release 0.1VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30515.0: Automatic drop of latest buildYet another developer blog - Examples: Asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery TreeView plugin for creating an asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC. This application is accompani...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersMirror Testing SystemN2 CMSStyleCop

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• Parallel LINQ - PLINQ

  - by nmarun

  Turns out now with .net 4.0 we can run a query like a multi-threaded application. Say you want to query a collection of objects and return only those that meet certain conditions. Until now, we basically had one ‘control’ that iterated over all the objects in the collection, checked the condition on each object and returned if it passed. We obviously agree that if we can ‘break’ this task into smaller ones, assign each task to a different ‘control’ and ask all the controls to do their job - in-parallel, the time taken the finish the entire task will be much lower. Welcome to PLINQ. Let’s take some examples. I have the following method that uses our good ol’ LINQ. 1: private static void Linq(int lowerLimit, int upperLimit) 2: { 3: // populate an array with int values from lowerLimit to the upperLimit 4: var source = Enumerable.Range(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 5:  6: // Start a timer 7: Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); 8: stopwatch.Start(); 9:  10: // set the expectation => build the expression tree 11: var evenNumbers =   from num in source 12: where IsDivisibleBy(num, 2) 13: select num; 14: 15: // iterate over and print the returned items 16: foreach (var number in evenNumbers) 17: { 18: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("** {0}", number)); 19: } 20:  21: stopwatch.Stop(); 22:  23: // check the metrics 24: Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Elapsed {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds)); 25: } I’ve added comments for the major steps, but the only thing I want to talk about here is the IsDivisibleBy() method. I know I could have just included the logic directly in the where clause. I called a method to add ‘delay’ to the execution of the query - to simulate a loooooooooong operation (will be easier to compare the results). 1: private static bool IsDivisibleBy(int number, int divisor) 2: { 3: // iterate over some database query 4: // to add time to the execution of this method; 5: // the TableB has around 10 records 6: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) 7: { 8: DataClasses1DataContext dataContext = new DataClasses1DataContext(); 9: var query = from b in dataContext.TableBs select b; 10: 11: foreach (var row in query) 12: { 13: // Do NOTHING (wish my job was like this) 14: } 15: } 16:  17: return number % divisor == 0; 18: } Now, let’s look at how to modify this to PLINQ. 1: private static void Plinq(int lowerLimit, int upperLimit) 2: { 3: // populate an array with int values from lowerLimit to the upperLimit 4: var source = Enumerable.Range(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 5:  6: // Start a timer 7: Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); 8: stopwatch.Start(); 9:  10: // set the expectation => build the expression tree 11: var evenNumbers = from num in source.AsParallel() 12: where IsDivisibleBy(num, 2) 13: select num; 14:  15: // iterate over and print the returned items 16: foreach (var number in evenNumbers) 17: { 18: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("** {0}", number)); 19: } 20:  21: stopwatch.Stop(); 22:  23: // check the metrics 24: Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Elapsed {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds)); 25: } That’s it, this is now in PLINQ format. Oh and if you haven’t found the difference, look line 11 a little more closely. You’ll see an extension method ‘AsParallel()’ added to the ‘source’ variable. Couldn’t be more simpler right? So this is going to improve the performance for us. Let’s test it. So in my Main method of the Console application that I’m working on, I make a call to both. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: // set lower and upper limits 4: int lowerLimit = 1; 5: int upperLimit = 20; 6: // call the methods 7: Console.WriteLine("Calling Linq() method"); 8: Linq(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 9: 10: Console.WriteLine(); 11: Console.WriteLine("Calling Plinq() method"); 12: Plinq(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 13:  14: Console.ReadLine(); // just so I get enough time to read the output 15: } YMMV, but here are the results that I got:    It’s quite obvious from the above results that the Plinq() method is taking considerably less time than the Linq() version. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that the output of the Plinq() method is not in order. That’s because, each of the ‘control’s we sent to fetch the results, reported with values as and when they obtained them. This is something about parallel LINQ that one needs to remember – the collection cannot be guaranteed to be undisturbed. This could be counted as a negative about PLINQ (emphasize ‘could’). Nevertheless, if we want the collection to be sorted, we can use a SortedSet (.net 4.0) or build our own custom ‘sorter’. Either way we go, there’s a good chance we’ll end up with a better performance using PLINQ. And there’s another negative of PLINQ (depending on how you see it). This is regarding the CPU cycles. See the usage for Linq() method (used ResourceMonitor): I have dual CPU’s and see the height of the peak in the bottom two blocks and now compare to what happens when I run the Plinq() method. The difference is obvious. Higher usage, but for a shorter duration (width of the peak). Both these points make sense in both cases. Linq() runs for a longer time, but uses less resources whereas Plinq() runs for a shorter time and consumes more resources. Even after knowing all these, I’m still inclined towards PLINQ. PLINQ rocks! (no hard feelings LINQ)

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• Conversion of BizTalk Projects to Use the New WCF-SAP Adaptor

  - by Geordie

  We are in the process of upgrading our BizTalk Environment from BizTalk 2006 R2 to BizTalk 2010. The SAP adaptor in BizTalk 2010 is an all new and more powerful WCF-SAP adaptor. When my colleagues tested out the new adaptor they discovered that the format of the data extracted from SAP was not identical to the old adaptor. This is not a big deal if the structure of the messages from SAP is simple. In this case we were receiving the delivery and invoice iDocs. Both these structures are complex especially the delivery document. Over the past few years I have tweaked the delivery mapping to remove bugs from original mapping. The idea of redoing these maps did not appeal and due to the current work load was not even an option. I opted for a rather crude alternative of pulling in the iDoc in the new typed format and then adding a static map at the start of the orchestration to convert the data to the old schema.  Note WCF-SAP data formats (on the binding tab of the configuration dialog box is the ‘RecieiveIdocFormat’ field): Typed:  Returns a XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML and all fields being represented by XML tags. RFC: Returns an XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML but the iDoc lines in flat file format. String: This returns the iDoc in a format that is closest to the original flat file format but is still wrapped with some top level XML tags. The files also contained some strange characters at the end of each line. I started with the invoice document and it was quite straight forward to add the mapping but this is where my problems started. The orchestrations for these documents are dynamic and so require the identity of the partner to be able to correctly configure the orchestration. The partner identity is in the EDI_DC40 segment of the iDoc. In the old project the RECPRN node of the segment was promoted. The code to set a variable to the partner ID was now failing. After lot of head scratching I discovered the problem was due to the addition of Namespaces to the fields in the EDI_DC40 segment. To overcome this I needed to use an xPath query with a Namespace Manager. This had to be done in custom code. I now tried to repeat the process with the delivery document. Unfortunately when we tried to get sample typed data from SAP an exception was thrown. The adapter "WCF-SAP" raised an error message. Details "Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.XmlReaderGenerationException: The segment or group definition E2EDKA1001 was not found in the IDoc metadata. The UniqueId of the IDoc type is: IDOCTYP/3/DESADV01/ZASNEXT1/640. For Receive operations, the SAP adapter does not support unreleased segments.   Our guess is that when the WCF-SAP adaptor tries to down load the data it retrieves a data schema from SAP. For some reason the schema does not match the data. This may be due to the version of SAP we are running or due to a customization. Either way resolving this problem did not look easy. When doing some research on this problem I found an article showing me how to get the data from SAP using the WCF-SAP adaptor without any XML tags. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adapters/archive/2007/10/05/receiving-idocs-getting-the-raw-idoc-data.aspx Reproduction of Mustansir blog: Since the WCF based SAP Adapter is ... well, WCF based, all data flowing in and out of the adapter is encapsulated within a SOAP message. Which means there are those pesky xml tags all over the place. If you want to receive an Idoc from SAP, you can receive it in "Typed" format (in which case each column in each segment of the idoc appears within its own xml tag), or you can receive it in "String" format (in which case there are just 2 xml tags at the top, the raw xml data in string/flat file format, and the 2 closing xml tags). In "String" format, an incoming idoc (for ORDERS05, containing 5 data records) would look like: <ReceiveIdoc ><idocData>EDI_DC40 8000000000001064985620 E2EDK01005 800000000000106498500000100000001 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000002000000020111000 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000003000000020081000 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000040000000200710 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000050000000200600</idocData></ReceiveIdoc> (I have trimmed part of the control record so that it fits cleanly here on one line). Now, you're only interested in the IDOC data, and don't care much for the XML tags. It isn't that difficult to write your own pipeline component, or even some logic in the orchestration to remove the tags, right? Well, you don't need to write any extra code at all - the WCF Adapter can help you here! During the configuration of your one-way Receive Location using WCF-Custom, navigate to the Messages tab. Under the section "Inbound BizTalk Messge Body", select the "Path" radio button, and: (a) Enter the body path expression as: /*[local-name()='ReceiveIdoc']/*[local-name()='idocData'] (b) Choose "String" for the Node Encoding. What we've done is, used an XPATH to pull out the value of the "idocData" node from the XML. Your Receive Location will now emit text containing only the idoc data. You can at this point, for example, put the Flat File Pipeline component to convert the flat text into a different xml format based on some other schema you already have, and receive your version of the xml formatted message in your orchestration.   This was potentially a much easier solution than adding the static maps to the orchestrations and overcame the issue with ‘Typed’ delivery documents. Not quite so fast… Note: When I followed Mustansir’s blog the characters at the end of each line disappeared. After configuring the adaptor and passing the iDoc data into the original flat file receive pipelines I was receiving exceptions. There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "PAPINETPipelines.DeliveryFlatFileReceive, CustomerIntegration2.PAPINET.Pipelines, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4ca3635fbf092bbb" Source: "Pipeline " Receive Port: "recSAP_Delivery" URI: "D:\CustomerIntegration2\SAP\Delivery\*.xml" Reason: An error occurred when parsing the incoming document: "Unexpected data found while looking for: 'Z2EDPZ7' The current definition being parsed is E2EDP07GRP. The stream offset where the error occured is 8859. The line number where the error occured is 23. The column where the error occured is 0.". Although the new flat file looked the same as the old one there was a differences. In the original file all lines in the document were exactly 1064 character long. In the new file all lines were truncated to the last alphanumeric character. The final piece of the puzzle was to add a custom pipeline component to pad all the lines to 1064 characters. This component was added to the decode node of the custom delivery and invoice flat file disassembler pipelines. Execute method of the custom pipeline component: public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pc, IBaseMessage inmsg) { //Convert Stream to a string Stream s = null; IBaseMessagePart bodyPart = inmsg.BodyPart;   // NOTE inmsg.BodyPart.Data is implemented only as a setter in the http adapter API and a //getter and setter for the file adapter. Use GetOriginalDataStream to get data instead. if (bodyPart != null) s = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();   string newMsg = string.Empty; string strLine; try { StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s); strLine = sr.ReadLine(); while (strLine != null) { //Execute padding code if (strLine != null) strLine = strLine.PadRight(1064, ' ') + "\r\n"; newMsg += strLine; strLine = sr.ReadLine(); } sr.Close(); } catch (IOException ex) { throw new Exception("Error occured trying to pad the message to 1064 charactors"); }   //Convert back to stream and set to Data property inmsg.BodyPart.Data = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(newMsg)); ; //reset the position of the stream to zero inmsg.BodyPart.Data.Position = 0; return inmsg; }

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• DTracing a PHPUnit Test: Looking at Functional Programming

  - by cj

  Here's a quick example of using DTrace Dynamic Tracing to work out what a PHP code base does. I was reading the article Functional Programming in PHP by Patkos Csaba and wondering how efficient this stype of programming is. I thought this would be a good time to fire up DTrace and see what is going on. Since DTrace is "always available" even in production machines (once PHP is compiled with --enable-dtrace), this was easy to do. I have Oracle Linux with the UEK3 kernel and PHP 5.5 with DTrace static probes enabled, as described in DTrace PHP Using Oracle Linux 'playground' Pre-Built Packages I installed the Functional Programming sample code and Sebastian Bergmann's PHPUnit. Although PHPUnit is included in the Functional Programming example, I found it easier to separately download and use its phar file: cd ~/Desktop wget -O master.zip https://github.com/tutsplus/functional-programming-in-php/archive/master.zip wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar unzip master.zip I created a DTrace D script functree.d: #pragma D option quiet self int indent; BEGIN { topfunc = $1; } php$target:::function-entry /copyinstr(arg0) == topfunc/ { self->follow = 1; } php$target:::function-entry /self->follow/ { self->indent += 2; printf("%*s %s%s%s\n", self->indent, "->", arg3?copyinstr(arg3):"", arg4?copyinstr(arg4):"", copyinstr(arg0)); } php$target:::function-return /self->follow/ { printf("%*s %s%s%s\n", self->indent, "<-", arg3?copyinstr(arg3):"", arg4?copyinstr(arg4):"", copyinstr(arg0)); self->indent -= 2; } php$target:::function-return /copyinstr(arg0) == topfunc/ { self->follow = 0; } This prints a PHP script function call tree starting from a given PHP function name. This name is passed as a parameter to DTrace, and assigned to the variable topfunc when the DTrace script starts. With this D script, choose a PHP function that isn't recursive, or modify the script to set self->follow = 0 only when all calls to that function have unwound. From looking at the sample FunSets.php code and its PHPUnit test driver FunSetsTest.php, I settled on one test function to trace: function testUnionContainsAllElements() { ... } I invoked DTrace to trace function calls invoked by this test with # dtrace -s ./functree.d -c 'php phpunit.phar \ /home/cjones/Desktop/functional-programming-in-php-master/FunSets/Tests/FunSetsTest.php' \ '"testUnionContainsAllElements"' The core of this command is a call to PHP to run PHPUnit on the FunSetsTest.php script. Outside that, DTrace is called and the PID of PHP is passed to the D script $target variable so the probes fire just for this invocation of PHP. Note the quoting around the PHP function name passed to DTrace. The parameter must have double quotes included so DTrace knows it is a string. The output is: PHPUnit 3.7.28 by Sebastian Bergmann. ......-> FunSetsTest::testUnionContainsAllElements -> FunSets::singletonSet <- FunSets::singletonSet -> FunSets::singletonSet <- FunSets::singletonSet -> FunSets::union <- FunSets::union -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertFalse -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isFalse -> {closure} -> main <- main <- {closure} <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isFalse -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsFalse::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsFalse::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertFalse <- FunSetsTest::testUnionContainsAllElements ... Time: 1.85 seconds, Memory: 3.75Mb OK (9 tests, 23 assertions) The periods correspond to the successful tests before and after (and from) the test I was tracing. You can see the function entry ("->") and return ("<-") points. Cross checking with the testUnionContainsAllElements() source code confirms the two singletonSet() calls, one union() call, two assertTrue() calls and finally an assertFalse() call. These assertions have a contains() call as a parameter, so contains() is called before the PHPUnit assertion functions are run. You can see contains() being called recursively, and how the closures are invoked. If you want to focus on the application logic and suppress the PHPUnit function trace, you could turn off tracing when assertions are being checked by adding D clauses checking the entry and exit of assertFalse() and assertTrue(). But if you want to see all of PHPUnit's code flow, you can modify the functree.d code that sets and unsets self-follow, and instead change it to toggle the variable in request-startup and request-shutdown probes: php$target:::request-startup { self->follow = 1 } php$target:::request-shutdown { self->follow = 0 } Be prepared for a large amount of output!

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• Combination of Operating Mode and Commit Strategy

  - by Kevin Yang

  If you want to populate a source into multiple targets, you may also want to ensure that every row from the source affects all targets uniformly (or separately). Let’s consider the Example Mapping below. If a row from SOURCE causes different changes in multiple targets (TARGET_1, TARGET_2 and TARGET_3), for example, it can be successfully inserted into TARGET_1 and TARGET_3, but failed to be inserted into TARGET_2, and the current Mapping Property TLO (target load order) is “TARGET_1 -> TARGET_2 -> TARGET_3”. What should Oracle Warehouse Builder do, in order to commit the appropriate data to all affected targets at the same time? If it doesn’t behave as you intended, the data could become inaccurate and possibly unusable.                                               Example Mapping In OWB, we can use Mapping Configuration Commit Strategies and Operating Modes together to achieve this kind of requirements. Below we will explore the combination of these two features and how they affect the results in the target tables Before going to the example, let’s review some of the terms we will be using (Details can be found in white paper Oracle® Warehouse Builder Data Modeling, ETL, and Data Quality Guide11g Release 2): Operating Modes: Set-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a single SQL statement that processes all data and performs all operations. Row-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates statements that process data row by row. The select statement is in a SQL cursor. All subsequent statements are PL/SQL. Row-Based (Target Only) Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a cursor select statement and attempts to include as many operations as possible in the cursor. For each target, Warehouse Builder inserts each row into the target separately. Commit Strategies: Automatic: Warehouse Builder loads and then automatically commits data based on the mapping design. If the mapping has multiple targets, Warehouse Builder commits and rolls back each target separately and independently of other targets. Use the automatic commit when the consequences of multiple targets being loaded unequally are not great or are irrelevant. Automatic correlated: It is a specialized type of automatic commit that applies to PL/SQL mappings with multiple targets only. Warehouse Builder considers all targets collectively and commits or rolls back data uniformly across all targets. Use the correlated commit when it is important to ensure that every row in the source affects all affected targets uniformly. Manual: select manual commit control for PL/SQL mappings when you want to interject complex business logic, perform validations, or run other mappings before committing data. Combination of the commit strategy and operating mode To understand the effects of each combination of operating mode and commit strategy, I’ll illustrate using the following example Mapping. Firstly we insert 100 rows into the SOURCE table and make sure that the 99th row and 100th row have the same ID value. And then we create a unique key constraint on ID column for TARGET_2 table. So while running the example mapping, OWB tries to load all 100 rows to each of the targets. But the mapping should fail to load the 100th row to TARGET_2, because it will violate the unique key constraint of table TARGET_2. With different combinations of Commit Strategy and Operating Mode, here are the results ¦ Set-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                     Result:                                                      What’s happening: A single error anywhere in the mapping triggers the rollback of all data. OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it reports an error for the table and does not load the row. OWB rolls back all the rows inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load rows to Target_3. No rows are added to any of the target tables. ¦ Row-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                   Result:                                                  What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately and loads it to all three targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100th to Target_2. OWB reports the error and does not load the row. It rolls back the row 100th previously inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load row 100 to Target_3. Then, if there are remaining rows, OWB will continue loading them, resuming with loading rows to Target_1. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into each target. ¦ Set-based/ Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: When OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it does not load any rows and reports an error for the table. It does, however, continue to insert rows into Target_3 and does not roll back the rows previously inserted into Target_1. The mapping completes with one error message for Target_2, no rows inserted into Target_2, and 100 rows inserted into Target_1 and Target_3 separately. ¦ Row-based/Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately for loading into the targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100 to Target_2 and reports the error. OWB does not roll back row 100th from Target_1, does insert it into Target_3. If there are remaining rows, it will continue to load them. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into Target_2 and 100 rows inserted into each of the other targets. Note: Automatic Correlated commit is not applicable for row-based (target only). If you design a mapping with the row-based (target only) and correlated commit combination, OWB runs the mapping but does not perform the correlated commit. In set-based mode, correlated commit may impact the size of your rollback segments. Space for rollback segments may be a concern when you merge data (insert/update or update/insert). Correlated commit operates transparently with PL/SQL bulk processing code. The correlated commit strategy is not available for mappings run in any mode that are configured for Partition Exchange Loading or that include a Queue, Match Merge, or Table Function operator. If you want to practice in your own environment, you can follow the steps: 1. Import the MDL file: commit_operating_mode.mdl 2. Fix the location for oracle module ORCL and deploy all tables under it. 3. Insert sample records into SOURCE table, using below plsql code: begin     for i in 1..99     loop         insert into source values(i, 'col_'||i);     end loop;     insert into source values(99, 'col_99'); end; 4. Configure MAPPING_1 to any combinations of operating mode and commit strategy you want to test. And make sure feature TLO of mapping is open. 5. Deploy Mapping “MAPPING_1”. 6. Run the mapping and check the result.

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #052

  - by Pinal Dave

  Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Set Server Level FILLFACTOR Using T-SQL Script Specifies a percentage that indicates how full the Database Engine should make the leaf level of each index page during index creation or alteration. fillfactor must be an integer value from 1 to 100. The default is 0. Limitation of Online Index Rebuld Operation Online operation means when online operations are happening in the database are in normal operational condition, the processes which are participating in online operations does not require exclusive access to the database. Get Permissions of My Username / Userlogin on Server / Database A few days ago, I was invited to one of the largest database company. I was asked to review database schema and propose changes to it. There was special username or user logic was created for me, so I can review their database. I was very much interested to know what kind of permissions I was assigned per server level and database level. I did not feel like asking Sr. DBA the question about permissions. Simple Example of WHILE Loop With CONTINUE and BREAK Keywords This question is one of those questions which is very simple and most of the users get it correct, however few users find it confusing for the first time. I have tried to explain the usage of simple WHILE loop in the first example. BREAK keyword will exit the stop the while loop and control is moved to the next statement after the while loop. CONTINUE keyword skips all the statement after its execution and control is sent to the first statement of while loop. Forced Parameterization and Simple Parameterization – T-SQL and SSMS When the PARAMETERIZATION option is set to FORCED, any literal value that appears in a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement is converted to a parameter during query compilation. When the PARAMETERIZATION database option is SET to SIMPLE, the SQL Server query optimizer may choose to parameterize the queries. 2008 Transaction and Local Variables – Swap Variables – Update All At Once Concept Summary : Transaction have no effect over memory variables. When UPDATE statement is applied over any table (physical or memory) all the updates are applied at one time together when the statement is committed. First of all I suggest that you read the article listed above about the effect of transaction on local variant. As seen there local variables are independent of any transaction effect. Simulate INNER JOIN using LEFT JOIN statement – Performance Analysis Just a day ago, while I was working with JOINs I find one interesting observation, which has prompted me to create following example. Before we continue further let me make very clear that INNER JOIN should be used where it cannot be used and simulating INNER JOIN using any other JOINs will degrade the performance. If there are scopes to convert any OUTER JOIN to INNER JOIN it should be done with priority. 2009 Introduction to Business Intelligence – Important Terms & Definitions Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data from various data sources, thus providing enterprise users with reliable and timely information and analysis for improved decision making. Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key Candidate Key – A Candidate Key can be any column or a combination of columns that can qualify as unique key in database. There can be multiple Candidate Keys in one table. Each Candidate Key can qualify as Primary Key. Primary Key – A Primary Key is a column or a combination of columns that uniquely identify a record. Only one Candidate Key can be Primary Key. 2010 Taking Multiple Backup of Database in Single Command – Mirrored Database Backup I recently had a very interesting experience. In one of my recent consultancy works, I was told by our client that they are going to take the backup of the database and will also a copy of it at the same time. I expressed that it was surely possible if they were going to use a mirror command. In addition, they told me that whenever they take two copies of the database, the size of the database, is always reduced. Now this was something not clear to me, I said it was not possible and so I asked them to show me the script. Corrupted Backup File and Unsuccessful Restore The CTO, who was also present at the location, got very upset with this situation. He then asked when the last successful restore test was done. As expected, the answer was NEVER.There were no successful restore tests done before. During that time, I was present and I could clearly see the stress, confusion, carelessness and anger around me. I did not appreciate the feeling and I was pretty sure that no one in there wanted the atmosphere like me. 2011 TRACEWRITE – Wait Type – Wait Related to Buffer and Resolution SQL Trace is a SQL Server database engine technology which monitors specific events generated when various actions occur in the database engine. When any event is fired it goes through various stages as well various routes. One of the routes is Trace I/O Provider, which sends data to its final destination either as a file or rowset. DATEDIFF – Accuracy of Various Dateparts If you want to have accuracy in seconds, you need to use a different approach. In the first example, the accurate method is to find the number of seconds first and then divide it by 60 to convert it in minutes. Dedicated Access Control for SQL Server Express Edition http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Book Signing at SQLPASS 2012 Who I Am And How I Got Here – True Story as Blog Post If there was a shortcut to success – I want to know. I learnt SQL Server hard way and I am still learning. There are so many things, I have to learn. There is not enough time to learn everything which we want to learn. I am constantly working on it every day. I welcome you to join my journey as well. Please join me in my journey to learn SQL Server – more the merrier. Vacation, Travel and Study – A New Concept Even those who have advanced degrees and went to college for years, or even decades, find studying hard.  There is a difference between studying for a career and studying for a certification.  At least to get a degree there is a variety of subjects, with labs, exams, and practice problems to make things more interesting. Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with an example. Resolving SQL Server Connection Errors – SQL in Sixty Seconds #030 – Video One of the most famous errors related to SQL Server is about connecting to SQL Server itself. Here is how it goes, most of the time developers have worked with SQL Server and knows pretty much every error which they face during development language. However, hardly they install fresh SQL Server. As the installation of the SQL Server is a rare occasion unless you are a DBA who is responsible for such an instance – the error faced during installations are pretty rare as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• IntelliSense for Razor Hosting in non-Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When I posted my Razor Hosting article a couple of weeks ago I got a number of questions on how to get IntelliSense to work inside of Visual Studio while editing your templates. The answer to this question is mainly dependent on how Visual Studio recognizes assemblies, so a little background is required. If you open a template just on its own as a standalone file by clicking on it say in Explorer, Visual Studio will open up with the template in the editor, but you won’t get any IntelliSense on any of your related assemblies that you might be using by default. It’ll give Intellisense on base System namespace, but not on your imported assembly types. This makes sense: Visual Studio has no idea what the assembly associations for the single file are. There are two options available to you to make IntelliSense work for templates: Add the templates as included files to your non-Web project Add a BIN folder to your template’s folder and add all assemblies required there Including Templates in your Host Project By including templates into your Razor hosting project, Visual Studio will pick up the project’s assembly references and make IntelliSense available for any of the custom types in your project and on your templates. To see this work I moved the \Templates folder from the samples from the Debug\Bin folder into the project root and included the templates in the WinForm sample project. Here’s what this looks like in Visual Studio after the templates have been included:   Notice that I take my original example and type cast the Context object to the specific type that it actually represents – namely CustomContext – by using a simple code block: @{ CustomContext Model = Context as CustomContext; } After that assignment my Model local variable is in scope and IntelliSense works as expected. Note that you also will need to add any namespaces with the using command in this case: @using RazorHostingWinForm which has to be defined at the very top of a Razor document. BTW, while you can only pass in a single Context 'parameter’ to the template with the default template I’ve provided realize that you can also assign a complex object to Context. For example you could have a container object that references a variety of other objects which you can then cast to the appropriate types as needed: @{ ContextContainer container = Context as ContextContainer; CustomContext Model = container.Model; CustomDAO DAO = container.DAO; } and so forth. IntelliSense for your Custom Template Notice also that you can get IntelliSense for the top level template by specifying an inherits tag at the top of the document: @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost By specifying the above you can then get IntelliSense on your base template’s properties. For example, in my base template there are Request and Response objects. This is very useful especially if you end up creating custom templates that include your custom business objects as you can get effectively see full IntelliSense from the ‘page’ level down. For Html Help Builder for example, I’d have a Help object on the page and assuming I have the references available I can see all the way into that Help object without even having to do anything fancy. Note that the @inherits key is a GREAT and easy way to override the base template you normally specify as the default template. It allows you to create a custom template and as long as it inherits from the base template it’ll work properly. Since the last post I’ve also made some changes in the base template that allow hooking up some simple initialization logic so it gets much more easy to create custom templates and hook up custom objects with an IntializeTemplate() hook function that gets called with the Context and a Configuration object. These objects are objects you can pass in at runtime from your host application and then assign to custom properties on your template. For example the default implementation for RazorTemplateFolderHost does this: public override void InitializeTemplate(object context, object configurationData) { // Pick up configuration data and stuff into Request object RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration config = configurationData as RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration; this.Request.TemplatePath = config.TemplatePath; this.Request.TemplateRelativePath = config.TemplateRelativePath; // Just use the entire ConfigData as the model, but in theory // configData could contain many objects or values to set on // template properties this.Model = config.ConfigData as TModel; } to set up a strongly typed Model and the Request object. You can do much more complex hookups here of course and create complex base template pages that contain all the objects that you need in your code with strong typing. Adding a Bin folder to your Template’s Root Path Including templates in your host project works if you own the project and you’re the only one modifying the templates. However, if you are distributing the Razor engine as a templating/scripting solution as part of your application or development tool the original project is likely not available and so that approach is not practical. Another option you have is to add a Bin folder and add all the related assemblies into it. You can also add a Web.Config file with assembly references for any GAC’d assembly references that need to be associated with the templates. Between the web.config and bin folder Visual Studio can figure out how to provide IntelliSense. The Bin folder should contain: The RazorHosting.dll Your host project’s EXE or DLL – renamed to .dll if it’s an .exe Any external (bin folder) dependent assemblies Note that you most likely also want a reference to the host project if it contains references that are going to be used in templates. Visual Studio doesn’t recognize an EXE reference so you have to rename the EXE to DLL to make it work. Apparently the binary signature of EXE and DLL files are identical and it just works – learn something new everyday… For GAC assembly references you can add a web.config file to your template root. The Web.config file then should contain any full assembly references to GAC components: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true"> <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> <add assembly="System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> </assemblies> </compilation> </system.web> </configuration> And with that you should get full IntelliSense. Note that if you add a BIN folder and you also have the templates in your Visual Studio project Visual Studio will complain about reference conflicts as it’s effectively seeing both the project references and the ones in the bin folder. So it’s probably a good idea to use one or the other but not both at the same time :-) Seeing IntelliSense in your Razor templates is a big help for users of your templates. If you’re shipping an application level scripting solution especially it’ll be real useful for your template consumers/users to be able to get some quick help on creating customized templates – after all that’s what templates are all about – easy customization. Making sure that everything is referenced in your bin folder and web.config is a good idea and it’s great to see that Visual Studio (and presumably WebMatrix/Visual Web Developer as well) will be able to pick up your custom IntelliSense in Razor templates.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in Razor  

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• MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release – Foreign Keys Are In!

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1097 6254 Homework 52 14 7337 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Summary (aka TL/DR): Support for Foreign Key constraints has been one of the most requested feature enhancements for MySQL Cluster. We are therefore extremely excited to announce that Foreign Keys are part of the first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 – available for download, evaluation and feedback now! (Select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) In this blog, I will attempt to discuss the design rationale, implementation, configuration and steps to get started in evaluating the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release. Pace of Innovation It was only a couple of months ago that we announced the General Availability (GA) of MySQL Cluster 7.2, delivering 1 billion Queries per Minute, with 70x higher cross-shard JOIN performance, Memcached NoSQL key-value API and cross-data center replication.  This release has been a huge hit, with downloads and deployments quickly reaching record levels. The announcement of the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access lab release at today's MySQL Innovation Day event demonstrates the continued pace in Cluster development, and provides an opportunity for the community to evaluate and feedback on new features they want to see. What’s the Plan for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Well, Foreign Keys, as you may have gathered by now (!), and this is the focus of this first Labs Release. As with MySQL Cluster 7.2, we plan to publish a series of preview releases for 7.3 that will incrementally add new candidate features for a final GA release (subject to usual safe harbor statement below*), including: - New NoSQL APIs; - Features to automate the configuration and provisioning of multi-node clusters, on premise or in the cloud; - Performance and scalability enhancements; - Taking advantage of features in the latest MySQL 5.x Server GA. Design Rationale MySQL Cluster is designed as a “Not-Only-SQL” database. It combines attributes that enable users to blend the best of both relational and NoSQL technologies into solutions that deliver web scalability with 99.999% availability and real-time performance, including: Concurrent NoSQL and SQL access to the database; Auto-sharding with simple scale-out across commodity hardware; Multi-master replication with failover and recovery both within and across data centers; Shared-nothing architecture with no single point of failure; Online scaling and schema changes; ACID compliance and support for complex queries, across shards. Native support for Foreign Key constraints enables users to extend the benefits of MySQL Cluster into a broader range of use-cases, including: - Packaged applications in areas such as eCommerce and Web Content Management that prescribe databases with Foreign Key support. - In-house developments benefiting from Foreign Key constraints to simplify data models and eliminate the additional application logic needed to maintain data consistency and integrity between tables. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within MySQL Cluster’s data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether using SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA or HTTP/REST.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation. An important difference to note with the Foreign Key implementation in InnoDB is that MySQL Cluster does not support the updating of Primary Keys from within the Data Nodes themselves - instead the UPDATE is emulated with a DELETE followed by an INSERT operation. Therefore an UPDATE operation will return an error if the parent reference is using a Primary Key, unless using CASCADE action, in which case the delete operation will result in the corresponding rows in the child table being deleted. The Engineering team plans to change this behavior in a subsequent preview release. Also note that when using InnoDB "NO ACTION" is identical to "RESTRICT". In the case of MySQL Cluster “NO ACTION” means “deferred check”, i.e. the constraint is checked before commit, allowing user-defined triggers to automatically make changes in order to satisfy the Foreign Key constraints. Configuration There is nothing special you have to do here – Foreign Key constraint checking is enabled by default. If you intend to migrate existing tables from another database or storage engine, for example from InnoDB, there are a couple of best practices to observe: 1. Analyze the structure of the Foreign Key graph and run the ALTER TABLE ENGINE=NDB in the correct sequence to ensure constraints are enforced 2. Alternatively drop the Foreign Key constraints prior to the import process and then recreate when complete. Getting Started Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  You can download MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release with Foreign Keys today - (select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3) Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section of this blog. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. This first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 gives you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases. * Safe Harbor Statement This information is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014Popular ReleasesSandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Tooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Database Helper: Release 1.0.0.0: First Release of Database HelperCoMaSy: CoMaSy1.0.2: !Contact Management SystemImage View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: V1.5.6.0: V1.5.6.0 - 2014.5.30New feature: support quick-cocos2d-x project now; support text search in scripts folder now, you can use this function in Search Result Window;SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Fancontroller: Fancontroller: Initial releaseVi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Binary Top Verses: This one is the bin folder of the component. the .dll component is inside.Traditional Calendar Component: Traditional Calender Converter: Duta Wacana Christian University This file containing Traditional Calendar Component and Demo Aplication that using Traditional Calendar Component. This component made with .NET Framework 4 and the programming language is C# .SQLSetupHelper: 1.0.0.0: First Stable Version of SQL SetupComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesNew ProjectsCet MicroWPF: WPF-like library for simple graphic-UI application using Netduino (Plus) 2 and the FTDI FT800 Eve board.Fakemons: Some Fakmons, powered by XML, XSLT, CSS and JavascriptFling OS: Fling OS is a C# operating system project aiming to create a new, managed operating system from the ground up.MudRoom: Experimental tool sets in mud parsing and area definitionOOP-2112110158: My name's NgocDungRoslynResearch: Roslyn ResearchTHD - Control de Usuarios: control de usuarios y permisosWPF Kinect User Controls: WPF Kinect User Control project provide simple Tilt and Skeleton Tracking Parameter Controls.

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