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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; SpeedTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  SpeedTrace is a relatively unknown profiler made a company called Ipcas. A single professional license does cost 449€+VAT. For the test I did use SpeedTrace 4.5 which is currently Beta. Although it is cheaper than dotTrace it has by far the most options to influence how profiling does work. First you need to create a tracing project which does configure tracing for one process type. You can start the application directly from the profiler or (much more interesting) it does attach to a specific process when it is started. For this you need to check “Trace the specified …” radio button and enter the process name in the “Process Name of the Trace” edit box. You can even selectively enable tracing for processes with a specific command line. Then you need to activate the trace project by pressing the Activate Project button and you are ready to start VS as usual. If you want to profile the next 10 VS instances that you start you can set the Number of Processes counter to e.g. 10. This is immensely helpful if you are trying to profile only the next 5 started processes. As you can see there are many more tabs which do allow to influence tracing in a much more sophisticated way. SpeedTrace is the only profiler which does not rely entirely on the profiling Api of .NET. Instead it does modify the IL code (instrumentation on the fly) to write tracing information to disc which can later be analyzed. This approach is not only very fast but it does give you unprecedented analysis capabilities. Once the traces are collected they do show up in your workspace where you can open the trace viewer. I do skip the other windows because this view is by far the most useful one. You can sort the methods not only by Wall Clock time but also by CPU consumption and wait time which none of the other products support in their views at the same time. If you want to optimize for CPU consumption sort by CPU time. If you want to find out where most time is spent you need Clock Total time and Clock Waiting. There you can directly see if the method did take long because it did wait on something or it did really execute stuff that did take so long. Once you have found a method you want to drill deeper you can double click on a method to get to the Caller/Callee view which is similar to the JetBrains Method Grid view. But this time you do see much more. In the middle is the clicked method. Above are the methods that call you and below are the methods that you do directly call. Normally you would then start digging deeper to find the end of the chain where the slow method worth optimizing is located. But there is a shortcut. You can press the magic   button to calculate the aggregation of all called methods. This is displayed in the lower left window where you can see each method call and how long it did take. There you can also sort to see if this call stack does only contain methods (e.g. WCF connect calls which you cannot make faster) not worth optimizing. YourKit has a similar feature where it is called Callees List. In the Functions tab you have in the context menu also many other useful analysis options One really outstanding feature is the View Call History Drilldown. When you select this one you get not a sum of all method invocations but a list with the duration of each method call. This is not surprising since SpeedTrace does use tracing to get its timings. There you can get many useful graphs how this method did behave over time. Did it become slower at some point in time or was only the first call slow? The diagrams and the list will tell you that. That is all fine but what should I do when one method call was slow? I want to see from where it was coming from. No problem select the method in the list hit F10 and you get the call stack. This is a life saver if you e.g. search for serialization problems. Today Serializers are used everywhere. You want to find out from where the 5s XmlSerializer.Deserialize call did come from? Hit F10 and you get the call stack which did invoke the 5s Deserialize call. The CPU timeline tab is also useful to find out where long pauses or excessive CPU consumption did happen. Click in the graph to get the Thread Stacks window where you can get a quick overview what all threads were doing at this time. This does look like the Stack Traces feature in YourKit. Only this time you get the last called method first which helps to quickly see what all threads were executing at this moment. YourKit does generate a rather long list which can be hard to go through when you have many threads. The thread list in the middle does not give you call stacks or anything like that but you see which methods were found most often executing code by the profiler which is a good indication for methods consuming most CPU time. This does sound too good to be true? I have not told you the best part yet. The best thing about this profiler is the staff behind it. When I do see a crash or some other odd behavior I send a mail to Ipcas and I do get usually the next day a mail that the problem has been fixed and a download link to the new version. The guys at Ipcas are even so helpful to log in to your machine via a Citrix Client to help you to get started profiling your actual application you want to profile. After a 2h telco I was converted from a hater to a believer of this tool. The fast response time might also have something to do with the fact that they are actively working on 4.5 to get out of the door. But still the support is by far the best I have encountered so far. The only downside is that you should instrument your assemblies including the .NET Framework to get most accurate numbers. You can profile without doing it but then you will see very high JIT times in your process which can severely affect the correctness of the measured timings. If you do not care about exact numbers you can also enable in the main UI in the Data Trace tab logging of method arguments of primitive types. If you need to know what files at which times were opened by your application you can find it out without a debugger. Since SpeedTrace does read huge trace files in its reader you should perhaps use a 64 bit machine to be able to analyze bigger traces as well. The memory consumption of the trace reader is too high for my taste. But they did promise for the next version to come up with something much improved.

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Comparer&lt;T&gt;.Default

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve been working with a wonderful team on a major release where I work, which has had the side-effect of occupying most of my spare time preparing, testing, and monitoring.  However, I do have this Little Wonder tidbit to offer today. Introduction The IComparable<T> interface is great for implementing a natural order for a data type.  It’s a very simple interface with a single method: 1: public interface IComparer<in T> 2: { 3: // Compare two instances of same type. 4: int Compare(T x, T y); 5: }  So what do we expect for the integer return value?  It’s a pseudo-relative measure of the ordering of x and y, which returns an integer value in much the same way C++ returns an integer result from the strcmp() c-style string comparison function: If x == y, returns 0. If x > y, returns > 0 (often +1, but not guaranteed) If x < y, returns < 0 (often –1, but not guaranteed) Notice that the comparison operator used to evaluate against zero should be the same comparison operator you’d use as the comparison operator between x and y.  That is, if you want to see if x > y you’d see if the result > 0. The Problem: Comparing With null Can Be Messy This gets tricky though when you have null arguments.  According to the MSDN, a null value should be considered equal to a null value, and a null value should be less than a non-null value.  So taking this into account we’d expect this instead: If x == y (or both null), return 0. If x > y (or y only is null), return > 0. If x < y (or x only is null), return < 0. But here’s the problem – if x is null, what happens when we attempt to call CompareTo() off of x? 1: // what happens if x is null? 2: x.CompareTo(y); It’s pretty obvious we’ll get a NullReferenceException here.  Now, we could guard against this before calling CompareTo(): 1: int result; 2:  3: // first check to see if lhs is null. 4: if (x == null) 5: { 6: // if lhs null, check rhs to decide on return value. 7: if (y == null) 8: { 9: result = 0; 10: } 11: else 12: { 13: result = -1; 14: } 15: } 16: else 17: { 18: // CompareTo() should handle a null y correctly and return > 0 if so. 19: result = x.CompareTo(y); 20: } Of course, we could shorten this with the ternary operator (?:), but even then it’s ugly repetitive code: 1: int result = (x == null) 2: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 3: : x.CompareTo(y); Fortunately, the null issues can be cleaned up by drafting in an external Comparer.  The Soltuion: Comparer<T>.Default You can always develop your own instance of IComparer<T> for the job of comparing two items of the same type.  The nice thing about a IComparer is its is independent of the things you are comparing, so this makes it great for comparing in an alternative order to the natural order of items, or when one or both of the items may be null. 1: public class NullableIntComparer : IComparer<int?> 2: { 3: public int Compare(int? x, int? y) 4: { 5: return (x == null) 6: ? ((y == null) ? 0 : -1) 7: : x.Value.CompareTo(y); 8: } 9: }  Now, if you want a custom sort -- especially on large-grained objects with different possible sort fields -- this is the best option you have.  But if you just want to take advantage of the natural ordering of the type, there is an easier way.  If the type you want to compare already implements IComparable<T> or if the type is System.Nullable<T> where T implements IComparable, there is a class in the System.Collections.Generic namespace called Comparer<T> which exposes a property called Default that will create a singleton that represents the default comparer for items of that type.  For example: 1: // compares integers 2: var intComparer = Comparer<int>.Default; 3:  4: // compares DateTime values 5: var dateTimeComparer = Comparer<DateTime>.Default; 6:  7: // compares nullable doubles using the null rules! 8: var nullableDoubleComparer = Comparer<double?>.Default;  This helps you avoid having to remember the messy null logic and makes it to compare objects where you don’t know if one or more of the values is null. This works especially well when creating say an IComparer<T> implementation for a large-grained class that may or may not contain a field.  For example, let’s say you want to create a sorting comparer for a stock open price, but if the market the stock is trading in hasn’t opened yet, the open price will be null.  We could handle this (assuming a reasonable Quote definition) like: 1: public class Quote 2: { 3: // the opening price of the symbol quoted 4: public double? Open { get; set; } 5:  6: // ticker symbol 7: public string Symbol { get; set; } 8:  9: // etc. 10: } 11:  12: public class OpenPriceQuoteComparer : IComparer<Quote> 13: { 14: // Compares two quotes by opening price 15: public int Compare(Quote x, Quote y) 16: { 17: return Comparer<double?>.Default.Compare(x.Open, y.Open); 18: } 19: } Summary Defining a custom comparer is often needed for non-natural ordering or defining alternative orderings, but when you just want to compare two items that are IComparable<T> and account for null behavior, you can use the Comparer<T>.Default comparer generator and you’ll never have to worry about correct null value sorting again.     Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,IComparable,Comparer

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• Not attending the LUGM mini-meetup - 05. Oct 2013

  Not attending a meeting of the LUGM can be fun, too. It's getting a bit of a habit that Ish is organising small gatherings, aka mini-meetups, of the Linux User Group Mauritius/Meta (LUGM) almost every Saturday. There they mainly discuss and talk about various elements of using Linux as ones main operating systems and the possibilities you are going to have. On top of course, some tips & tricks about mastering the command line and initial steps in scripting or even writing HTML. In general, sounds like a good portion of fun and great spirit of community. Unfortunately, I'm usually quite busy with private and family matters during the weekend and so I already signalised that I wouldn't be around. Well, at least not physically... But this Saturday a couple of things worked out faster than expected and so I was hanging out on my machine. I made virtual contact with one of Pawan's messages over on Facebook... And somehow that kicked off some kind of an online game fun on basic configuration of Apache HTTPd 2.2.x, PHP 5.x and how to improve the overall performance of a newly installed blog based on WordPress. Default configuration files Nitin's website finally came alive and despite the dark theme and the hidden Apple 'fanboy' advertisement I was more interested in the technical situation. As with any new installation there is usually quite some adjustment to be done. And Nitin's page was no exception. Unfortunately, out of the box installations of Apache httpd and PHP are too verbose and expose too much information under the hood. You might think that this isn't really a problem at all, well, think about it again after completely reading this article. First, I checked the HTTP response headers - using either Chrome Developer Tools or Firefox Web Developer extension - of Nitin's page and based on that I advised him to lower the noise levels a little bit. It's not really necessary that detailed information about web server software and scripting language has to be published in every response made. Quite a number of script kiddies and exploits actually check for version specifics prior to an attack. So, removing at least version details hardens the system a little bit. In particular, I'm talking about these response values: Server X-Powered-By How to achieve that? By tweaking the configuration files... Namely, we are going to look into the following ones: apache2.conf httpd.conf .htaccess php.ini The above list contains some additional files, I'm talking about in the next paragraphs. Anyway, those are the ones involved. Tweaking Apache Open your favourite text editor and start to modify the apache2.conf. Eventually, you might like to have a quick peak at the file to see whether it is necessary to adjust it or not. Following is a handy combination of commands to get an overview of your active directives: # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | grep -v '^$' | less There you keep an eye on those two Apache directives: ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod If that's not the case, change them as highlighted above. In order to activate your modifications you have to restart Apache httpd server. On Debian and Ubuntu you might use apache2ctl for that, on other distributions you might have to use service or run the init-scripts again: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Refresh your website and check the HTTP response header. Tweaking PHP5 (a little bit) Next, check your php.ini file with the following statement: # sudo grep -v ';' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep -v '^$' | less And check the value of expose_php = Off Again, if it's not as highlighted, change it... Some more Apache love Okay, back to Apache it might also be interesting to improve the situation about browser caching and removing more obsolete information. When you run your website against the usual performance checks like Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow you might see those check points with bad grades on a standard, default configuration. Well, this can be done easily. Configure entity tags (ETags) ETags are only interesting when you run your websites on a farm of multiple web servers. Removing this data for your static resources is very simple in Apache. As we are going to deal with the HTTP response header information you have to ensure that Apache is capable to manipulate them. First, check your enabled modules: # sudo ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep headers And in case that the 'headers' module is not listed, you have to enable it from the available ones: # sudo a2enmod headers Second, check your httpd.conf file (in case it exists): # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf | grep -v '^$' | less In newer (better said fresh) installations you might have to create a new configuration file below your conf.d folder with your favourite text editor like so: # sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/headers.conf Then, in order to tweak your HTTP responses either check for those lines or add them: Header unset ETagFileETag None In case that your file doesn't exist or those lines are missing, feel free to create/add them. Afterwards, check your Apache configuration syntax and restart your running instances as already shown above: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Add Expires headers To improve the loading performance of your website, you should take some care into the proper configuration of how to leverage the browser's ability to cache certain resources and files. This is done by adding an Expires: value to the HTTP response header. Generally speaking it is advised that you specify a near-future, read: 1 week or a little bit more, for your static content like JavaScript files or Cascading Style Sheets. One solution to adjust this is to put some instructions into the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web site. Of course, this could also be placed into a more generic location of your Apache installation but honestly, I'd like to keep this at the web site level. Following some adjustments I'm currently using on this blog site: # Turn on Expires and set default to 0ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault A0 # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">ExpiresDefault A29030400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 1 week<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">ExpiresDefault A604800Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 31 days<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">ExpiresDefault A2678400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> As we are editing the .htaccess files, it is not necessary to restart Apache. In case that your web site doesn't load anymore or you're experiencing an error while trying to restart your httpd, check that the 'expires' module is actually an enabled module: # ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep expires# sudo a2enmod expires Of course, the instructions above a re not feature complete but I hope that they might provide a better default configuration for your LAMP stack. Resume of the day Within a couple of hours, and while being occupied with an eLearning course on SQL Server 2012, I had some good fun in helping and assisting other LUGM members while they were some kilometers away at Bagatelle. According to other blog articles it seems that Nitin had quite some moments of desperation. Just for the records: At no time it was my intention to either kick his butt or pull a leg on him. Simply, providing some input based on the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years configuring Apache HTTPd and PHP. Check out the other blogs, too: LUGM mini-meetup... Epic! Superb Saturday Linux Meetup And last but not least, the man himself: The end of a new beginning Cheers, and happy community'ing! Updates Due to our weekly Code & Coffee sessions in the MSCC community, I had a chance to talk to Nitin directly and he showed me the problems directly on his machine. This led to update this article hence the paragraphs on enabling the modules 'headers' and 'expires'.

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; 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;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

  One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

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• We've completed the first iteration

  - by CliveT

  There are a lot of features in C# that are implemented by the compiler and not by the underlying platform. One such feature is a lambda expression. Since local variables cannot be accessed once the current method activation finishes, the compiler has to go out of its way to generate a new class which acts as a home for any variable whose lifetime needs to be extended past the activation of the procedure. Take the following example:     Random generator = new Random();     Func func = () = generator.Next(10); In this case, the compiler generates a new class called c_DisplayClass1 which is marked with the CompilerGenerated attribute. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class c__DisplayClass1 {     // Fields     public Random generator;     // Methods     public int b__0()     {         return this.generator.Next(10);     } } Two quick comments on this: (i)    A display was the means that compilers for languages like Algol recorded the various lexical contours of the nested procedure activations on the stack. I imagine that this is what has led to the name. (ii)    It is a shame that the same attribute is used to mark all compiler generated classes as it makes it hard to figure out what they are being used for. Indeed, you could imagine optimisations that the runtime could perform if it knew that classes corresponded to certain high level concepts. We can see that the local variable generator has been turned into a field in the class, and the body of the lambda expression has been turned into a method of the new class. The code that builds the Func object simply constructs an instance of this class and initialises the fields to their initial values.     c__DisplayClass1 class2 = new c__DisplayClass1();     class2.generator = new Random();     Func func = new Func(class2.b__0); Reflector already contains code to spot this pattern of code and reproduce the form containing the lambda expression, so this is example is correctly decompiled. The use of compiler generated code is even more spectacular in the case of iterators. C# introduced the idea of a method that could automatically store its state between calls, so that it can pick up where it left off. The code can express the logical flow with yield return and yield break denoting places where the method should return a particular value and be prepared to resume.         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } Of course, there was already a .NET pattern for expressing the idea of returning a sequence of values with the computation proceeding lazily (in the sense that the work for the next value is executed on demand). This is expressed by the IEnumerable interface with its Current property for fetching the current value and the MoveNext method for forcing the computation of the next value. The sequence is terminated when this method returns false. The C# compiler links these two ideas together so that an IEnumerator returning method using the yield keyword causes the compiler to produce the implementation of an Iterator. Take the following piece of code.         IEnumerable GetItems()         {             yield return 1;             yield return 2;             yield return 3;         } The compiler implements this by defining a new class that implements a state machine. This has an integer state that records which yield point we should go to if we are resumed. It also has a field that records the Current value of the enumerator and a field for recording the thread. This latter value is used for optimising the creation of iterator instances. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class d__0 : IEnumerable, IEnumerable, IEnumerator, IEnumerator, IDisposable {     // Fields     private int 1__state;     private int 2__current;     public Program 4__this;     private int l__initialThreadId; The body gets converted into the code to construct and initialize this new class. private IEnumerable GetItems() {     d__0 d__ = new d__0(-2);     d__.4__this = this;     return d__; } When the class is constructed we set the state, which was passed through as -2 and the current thread. public d__0(int 1__state) {     this.1__state = 1__state;     this.l__initialThreadId = Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId; } The state needs to be set to 0 to represent a valid enumerator and this is done in the GetEnumerator method which optimises for the usual case where the returned enumerator is only used once. IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() {     if ((Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId == this.l__initialThreadId)               && (this.1__state == -2))     {         this.1__state = 0;         return this;     } The state machine itself is implemented inside the MoveNext method. private bool MoveNext() {     switch (this.1__state)     {         case 0:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 1;             this.1__state = 1;             return true;         case 1:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 2;             this.1__state = 2;             return true;         case 2:             this.1__state = -1;             this.2__current = 3;             this.1__state = 3;             return true;         case 3:             this.1__state = -1;             break;     }     return false; } At each stage, the current value of the state is used to determine how far we got, and then we generate the next value which we return after recording the next state. Finally we return false from the MoveNext to signify the end of the sequence. Of course, that example was really simple. The original method body didn't have any local variables. Any local variables need to live between the calls to MoveNext and so they need to be transformed into fields in much the same way that we did in the case of the lambda expression. More complicated MoveNext methods are required to deal with resources that need to be disposed when the iterator finishes, and sometimes the compiler uses a temporary variable to hold the return value. Why all of this explanation? We've implemented the de-compilation of iterators in the current EAP version of Reflector (7). This contrasts with previous version where all you could do was look at the MoveNext method and try to figure out the control flow. There's a fair amount of things we have to do. We have to spot the use of a CompilerGenerated class which implements the Enumerator pattern. We need to go to the class and figure out the fields corresponding to the local variables. We then need to go to the MoveNext method and try to break it into the various possible states and spot the state transitions. We can then take these pieces and put them back together into an object model that uses yield return to show the transition points. After that Reflector can carry on optimising using its usual optimisations. The pattern matching is currently a little too sensitive to changes in the code generation, and we only do a limited analysis of the MoveNext method to determine use of the compiler generated fields. In some ways, it is a pity that iterators are compiled away and there is no metadata that reflects the original intent. Without it, we are always going to dependent on our knowledge of the compiler's implementation. For example, we have noticed that the Async CTP changes the way that iterators are code generated, so we'll have to do some more work to support that. However, with that warning in place, we seem to do a reasonable job of decompiling the iterators that are built into the framework. Hopefully, the EAP will give us a chance to find examples where we don't spot the pattern correctly or regenerate the wrong code, and we can improve things. Please give it a go, and report any problems.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

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mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; 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mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-top-themecolor:accent6; border-left:none; border-bottom:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; mso-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; border-right:none; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Georgia","serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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• Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that. I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide. Write Software Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux.  Components you can use: Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control. Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database. Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs. Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more.   Use Software Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure.  Components you can use: Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others. Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos. High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel. Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee.   Run Software Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software.  Components you can use: Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft. Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances. Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances.   Decision Matrix With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use. I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions. Security, Pricing, and Other Info  Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you.   Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment? New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - a good roundup of those changes can be found here. Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support.    

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• SOA Suite Integration: Part 3: Loading files

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the most common scenarios in SOA Integration is the loading of a file into the product from an external source. In Oracle SOA Suite there is a File Adapter that can process many file types into your BPEL process. For this example I will use the File Adapter to load a file of user and emails to update the user object within the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Remember you can repeat this process with other objects and other file types. Again I am illustrating the ease of integration. The first thing is to create an empty BPEL process that will hold our flow. In Oracle JDeveloper this can be achieved by specifying the Define Service Later template (as other templates have predefined inputs and outputs and in this case we want to specify those). So I will create simpleFileLoad process to house our process. You will start with an empty canvas so you need to first specify the load part of the process using the File Adapter. Select the File Adapter from the Component Palette under BPEL Services and drag and drop it to the left side Partner Links (left is input). You name the Service. In this case I chose LoadFile. Press Next. We will define the interface as part of the wizard so select Define from operation and schema (specified later). Press Next. We are going to choose Read File to denote that we will read the file and specify the default Operation Name as Read. Press Next. The next step is to tell the Adapter the location of the files, how to process them and what to do with them after they have been processed. I am using hardcoded locations in this example but you can have logical locations as well. Press Next. I am now going to tell the adapter how to recognize the files I want to load. In my case I am using CSV files and more importantly I am tell the adapter to run the process for each record in the file it encounters. Press Next. Now, I tell the adapter how often I want to poll for the files. I have taken the defaults. Press Next. At this stage I have no explanation of the format of the input. So I am going to invoke the Native Format Wizard which will guide me through the process of creating the file input format. Clicking the purple cog icon will start the wizard. After an introduction screen (not shown), you specify the format of the input file. The File Adapter supports multiple format types. For this example, I will use Delimited as I am going to load a CSV file. Press Next. The best way for the wizard to work is with a sample. I have a sample file and the wizard will ask how much of the file to use as a template. I will use the defaults. Note: If you are using a language that has other languages other than US-ASCII, it is at this point you specify the character set to use.  Press Next. The sample contains multiple instances of a single record type. The wizard supports complex types as well. We will use the appropriate setting for our file. Press Next. You have to specify the file element and the record element. This will be used by the input wizard to translate the CSV data into an XML structure (this will make sense later). I am using LoadUsers as my file delimiter (root element) and User Record as my record root element. Press Next. As the file is CSV the delimiter is "," so I will also specify that the End Of Line (EOL) indicator indicates the end of a record. Press Next. Up until this point your have not given the columns their names. In my case my sample includes the column names in the first record. This is not always the case but you can specify the names and formats of columns in this dialog (not shown). Press Next. The wizard now generates the schema for the input file. You can specify a name for the schema. I have used userupdate.xsd. We want to verify the schema so press Test. You can test the schema by specifying an input sample. and pressing the green play button. You will see the delimiters you specified earlier for the file and the records. Press Ok to continue. A confirmation screen will be displayed showing you the location of the schema in your project. Press Finish to return to the File Adapter configuration. You will now see the schema and elements prepopulated from the wizard. Press Next. The File Adapter configuration is now complete. Press Finish. Now you need to receive the input from the LoadFile component so we need to place a Receive node in the BPEL process by drag and dropping the Receive component from the Component Palette under BPEL Constructs onto the BPEL process. We link the receive process with the LoadFile component by dragging the left most connect node of the Receive node to the LoadFile component. Once the link is established you need to name the Receive node appropriately and as in the post of the last part of this series you need to generate input variables for the BPEL process to hold the input records in. You need to now add the product Web Service. The process is the same as described in the post of the last part of this series. You drop the Web Service BPEL Service onto the right side of the process and fill in the details of the WSDL URL . You also have to add an Invoke node to call the service and generate the input and outputs variables for the call in the Invoke node. Now, to get the inputs from File to the service. You have to use a Transform (you can use an Assign action but a Transform action is more flexible). You drag and drop the Transform component from the Component Palette under Oracle Extensions and place it between the Receive and Invoke nodes. We name the Transform Node, Mapper File and associate the source of the mapping the schema from the Receive node and the output will be the input variable from the Invoke node. We now build the transform. We first map the user and email attributes by drag and drop the elements from the left to the right. The reason we needed to use the transform is that we will be telling the AS-User service that we want to issue an update action. Remember when we registered the service we actually used Read as the default. If we do not otherwise inform the service to use the Update action it will use the Read action instead (which is not desired). To specify the update action you need to click on the transactionType node on the right and select Set Text to set the action. You need to specify the transactionType of UPD (for update). The mapping is now complete. The final BPEL process is ready for deployment. You then deploy the BPEL process to the server and to test the service by simply dropping a file, in the same pattern/name as you specified, in the directory you specified in the File Adapter. You will see each record as a separate instance entry in the Fusion Middleware Control console. You can now load files into the product. You can repeat this process for each type of file to process. While this was a simple example it illustrates the method of loading data can be achieved using SOA Suite in conjunction with our products.

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• JavaOne Session Report: “50 Tips in 50 Minutes for GlassFish Fans”

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At JavaOne 2012 on Monday, Oracle’s Engineer Chris Kasso, and Technology Evangelist Arun Gupta, presented a head-spinning session (CON4701) in which they offered 50 tips for GlassFish fans. Kasso and Gupta alternated back and forth with each presenting 10 tips at a time. An audience of about (appropriately) 50 attentive and appreciative developers was on hand in what has to be one of the most information-packed sessions ever at JavaOne!Aside: I experienced one of the quiet joys of JavaOne when, just before the session began, I spotted Java Champion and JavaOne Rock Star Adam Bien sitting nearby – Adam is someone I have been fortunate to know for many years.GlassFish is a freely available, commercially supported Java EE reference implementation. The session prioritized quantity of tips over depth of information and offered tips that are intended for both seasoned and new users, that are meant to increase the range of functional options available to GlassFish users. The focus was on lesser-known dimensions of GlassFish. Attendees were encouraged to pursue tips that contained new information for them. All 50 tips can be accessed here.Below are several examples of more elaborate tips and a final practical tip on how to get in touch with these folks. Tip #1: Using the login Command * To execute a remote command with asadmin you must provide the admin's user name and password.* The login command allows you to store the login credentials to be reused in subsequent commands.* Can be logged into multiple servers (distinguish by host and port). Example:     % asadmin --host ouch login     Enter admin user name [default: admin]>     Enter admin password>     Login information relevant to admin user name [admin]     for host [ouch] and admin port [4848] stored at     [/Users/ckasso/.asadminpass] successfully.     Make sure that this file remains protected.     Information stored in this file will be used by     asadmin commands to manage the associated domain.     Command login executed successfully.     % asadmin --host ouch list-clusters     c1 not running     Command list-clusters executed successfully.Tip #4: Using the AS_DEBUG Env Variable* Environment variable to control client side debug output* Exposes: command processing info URL used to access the command:                           http://localhost:4848/__asadmin/uptime Raw response from the server Example:   % export AS_DEBUG=true  % asadmin uptime  CLASSPATH= ./../glassfish/modules/admin-cli.jar  Commands: [uptime]  asadmin extension directory: /work/gf-3.1.2/glassfish3/glassfish/lib/asadm      ------- RAW RESPONSE  ---------   Signature-Version: 1.0   message: Up 7 mins 10 secs   milliseconds_value: 430194   keys: milliseconds   milliseconds_name: milliseconds   use-main-children-attribute: false   exit-code: SUCCESS  ------- RAW RESPONSE  ---------Tip #11: Using Password Aliases * Some resources require a password to access (e.g. DB, JMS, etc.).* The resource connector is defined in the domain.xml.Example:Suppose the DB resource you wish to access requires an entry like this in the domain.xml:     <property name="password" value="secretp@ssword"/>But company policies do not allow you to store the password in the clear.* Use password aliases to avoid storing the password in the domain.xml* Create a password alias:     % asadmin create-password-alias DB_pw_alias     Enter the alias password>     Enter the alias password again>     Command create-password-alias executed successfully.* The password is stored in domain's encrypted keystore.* Now update the password value in the domain.xml:     <property name="password" value="${ALIAS=DB_pw_alias}"/>Tip #21: How to Start GlassFish as a Service * Configuring a server to automatically start at boot can be tedious.* Each platform does it differently.* The create-service command makes this easy.   Windows: creates a Windows service Linux: /etc/init.d script Solaris: Service Management Facility (SMF) service * Must execute create-service with admin privileges.* Can be used for the DAS or instances* Try it first with the --dry-run option.* There is a (unsupported) _delete-serverExample:     # asadmin create-service domain1     The Service was created successfully. Here are the details:     Name of the service:application/GlassFish/domain1     Type of the service:Domain     Configuration location of the service:/work/gf-3.1.2.2/glassfish3/glassfish/domains     Manifest file location on the system:/var/svc/manifest/application/GlassFish/domain1_work_gf-3.1.2.2_glassfish3_glassfish_domains/Domain-service-smf.xml.     You have created the service but you need to start it yourself. Here are the most typical Solaris commands of interest:     * /usr/bin/svcs  -a | grep domain1  // status     * /usr/sbin/svcadm enable domain1 // start     * /usr/sbin/svcadm disable domain1 // stop     * /usr/sbin/svccfg delete domain1 // uninstallTip #34: Posting a Command via REST* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example:  Deploying an application   % curl -s -S \       -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \       -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \       -F id=@/path/to/application.war \       -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.* Use wget/curl to execute commands on the DAS.Example:  Deploying an application   % curl -s -S \       -H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \       -H 'X-Requested-By: anyvalue' \       -F id=@/path/to/application.war \       -F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application* Use @ before a file name to tell curl to send the file's contents.* The force option tells GlassFish to force the deployment in case the application is already deployed.Tip #46: Upgrading to a Newer Version * Upgrade applications and configuration from an earlier version* Upgrade Tool: Side-by-side upgrade– GUI: asupgrade– CLI: asupgrade --c– What happens ?* Copies older source domain -> target domain directory* asadmin start-domain --upgrade* Update Tool and pkg: In-place upgrade– GUI: updatetool, install all Available Updates– CLI: pkg image-update– Upgrade the domain* asadmin start-domain --upgradeTip #50: How to reach us?* GlassFish Forum: http://www.java.net/forums/glassfish/glassfish* [email protected]* @glassfish* facebook.com/glassfish* youtube.com/GlassFishVideos* blogs.oracle.com/theaquariumArun Gupta acknowledged that their method of presentation was experimental and actively solicited feedback about the session. The best way to reach them is on the GlassFish user forum.In addition, check out Gupta’s new book Java EE 6 Pocket Guide.

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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

  Currently, the Azure PaaS does not offer a distributed\resilient task scheduling service.  If you do want to host a task scheduling product\solution off-premise (and ideally use Azure), what are your options? PaaS Option 1: Worker Roles Use a worker role to schedule and execute actions at specific time periods.  There are a few frameworks available to assist with this: http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-cloud/wiki/TaskScheduler http://blog.smarx.com/posts/building-a-task-scheduler-in-windows-azure - This addresses a slightly different set of requirements. It’s a more dynamic approach for queuing up tasks, but not repeatable tasks (e.g. daily). I found the Azure Toolkit option the most simple to implement.  Step 1 : Create a domain entity implementing IJob for each job to schedule.  In this sample, I asynchronously call a WCF service method. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole.Jobs 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit; 4: using ScheduledTasksService; 5: 6: public class UploadEmployeesJob : IJob 7: { 8: public void Run() 9: { 10: // Call Tasks Service 11: var client = new ScheduledTasksServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IScheduledTasksService"); 12: client.UploadEmployees(); 13: client.Close(); 14: } 15: } 16: } Step 2 : In the worker role run method, add the jobs to the toolkit engine. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit.Engine; 4: using Jobs; 5:   6: public class WorkerRole : WorkerRoleEntryPoint 7: { 8: public override void Run() 9: { 10: var engine = new CloudEngine(); 11:   12: // Add Scheduled Jobs (using CronJob syntax - see http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference). 13:   14: // 1. Upload Employee job - 8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) 15: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<UploadEmployeesJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 20 * * 1-5"; }); 16: // 2. Purge Data job - 10 AM every Saturday 17: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<PurgeDataJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 10 * * 6"; }); 18: // 3. Process Exceptions job - Every 5 minutes 19: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<ProcessExceptionsJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "*/5 * * * *"; }); 20:   21: engine.Run(); 22: base.Run(); 23: } 24: } 25: } Pros Cons Azure Toolkit option is simple to implement. For the AzureToolkit option, you are limited to a single worker role.  Otherwise, the jobs will be executed multiple times, once for each worker role instance.   Paying for a continuously running worker role, even if it just processes a single job once a week.  If you only have a few scheduled tasks to run calling asynchronous services hosted in different web roles, an extra small worker role likely to be sufficient.  However, for an extra small worker role this still costs $14.40/month (03/09/2012). Option 2: Use Scheduled Task on Azure Web Role calling a console app Setup a Windows Scheduled Task on the Azure Web Role. This calls a console application that calls the WCF service methods that run the task actions. This design is described here: http://www.ronaldwidha.net/2011/02/23/cron-job-on-azure-using-scheduled-task-on-a-web-role-to-replace-azure-worker-role-for-background-job/ http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/2011/07/windows-azure-task-scheduler/ http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2011/10/23/moving-to-azure-worker-roles-for-nothing-and-tasks-for-free.aspx Pros Cons Fairly easy to implement. Supportability - I RDC’ed onto the Azure server and stopped the scheduled task. I then rebooted the machine and the task was re-started. I also tried deleting the task and rebooting, the same thing occurred. The only way to permanently guarantee that a task is disabled is to do a fresh deployment. I think this is a major supportability concern.   Saleability - multiple instances would trigger multiple tasks. You can only have one instance for the scheduled task web role. The guidance implements setup of the scheduled task as part of a web role instance. But if you have more than one instance in a web role, the task will be triggered multiple times for each scheduled action (once per machine). Workaround: If we wanted to use scheduled tasks for another client with a saleable WCF service, then we could include the console & tasks scripts in a separate web role (e.g. a empty WCF service with no real purpose to it). SaaS Option 3: Azure Marketplace I thought that someone might be offering this type of service via the Azure marketplace. At the point of writing this blog post, I did not find anyone doing so. https://datamarket.azure.com/ Pros Cons   Nobody currently offers this on the Azure Marketplace. Option 4: Online Job Scheduling Service Provider There are plenty of online providers that offer this type of service on a pay-as-you-go approach.  Some of these are free for small usage.   Many of these providers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcron Pros Cons No bespoke development for scheduler. Reliance on third party. IaaS Option 5: Setup Scheduling Software on Azure IaaS VM’s One of job scheduling software offerings could be installed and configured on Azure VM’s.  A list of software options is listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software Pros Cons Enterprise distributed\resilient task scheduling service VM Setup and maintenance   Software Licence Costs Option 6: VM Gallery A the time of writing this blog post, I did not spot a VM in the gallery that included pre-installation of any of the above software options. Pros Cons   No current VM template. Summary For my current project that had a small handful of tasks to schedule with a limited project budget I chose option 1 (a worker role using the Azure Toolkit to schedule tasks).  If I was building an enterprise scale solution for the future, options 4 and 5 are currently worthy of consideration. Hopefully, Microsoft will include tasks scheduling in the future as part of their PaaS offerings.

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• Accessing your web server via IPv6

  Being able to run your systems on IPv6, have automatic address assignment and the ability to resolve host names are the necessary building blocks in your IPv6 network infrastructure. Now, that everything is in place it is about time that we are going to enable another service to respond to IPv6 requests. The following article will guide through the steps on how to enable Apache2 httpd to listen and respond to incoming IPv6 requests. This is the fourth article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. Surfing the web - IPv6 style Enabling IPv6 connections in Apache 2 is fairly simply. But first let's check whether your system has a running instance of Apache2 or not. You can check this like so: $ service apache2 status Apache2 is running (pid 2680). In case that you got a 'service unknown' you have to install Apache to proceed with the following steps: $ sudo apt-get install apache2 Out of the box, Apache binds to all your available network interfaces and listens to TCP port 80. To check this, run the following command: $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      28306/apache2 In this case Apache2 is already binding to IPv6 (and implicitly to IPv4). If you only got a tcp output, then your HTTPd is not yet IPv6 enabled. Check your Listen directive, depending on your system this might be in a different location than the default in Ubuntu. $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf # If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also# have to change the VirtualHost statement in# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default# This is also true if you have upgraded from before 2.2.9-3 (i.e. from# Debian etch). See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz and# README.Debian.gzNameVirtualHost *:80Listen 80<IfModule mod_ssl.c>    # If you add NameVirtualHost *:443 here, you will also have to change    # the VirtualHost statement in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl    # to <VirtualHost *:443>    # Server Name Indication for SSL named virtual hosts is currently not    # supported by MSIE on Windows XP.    Listen 443</IfModule><IfModule mod_gnutls.c>    Listen 443</IfModule> Just in case that you don't have a ports.conf file, look for it like so: $ cd /etc/apache2/$ fgrep -r -i 'listen' ./* And modify the related file instead of the ports.conf. Which most probably might be either apache2.conf or httpd.conf anyways. Okay, please bear in mind that Apache can only bind once on the same interface and port. So, eventually, you might be interested to add another port which explicitly listens to IPv6 only. In that case, you would add the following in your configuration file: Listen 80Listen [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080 But this is completely optional... Anyways, just to complete all steps, you save the file, and then check the syntax like so: $ sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK Ok, now let's apply the modifications to our running Apache2 instances: $ sudo service apache2 reload * Reloading web server config apache2   ...done. $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"                                                                                               tcp6       0      0 2001:db8:bad:a55:::8080 :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2    tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2 There we have two daemons running and listening to different TCP ports. Now, that the basics are in place, it's time to prepare any website to respond to incoming requests on the IPv6 address. Open up any configuration file you have below your sites-enabled folder. $ ls -al /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/... $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default <VirtualHost *:80 [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080>        ServerAdmin [email protected]        ServerName server.ios.mu        ServerAlias server Here, we have to check and modify the VirtualHost directive and enable it to respond to the IPv6 address and port our web server is listening to. Save your changes, run the configuration test and reload Apache2 in order to apply your modifications. After successful steps you can launch your favourite browser and navigate to your IPv6 enabled web server. Accessing an IPv6 address in the browser That looks like a successful surgery to me... Note: In case that you received a timeout, check whether your client is operating on IPv6, too.

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• Chart Filtering

  - by Tim Dexter

  Interesting question from a colleague this week. Can you add a filter to a chart to just show a specific set of data? In an RTF template, you need to do a little finagling in the chart definition. In an online template, a couple of clicks and you're done. RTF Build your chart as you would normally to include all the data to start with. Now flip to the Advanced tab to see the code behind the chart. Its not very pretty but with a little effort you can get it looking a little more friendly. Here's my chart showing employees and their salaries. <Graph depthAngle="50" depthRadius="8" seriesEffect="SE_AUTO_GRADIENT"> <LegendArea visible="true"/>  <Title text="Executive Department Only" visible="true" horizontalAlignment="CENTER"/>  <LocalGridData colCount="{count(.//G_2)}" rowCount="1">   <RowLabels>    <Label>SALARY</Label>   </RowLabels>   <ColLabels>    <xsl:for-each select=".//G_2">     <Label><xsl:value-of select="EMP_NAME"/></Label>    </xsl:for-each>   </ColLabels>   <DataValues>    <RowData>     <xsl:for-each select=".//G_2">      <Cell><xsl:value-of select="SALARY"/></Cell>     </xsl:for-each>    </RowData>   </DataValues>  </LocalGridData> </Graph> Note the emboldened text. Its currently grabbing all values in the G_2 level of the data. We can use an XPATH expression to filter the data to the set we want to see. In my case I want to only see the employees that are in the Executive department. My  data is structured thus:   <DATA_DS>     <G_1>         <DEPARTMENT_NAME>Accounting</DEPARTMENT_NAME>         <G_2>             <MANAGER>Higgins</MANAGER>             <EMPLOYEE_ID>206</EMPLOYEE_ID>             <HIRE_DATE>2002-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00</HIRE_DATE>             <SALARY>8300</SALARY>             <JOB_TITLE>Public Accountant</JOB_TITLE>             <PARAS>11000</PARAS>             <EMP_NAME>William Gietz</EMP_NAME>         </G_2> So the XPATH expression Im going to use to limit the data to the Executive department would be .//G_2[../DEPARTMENT_NAME='Executive'] Note the ../ moves the parser up the XML tree to be able to test the DEPARTMENT_NAME value. I added this XPATH expression to the three instances that need it ColCount, ColLabels and RowData. Its simple enough to do. Testing your XPATH expression is easier to do using a table of data. Please note, as soon as you make changes to the chart code. Going back to the Builder tab, you'll find that everything is grayed out. I recommend you make all the changes you can via the chart dialog before updating the code. Online Template Implementing the filter is much simpler, there is a dialog box to help you out. Add you chart and fill out the various data points you want to show. then hit the Filter item in the ribbon above the chart. That will pop the filter dialog box where you can then add a filter to the chart.   You can add multiple filters if needed and of course you can use the Manage Filters button to re-open and edit the filters. Pretty straightforward stuff!

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• LINQ – SequenceEqual() method

  - by nmarun

  I have been looking at LINQ extension methods and have blogged about what I learned from them in my blog space. Next in line is the SequenceEqual() method. Here’s the description about this method: “Determines whether two sequences are equal by comparing the elements by using the default equality comparer for their type.” Let’s play with some code: 1: int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 }; 2: // int[] numbersCopy = numbers; 3: int[] numbersCopy = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 }; 4:  5: Console.WriteLine(numbers.SequenceEqual(numbersCopy)); This gives an output of ‘True’ – basically compares each of the elements in the two arrays and returns true in this case. The result is same even if you uncomment line 2 and comment line 3 (I didn’t need to say that now did I?). So then what happens for custom types? For this, I created a Product class with the following definition: 1: class Product 2: { 3: public int ProductId { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public string Category { get; set; } 6: public DateTime MfgDate { get; set; } 7: public Status Status { get; set; } 8: } 9:  10: public enum Status 11: { 12: Active = 1, 13: InActive = 2, 14: OffShelf = 3, 15: } In my calling code, I’m just adding a few product items: 1: private static List<Product> GetProducts() 2: { 3: return new List<Product> 4: { 5: new Product 6: { 7: ProductId = 1, 8: Name = "Laptop", 9: Category = "Computer", 10: MfgDate = new DateTime(2003, 4, 3), 11: Status = Status.Active, 12: }, 13: new Product 14: { 15: ProductId = 2, 16: Name = "Compact Disc", 17: Category = "Water Sport", 18: MfgDate = new DateTime(2009, 12, 3), 19: Status = Status.InActive, 20: }, 21: new Product 22: { 23: ProductId = 3, 24: Name = "Floppy", 25: Category = "Computer", 26: MfgDate = new DateTime(1993, 3, 7), 27: Status = Status.OffShelf, 28: }, 29: }; 30: } Now for the actual check: 1: List<Product> products1 = GetProducts(); 2: List<Product> products2 = GetProducts(); 3:  4: Console.WriteLine(products1.SequenceEqual(products2)); This one returns ‘False’ and the reason is simple – this one checks for reference equality and the products in the both the lists get different ‘memory addresses’ (sounds like I’m talking in ‘C’). In order to modify this behavior and return a ‘True’ result, we need to modify the Product class as follows: 1: class Product : IEquatable<Product> 2: { 3: public int ProductId { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public string Category { get; set; } 6: public DateTime MfgDate { get; set; } 7: public Status Status { get; set; } 8:  9: public override bool Equals(object obj) 10: { 11: return Equals(obj as Product); 12: } 13:  14: public bool Equals(Product other) 15: { 16: //Check whether the compared object is null. 17: if (ReferenceEquals(other, null)) return false; 18:  19: //Check whether the compared object references the same data. 20: if (ReferenceEquals(this, other)) return true; 21:  22: //Check whether the products' properties are equal. 23: return ProductId.Equals(other.ProductId) 24: && Name.Equals(other.Name) 25: && Category.Equals(other.Category) 26: && MfgDate.Equals(other.MfgDate) 27: && Status.Equals(other.Status); 28: } 29:  30: // If Equals() returns true for a pair of objects 31: // then GetHashCode() must return the same value for these objects. 32: // read why in the following articles: 33: // http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2010/02/28/138234.aspx 34: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371328/why-is-it-important-to-override-gethashcode-when-equals-method-is-overriden-in-c 35: public override int GetHashCode() 36: { 37: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 38: int hashProductId = ProductId.GetHashCode(); 39:  40: //Get hash code for the Name field if it is not null. 41: int hashName = Name == null ? 0 : Name.GetHashCode(); 42:  43: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 44: int hashCategory = Category.GetHashCode(); 45:  46: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 47: int hashMfgDate = MfgDate.GetHashCode(); 48:  49: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 50: int hashStatus = Status.GetHashCode(); 51: //Calculate the hash code for the product. 52: return hashProductId ^ hashName ^ hashCategory & hashMfgDate & hashStatus; 53: } 54:  55: public static bool operator ==(Product a, Product b) 56: { 57: // Enable a == b for null references to return the right value 58: if (ReferenceEquals(a, b)) 59: { 60: return true; 61: } 62: // If one is null and the other not. Remember a==null will lead to Stackoverflow! 63: if (ReferenceEquals(a, null)) 64: { 65: return false; 66: } 67: return a.Equals((object)b); 68: } 69:  70: public static bool operator !=(Product a, Product b) 71: { 72: return !(a == b); 73: } 74: } Now THAT kinda looks overwhelming. But lets take one simple step at a time. Ok first thing you’ve noticed is that the class implements IEquatable<Product> interface – the key step towards achieving our goal. This interface provides us with an ‘Equals’ method to perform the test for equality with another Product object, in this case. This method is called in the following situations: when you do a ProductInstance.Equals(AnotherProductInstance) and when you perform actions like Contains<T>, IndexOf() or Remove() on your collection Coming to the Equals method defined line 14 onwards. The two ‘if’ blocks check for null and referential equality using the ReferenceEquals() method defined in the Object class. Line 23 is where I’m doing the actual check on the properties of the Product instances. This is what returns the ‘True’ for us when we run the application. I have also overridden the Object.Equals() method which calls the Equals() method of the interface. One thing to remember is that anytime you override the Equals() method, its’ a good practice to override the GetHashCode() method and overload the ‘==’ and the ‘!=’ operators. For detailed information on this, please read this and this. Since we’ve overloaded the operators as well, we get ‘True’ when we do actions like: 1: Console.WriteLine(products1.Contains(products2[0])); 2: Console.WriteLine(products1[0] == products2[0]); This completes the full circle on the SequenceEqual() method. See the code used in the article here.

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• Using Unity – Part 5

  - by nmarun

  In the previous article of the series, I talked about constructor and property (setter) injection. I wanted to write about how to work with arrays and generics in Unity in this blog, after seeing how lengthy this one got, I’ve decided to write about generics in the next one. This one will only concentrate on arrays. My Product4 class has the following definition: 1: public interface IProduct 2: { 3: string WriteProductDetails(); 4: } 5:  6: public class Product4 : IProduct 7: { 8: public string Name { get; set; } 9: public ILogger[] Loggers { get; set; } 10:  11: public Product4(string productName, ILogger[] loggers) 12: { 13: Name = productName; 14: Loggers = loggers; 15: } 16:  17: public string WriteProductDetails() 18: { 19: StringBuilder productDetails = new StringBuilder(); 20: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Name); 21: for (int i = 0; i < Loggers.Count(); i++) 22: { 23: productDetails.AppendFormat("{0}<br/>", Loggers[i].WriteLog()); 24: } 25: 26: return productDetails.ToString(); 27: } 28: } The key parts are line 4 where we declare an array of ILogger and line 5 where-in the constructor passes an instance of an array of ILogger objects. I’ve created another class – FakeLogger: 1: public class FakeLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public string WriteLog() 4: { 5: return string.Format("Type: {0}", GetType()); 6: } 7: } It’s implementation is the same as what we had for the FileLogger class. Coming to the web.config file, first add the following aliases. The alias for FakeLogger should make sense right away. ILoggerArray defines an array of ILogger objects. I’ll tell why we need an alias for System.String data type. 1: <typeAlias alias="string" type="System.String, mscorlib" /> 2: <typeAlias alias="ILoggerArray" type="ProductModel.ILogger[], ProductModel" /> 3: <typeAlias alias="FakeLogger" type="ProductModel.FakeLogger, ProductModel"/> Next is to create mappings for the FileLogger and FakeLogger classes: 1: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FileLogger" name="logger1"> 2: <lifetime type="singleton" /> 3: </type> 4: <type type="ILogger" mapTo="FakeLogger" name="logger2"> 5: <lifetime type="singleton" /> 6: </type> Finally, for the real deal: 1: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product4" name="ArrayProduct"> 2: <typeConfig extensionType="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.TypeInjectionElement,Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration, Version=1.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"> 3: <constructor> 4: <param name="productName" parameterType="string" > 5: <value value="Product name from config file" type="string"/> 6: </param> 7: <param name="loggers" parameterType="ILoggerArray"> 8: <array> 9: <dependency name="logger2" /> 10: <dependency name="logger1" /> 11: </array> 12: </param> 13: </constructor> 14: </typeConfig> 15: </type> Here’s where I’m saying, that if a type of IProduct is requested to be resolved, map it to type Product4. Furthermore, the Product4 has two constructor parameters – a string and an array of type ILogger. You might have observed the first parameter of the constructor is named ‘productName’ and that matches the value in the name attribute of the param element. The parameterType of ‘string’ maps to ‘System.String, mscorlib’ and is defined in the type alias above. The set up is similar for the second constructor parameter. The name matches the name of the parameter (loggers) and is of type ILoggerArray, which maps to an array of ILogger objects. We’ve also decided to add two elements to this array when unity resolves it – an instance of FileLogger and one of FakeLogger. The click event of the button does the following: 1: //unityContainer.RegisterType<IProduct, Product4>(); 2: //IProduct product4 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 3: IProduct product4 = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>("ArrayConstructor"); 4: productDetailsLabel.Text = product4.WriteProductDetails(); It’s worth mentioning here about the change in the format of resolving the IProduct to create an instance of Product4. You cannot use the regular way (the commented lines) to get an instance of Product4. The reason is due to the behavior of Unity which Alex Ermakov has brilliantly explained here. The corresponding output of the action is: You have a couple of options when it comes to adding dependency elements in the array node. You can: - leave it empty (no dependency elements declared): This will only create an empty array of loggers. This way you can check for non-null condition, in your mock classes. - add multiple dependency elements with the same name 1: <param name="loggers" parameterType="ILoggerArray"> 2: <array> 3: <dependency name="logger2" /> 4: <dependency name="logger2" /> 5: </array> 6: </param> With this you’ll see two instances of FakeLogger in the output. This article shows how Unity allows you to instantiate objects with arrays. Find the code here.

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• Delphi Speech recognition delphi

  - by XBasic3000

  I need create a programatic equivalent using delphi language... or could someone post a link on how to do grammars in peech recogniton using the delphi. sorry for my english... XML Grammar Sample(s): <GRAMMAR> <!-- Create a simple "hello world" rule --> <RULE NAME="HelloWorld" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <P>hello world</P> </RULE> <!-- Create a more advanced "hello world" rule that changes the display form. When the user says "hello world" the display text will be "Hiya there!" --> <RULE NAME="HelloWorld_Disp" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <P DISP="Hiya there!">hello world</P> </RULE> <!-- Create a rule that changes the pronunciation and the display form of the phrase. When the user says "eh" the display text will be "I don't understand?". Note the user didn't say "huh". The pronunciation for "what" is specific to this phrase tag and is not changed for the user or application lexicon, or even other instances of "what" in the grammar --> <RULE NAME="Question_Pron" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <P DISP="I don't understand" PRON="eh">what</P> </RULE> <!-- Create a rule demonstrating repetition --> <!-- the rule will only be recognized if the user says "hey diddle diddle" --> <RULE NAME="NurseryRhyme" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <P>hey</P> <P MIN="2" MAX="2">diddle</P> </RULE> <!-- Create a list with variable phrase weights --> <!-- If the user says similar phrases, the recognizer will use the weights to pick a match --> <RULE NAME="UseWeights" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <LIST> <!-- Note the higher likelihood that the user is expected to say "recognizer speech" --> <P WEIGHT=".95">recognize speech</P> <P WEIGHT=".05">wreck a nice beach</P> </LIST> </RULE> <!-- Create a phrase with an attached semantic property --> <!-- Speaking "one two three" will return three different unique semantic properties, with different names, and different values --> <RULE NAME="UseProps" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE"> <!-- named property, without value --> <P PROPNAME="NOVALUE">one</P> <!-- named property, with numeric value --> <P PROPNAME="NUMBER" VAL="2">two</P> <!-- named property, with string value --> <P PROPNAME="STRING" VALSTR="three">three</P> </RULE> </GRAMMAR> **Programmatic Equivalent:** To add a phrase to a rule, SAPI provides an API called ISpGrammarBuilder::AddWordTransition. The application developer can add the sentences as follows: SPSTATEHANDLE hsHelloWorld; // Create new top-level rule called "HelloWorld" hr = cpRecoGrammar->GetRule(L"HelloWorld", NULL, SPRAF_TopLevel | SPRAF_Active, TRUE, &hsHelloWorld); // Check hr // Add the command words "hello world" // Note that the lexical delimiter is " ", a space character. // By using a space delimiter, the entire phrase can be added // in one method call hr = cpRecoGrammar->AddWordTransition(hsHelloWorld, NULL, L"hello world", L" ", SPWT_LEXICAL, NULL, NULL); // Check hr // Add the command words "hiya there" // Note that the lexical delimiter is "|", a pipe character. // By using a pipe delimiter, the entire phrase can be added // in one method call hr = cpRecoGrammar->AddWordTransition(hsHelloWorld, NULL, L"hiya|there", L"|", SPWT_LEXICAL, NULL, NULL); // Check hr // save/commit changes hr = cpRecoGrammar->Commit(NULL); // Check hr

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• AutoMapper is not working for a Container class

  - by rboarman

  Hello, I have an AutoMapper issue that has been driving me crazy for way too long now. A similar question was also posted on the AutoMapper user site but has not gotten much love. The summary is that I have a container class that holds a Dictionary of components. The components are a derived object of a common base class. I also have a parallel structure that I am using as DTO objects to which I want to map. The error that gets generated seems to say that the mapper cannot map between two of the classes that I have included in the CreateMap calls. I think the error has to do with the fact that I have a Dictionary of objects that are not part of the container‘s hierarchy. I apologize in advance for the length of the code below. My simple test cases work. Needless to say, it’s only the more complex case that is failing. Here are the classes: #region Dto objects public class ComponentContainerDTO { public Dictionary<string, ComponentDTO> Components { get; set; } public ComponentContainerDTO() { this.Components = new Dictionary<string, ComponentDTO>(); } } public class EntityDTO : ComponentContainerDTO { public int Id { get; set; } } public class ComponentDTO { public EntityDTO Owner { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string ComponentType { get; set; } } public class HealthDTO : ComponentDTO { public decimal CurrentHealth { get; set; } } public class PhysicalLocationDTO : ComponentDTO { public Point2D Location { get; set; } } #endregion #region Domain objects public class ComponentContainer { public Dictionary<string, Component> Components { get; set; } public ComponentContainer() { this.Components = new Dictionary<string, Component>(); } } public class Entity : ComponentContainer { public int Id { get; set; } } public class Component { public Entity Owner { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string ComponentType { get; set; } } public class Health : Component { public decimal CurrentHealth { get; set; } } public struct Point2D { public decimal X; public decimal Y; public Point2D(decimal x, decimal y) { X = x; Y = y; } } public class PhysicalLocation : Component { public Point2D Location { get; set; } } #endregion The code: var entity = new Entity() { Id = 1 }; var healthComponent = new Health() { CurrentHealth = 100, Owner = entity, Name = "Health", Id = 2 }; entity.Components.Add("1", healthComponent); var locationComponent = new PhysicalLocation() { Location = new Point2D() { X = 1, Y = 2 }, Owner = entity, Name = "PhysicalLocation", Id = 3 }; entity.Components.Add("2", locationComponent); Mapper.CreateMap<ComponentContainer, ComponentContainerDTO>() .Include<Entity, EntityDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Entity, EntityDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Component, ComponentDTO>() .Include<Health, HealthDTO>() .Include<PhysicalLocation, PhysicalLocationDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Component, ComponentDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Health, HealthDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<PhysicalLocation, PhysicalLocationDTO>(); Mapper.AssertConfigurationIsValid(); var targetEntity = Mapper.Map<Entity, EntityDTO>(entity); The error when I call Map() (abbreviated stack crawls): AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException was unhandled Message=Trying to map MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.Component, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]] to System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.ComponentDTO, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.Mappers.TypeMapObjectMapperRegistry.PropertyMapMappingStrategy.MapPropertyValue(ResolutionContext context, IMappingEngineRunner mapper, Object mappedObject, PropertyMap propertyMap) . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.Component, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]] to System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.ComponentDTO, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map MapperTest1.Component to MapperTest1.ComponentDTO. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Health to MapperTest1.HealthDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Decimal to System.Decimal. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Health to MapperTest1.HealthDTO Destination property: CurrentHealth Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.Mappers.TypeMapObjectMapperRegistry.PropertyMapMappingStrategy.MapPropertyValue(ResolutionContext context, IMappingEngineRunner mapper, Object mappedObject, PropertyMap propertyMap) . . InnerException: System.InvalidCastException Message=Unable to cast object of type 'MapperTest1.ComponentDTO' to type 'MapperTest1.HealthDTO'. Source=Anonymously Hosted DynamicMethods Assembly StackTrace: at SetCurrentHealth(Object , Object ) . . Thank you in advance. Rick

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• "power limit notification" clobbering on 12G Dell servers with RHEL6

  - by Andrew B

  Server: Poweredge r620 OS: RHEL 6.4 Kernel: 2.6.32-358.18.1.el6.x86_64 I'm experiencing application alarms in my production environment. Critical CPU hungry processes are being starved of resources and causing a processing backlog. The problem is happening on all the 12th Generation Dell servers (r620s) in a recently deployed cluster. As near as I can tell, instances of this happening are matching up to peak CPU utilization, accompanied by massive amounts of "power limit notification" spam in dmesg. An excerpt of one of these events: Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU12: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Package power limit notification (total events = 11) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Package power limit notification (total events = 12) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Package power limit notification (total events = 377) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU11: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) A little Google Fu reveals that this is typically associated with the CPU running hot, or voltage regulation kicking in. I don't think that's what is happening though. Temperature sensors for all servers in the cluster are running fine, Power Cap Policy is disabled in the iDRAC, and my System Profile is set to "Performance" on all of these servers: # omreport chassis biossetup | grep -A10 'System Profile' System Profile Settings ------------------------------------------ System Profile : Performance CPU Power Management : Maximum Performance Memory Frequency : Maximum Performance Turbo Boost : Enabled C1E : Disabled C States : Disabled Monitor/Mwait : Enabled Memory Patrol Scrub : Standard Memory Refresh Rate : 1x Memory Operating Voltage : Auto Collaborative CPU Performance Control : Disabled A Dell mailing list post describes the symptoms almost perfectly. Dell suggested that the author try using the Performance profile, but that didn't help. He ended up applying some settings in Dell's guide for configuring a server for low latency environments and one of those settings (or a combination thereof) seems to have fixed the problem. Kernel.org bug #36182 notes that power-limit interrupt debugging was enabled by default, which is causing performance degradation in scenarios where CPU voltage regulation is kicking in. A RHN KB article (RHN login required) mentions a problem impacting PE r620 and r720 servers not running the Performance profile, and recommends an update to a kernel released two weeks ago. ...Except we are running the Performance profile... Everything I can find online is running me in circles here. What's the heck is going on?

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• Grails - Simple hasMany Problem - Using CheckBoxes rather than HTML Select in create.gsp

  - by gav

  My problem is this: I want to create a grails domain instance, defining the 'Many' instances of another domain that it has. I have the actual source in a Google Code Project but the following should illustrate the problem. class Person { String name static hasMany[skills:Skill] static constraints = { id (visible:false) skills (nullable:false, blank:false) } } class Skill { String name String description static constraints = { id (visible:false) name (nullable:false, blank:false) description (nullable:false, blank:false) } } If you use this model and def scaffold for the two Controllers then you end up with a form like this that doesn't work; My own attempt to get this to work enumerates the Skills as checkboxes and looks like this; But when I save the Volunteer the skills are null! This is the code for my save method; def save = { log.info "Saving: " + params.toString() def skills = params.skills log.info "Skills: " + skills def volunteerInstance = new Volunteer(params) log.info volunteerInstance if (volunteerInstance.save(flush: true)) { flash.message = "${message(code: 'default.created.message', args: [message(code: 'volunteer.label', default: 'Volunteer'), volunteerInstance.id])}" redirect(action: "show", id: volunteerInstance.id) log.info volunteerInstance } else { render(view: "create", model: [volunteerInstance: volunteerInstance]) } } This is my log output (I have custom toString() methods); 2010-05-10 21:06:41,494 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Saving: ["skills":["1", "2"], "name":"Ian", "_skills":["", ""], "create":"Create", "action":"save", "controller":"volunteer"] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,495 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Skills: [1, 2] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,508 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Volunteer[ id: null | Name: Ian | Skills [Skill[ id: 1 | Name: Carpenter ] , Skill[ id: 2 | Name: Sound Engineer ] ]] Note that in the final log line the right Skills have been picked up and are part of the object instance. When the volunteer is saved the 'Skills' are ignored and not commited to the database despite the in memory version created clearly does have the items. Is it not possible to pass the Skills at construction time? There must be a way round this? I need a single form to allow a person to register but I want to normalise the data so that I can add more skills at a later time. If you think this should 'just work' then a link to a working example would be great. If I use the HTML Select then it works fine! Such as the following to make the Create page; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:select name="skills" from="${uk.co.bumbumtrain.Skill.list()}" multiple="yes" optionKey="id" size="5" value="${volunteerInstance?.skills}" /> </td> </tr> But I need it to work with checkboxes like this; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:each in="${skillInstanceList}" status="i" var="skillInstance"> <label for="${skillInstance?.name}"><g:message code="${skillInstance?.name}.label" default="${skillInstance?.name}" /></label> <g:checkBox name="skills" value="${skillInstance?.id.toString()}"/> </g:each> </td> </tr> The log output is exactly the same! With both style of form the Volunteer instance is created with the Skills correctly referenced in the 'Skills' variable. When saving, the latter fails with a null reference exception as shown at the top of this question. Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance! Gav

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• Jboss Seam: Enabling Debug page

  - by Markos Fragkakis

  Hi all, I want to enable the debug page. So, I have done the following: I have the jboss-seam and jboss-seam-debug jars as dependency in both my ejb and web maven projects (both are modules of my superproject) I put this context parameter in my web.xml: <context-param> <param-name>org.jboss.seam.core.init.debug</param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> </context-param> Now, when I hit the URL of my application, I get the debug page with this exception (full stacktrace at the end of the post): Caused by java.lang.IllegalStateException with message: "No phase id bound to current thread (make sure you do not have two SeamPhaseListener instances installed)" From posts I read it seems that this is somehow related to two jars of jboss-seam or jboss-seam-debug being in the classpath. I opened my ear file and only one of each is present (in the ear) whereas the war itself has no libraries in the WEB-INF/lib. I have also read of another way to initialize debug page using the components.xml. I also tried to include the following components.xml in the WEB-INF, but it didn't work either: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <components xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/components" xmlns:core="http://jboss.com/products/seam/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation=" http://jboss.com/products/seam/core http://jboss.com/products/seam/core-2.2.xsd http://jboss.com/products/seam/components http://jboss.com/products/seam/components-2.2.xsd"> <core:init debug="true"/> </components> Any suggestions on what to do to enable the debug page correctly? Cheers! Full stacktrace: org.jboss.seam.contexts.PageContext.getPhaseId(PageContext.java:163) org.jboss.seam.contexts.PageContext.isBeforeInvokeApplicationPhase(PageContext.java:175) org.jboss.seam.contexts.PageContext.getCurrentWritableMap(PageContext.java:91) org.jboss.seam.contexts.PageContext.remove(PageContext.java:105) org.jboss.seam.Component.newInstance(Component.java:2141) org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:2021) org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:2000) org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:1994) org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:1967) org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:1962) org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesPage.instance(FacesPage.java:92) org.jboss.seam.core.ConversationPropagation.restorePageContextConversationId(ConversationPropagation.java:84) org.jboss.seam.core.ConversationPropagation.restoreConversationId(ConversationPropagation.java:57) org.jboss.seam.jsf.SeamPhaseListener.afterRestoreView(SeamPhaseListener.java:391) org.jboss.seam.jsf.SeamPhaseListener.afterServletPhase(SeamPhaseListener.java:230) org.jboss.seam.jsf.SeamPhaseListener.afterPhase(SeamPhaseListener.java:196) com.sun.faces.lifecycle.Phase.handleAfterPhase(Phase.java:175) com.sun.faces.lifecycle.Phase.doPhase(Phase.java:114) com.sun.faces.lifecycle.RestoreViewPhase.doPhase(RestoreViewPhase.java:104) com.sun.faces.lifecycle.LifecycleImpl.execute(LifecycleImpl.java:118) javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.service(FacesServlet.java:265) weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper$ServletServiceAction.run(StubSecurityHelper.java:227) weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper.invokeServlet(StubSecurityHelper.java:125) weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.execute(ServletStubImpl.java:292) weblogic.servlet.internal.TailFilter.doFilter(TailFilter.java:26) weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:56) org.ajax4jsf.webapp.BaseXMLFilter.doXmlFilter(BaseXMLFilter.java:178) org.ajax4jsf.webapp.BaseFilter.handleRequest(BaseFilter.java:290) org.ajax4jsf.webapp.BaseFilter.processUploadsAndHandleRequest(BaseFilter.java:388) org.ajax4jsf.webapp.BaseFilter.doFilter(BaseFilter.java:515) weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:56) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:83) org.jboss.seam.web.LoggingFilter.doFilter(LoggingFilter.java:60) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.web.IdentityFilter.doFilter(IdentityFilter.java:40) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.web.MultipartFilter.doFilter(MultipartFilter.java:90) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:64) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:56) weblogic.servlet.internal.RequestEventsFilter.doFilter(RequestEventsFilter.java:27) weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:56) weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.run(WebAppServletContext.java:3592) weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321) weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:121) weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.securedExecute(WebAppServletContext.java:2202) weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.execute(WebAppServletContext.java:2108) weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.run(ServletRequestImpl.java:1432) weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:201) weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:173)

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• Functions registered with ExternalInterface.addCallback not available in Javascript

  - by Selene

  I'm working on a Flash game that needs to call some Javascript on the page and get data back from it. Calling Javascript from Flash works. Calling the Flash functions from Javascript (often) doesn't. I'm using the Gaia framework. What happens: The swf is loaded in with SWFObject There's a button in the Flash file. On click, it uses ExternalInterface.call() to call a Javascript function. This works. The Javascript function calls a Flash function that was exposed with ExternalInterface.addCallback(). Sometimes, the Javascript produces the following error: TypeError: myFlash.testCallback is not a function. When the error happens, it affects all functions registered with addCallback(). Gaia and some of its included libraries use addCallback(), and calling those functions from Javascript also produces the TypeError. Waiting a long time before pressing the button in Flash doesn't solve the error. Having Flash re-try addCallback() periodically doesn't solve the error When the error occurs, ExternalInterface.available = true and ExternalInterface.objectID contains the correct name for the Flash embed object. When the error occurs, document.getElementById('myflashcontent') correctly returns the Flash embed object. From my Page class: public class MyPage extends AbstractPage { // declarations of stage instances and class variables // other functions override public function transitionIn():void { send_button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, callJS); exposeCallbacks(); super.transitionIn(); } private function exposeCallbacks():void { trace("exposeCallbacks()"); if (ExternalInterface.available) { trace("ExternalInterface.objectID: " + ExternalInterface.objectID); try { ExternalInterface.addCallback("testCallback", simpleTestCallback); trace("called ExternalInterface.addCallback"); } catch (error:SecurityError) { trace("A SecurityError occurred: " + error.message + "\n"); } catch (error:Error) { trace("An Error occurred: " + error.message + "\n"); } } else { trace("exposeCallbacks() - ExternalInterface not available"); } } private function simpleTestCallback(str:String):void { trace("simpleTestCallback(str=\"" + str + "\")"); } private function callJS(e:Event):void { if (ExternalInterface.available) { ExternalInterface.call("sendTest", "name", "url"); } else { trace("callJS() - ExternalInterface not available"); } } } My Javascript: function sendTest(text, url) { var myFlash = document.getElementById("myflashcontent"); var callbackStatus = ""; callbackStatus += '\nmyFlash[testCallback]: ' + myFlash['testCallback']; //console.log(callbackStatus); var errors = false; try { myFlash.testCallback("test string"); } catch (err) { alert("Error: " + err.toString()); error = true; } if (!error) { alert("Success"); } } var params = { quality: "high", scale: "noscale", wmode: "transparent", allowscriptaccess: "always", bgcolor: "#000000" }; var flashVars = { siteXML: "xml/site.xml" }; var attributes = { id: "myflashcontent", name: "myflashcontent" }; // load the flash movie. swfobject.embedSWF("http://myurl.com/main.swf?v2", "myflashcontent", "728", "676", "10.0.0", serverRoot + "expressInstall.swf", flashVars, params, attributes, function(returnObj) { console.log('Returned ' + returnObj.success); if (returnObj.success) { returnObj.ref.focus(); } });

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