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  • Methods in Customized View did not get invoke in AppDelegate, Why?

    - by NorthKyut
    I want the methods pauseGame in customized UIView - MyGameView get invoked when the phone is locked or interrupted. So I have a pauseGame method but it can't stop the timer when user lock screen (command+L). The lock screen did appear but the game still running at the background. So I added the testPause method to MyGameView and MyGameAppDelegate and and put a breakpoint to debug it. When screen locked it, the screen lock appeared and the code did stop at the breakpoint. But when I tried to step into the testPause method, it didn't take me to the method in MyGameView (it just passed it, not skipped) and no message was printed on terminal by NSLog. Why? What did I miss? // // MyGameAppDelegate.h // MyGame // #import <UIKit/UIKit.h> @class MyGameViewController; @class MyGameView; @interface MyGameAppDelegate : NSObject { UIWindow *window; MyGameViewController *viewController; MyGameView *view; } @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIWindow *window; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet MyGameViewController *viewController; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet MyGameView *view; @end // // MyGameAppDelegate.m // MyGame // #import "MyGameAppDelegate.h" #import "MyGameViewController.h" #import "MyGameView.h" @implementation MyGameAppDelegate @synthesize window; @synthesize viewController; @synthesize view; - (void)applicationWillResignActive:(UIApplication *)application { /* Sent when the application is about to move from active to inactive state. This can occur for certain types of temporary interruptions (such as an incoming phone call or SMS message) or when the user quits the application and it begins the transition to the background state. Use this method to pause ongoing tasks, disable timers, and throttle down OpenGL ES frame rates. Games should use this method to pause the game. */ [view pauseGame]; [view testPause]; } @end // // MyGameView.h // MyGame @interface MyGameView : UIView { - (void)pauseGame; - (void)testPause; @end // // MyGameView.m // MyGame // #import "MyGameView.h" #import "AtlasSprite.h" #import "MyGameViewController.h" #import "SecondViewController.h" @implementation MyGameView - (void)pauseGame { [theTimer invalidate]; theTimer = nil; } - (void)testPause{ NSLog(@"TestPause"); } @end

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  • Have main thread wait for a boost thread complete a task (but not finish).

    - by JAKE6459
    I have found plenty on making one thread wait for another to finish executing before continuing, but that is not what I wanted to do. I am not very familiar with using any multi-threading apis but right now I'm trying to learn boost. My situation is that I am using my main thread (the starting one from int main()) to create an instance of a class that is in charge of interacting with the main GUI. A class function is then called that creates a boost thread which in turn creates the GUI and runs the message pump. The thing I want to do is when my main thread calls the classes member function to create the GUI, I don't want that function to return until I tell it to from the newly created thread. This way my main thread can't continue and call more functions from the GUI class that interact with the GUI thread until that thread has completed GUI creation and entered the message loop. I think I may be able to figure it out if it was multiple boost thread objects interacting with each other, but when it is the main thread (non-boost object) interacting with a boost thread object, I get lost. Eventually I want a loop in my main thread to call a class function (among other tasks) to check if the user as entered any new input into the GUI (buy any changes detected by the message loop being updated into a struct and changing a bool to tell the main thread in the class function a change has occurred). Any suggestions for any of this would be greatly appreciated. This is the member function called by the main thread. int ANNGUI::CreateGUI() { GUIMain = new Main(); GUIThread = new boost::thread(boost::bind(&Main::MainThreadFunc, GUIMain)); return 0; }; This is the boost thread starting function. void Main::MainThreadFunc() { ANNVariables = new GUIVariables; WndProc = new WindowProcedure; ANNWindowsClass = new WindowsClass(ANNVariables, WndProc); ANNWindow = new MainWindow(ANNVariables); GUIMessagePump = new MessagePump; ANNWindow-ShowWindows(); while(true) { GUIMessagePump-ProcessMessage(); } }; BTW, everything compiles fine and when I run it, it works I just put a sleep() in the main thread so I can play with the GUI a little.

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  • Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

    - by ScottGu
    The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download.  Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that).  The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well.  It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.  For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object.  For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control.  In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control.  For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property).  Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services.  It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight.  It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication.  WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server.  It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server  It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them.    The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications.  All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • SharePoint - Summing Calculated Columns By Groups (DVWP)

    - by Mark Rackley
    I had a problem… okay.. okay.. so I have many problems… but let’s focus on one in particular or this blog post would never end… okay? Thank you…. So, I had an electronic timesheet where users entered hours for each day of the week. It also had a “Week Total” column which was a calculated column of the sum. The calculated column looked like this: Pretty easy.. nothing spectacular. So, what’s the problem? WELL……………….. There is a row in the timesheet for each task a person worked on in a given week. So, if you worked on 4 tasks, you would have 4 rows of data, and 4 week totals for that week: This is all fine and dandy, but I want to know what the total was for the entire week. Yes.. I realize the answer is 24 from my example… I mean, I know how to add! I just want SharePoint to display it for me for the executives (we all know, they have math problems).  You may be thinking, hey genius (in a sarcastic tone of course), why don’t you just go to the view and total on the “Week Total” field. What a brilliant idea! Why didn’t I think of that… let’s go to the view and do just that…. Ohhhhhh… you can’t total on a Calculated Column.. it’s not even an option…  Yeah… I had the same moment. So, what do you do? Well… what do you think I did? 1) Googled “SharePoint total calculated column” 2) Said it couldn’t be done 3) Took a nap 4) Asked the question on twitter? The correct answer of course is number 4… followed by number 3… although I may have told my boss number 2 so that I look more brilliant than I am? It’s safe to say I did NOT try to find the solution on my own doing step 1… that would be just WAY to easy… So, anyway, I posted the question on Twitter and it turns out several people had suggestions from using jQuery to using DVWPs. I tend to be a big fan of the DVWP except for the disgusting process of deploying them to another farm.. ugh… just shoot me…. so, that is the solution I went with. Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura) has a super duper easy to follow video on the subject over at EndUserSharePoint.com: SharePoint: Displaying Calculated Column SUMS in a View (Screencast) Laura’s video was very easy to follow and was ALMOST exactly what I needed. She does a great job walking you through every step of summing up a calculated field which was PART of my problem. The other part was my list is grouped by date! So, I wanted to see for a given week, the summed “Week Total” of hours. Laura got me on the right track with her video and I dug a little deeper into the DVWP to accomplish my task. So, here are the steps you follow: 1. Click on the "chevron” (I didn’t know it was actually called that until I heard Laura say it).. I always call it the “little-button-in-the-top-right-corner-with-the-greater-than-sign”.. but “chevron” is much shorter. So, click on the chevron, click on “Sort and Group”. The Add the field you want to group by, in my example it is the “Monday Date” of the timesheet entry. Make sure to check the check boxes for “Show Group Header” AND “Show Group Footer”. Click “OK”. The view now shows the count of each grouped set of data: Interesting, this looks very similar to Laura’s video… right? So, let’s take a look at the code for the Count: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($nodeset)" /> Wow, also very similar… except in Laura’s video it looks like: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($Rows)" /> So.. the only difference is that instead of $Rows we have $nodeset. It turns out the $nodeset will go through each Row in the group just like $Rows goes through each row in the entire view. So, using the exact same logic as in Laura’s blog except replacing $Rows with $nodeset we get the functionality of being able to sum up the values for a group. So, I want to replace “Count: #” with the total hours, this is done using the following changes to the above code: Week Total : <xsl:value-of select="sum($nodeset/@Monday)+sum($nodeset/@Tuesday) +sum($nodeset/@Wednesday)+sum($nodeset/@Thursday)+sum($nodeset/@Friday) +sum($nodeset/@Saturday)+sum($nodeset/@Sunday)" /> Our final output has the summed hours for each group! So… long story short… follow Laura’s blog, then group your list, then replace “$Rows” with “$nodeset”. One caveat, this will not work if you group by a person field. For some reason the person field does not go through each row in the group. I haven’t dug into this much yet. Maybe if I find some time… whatever that is… Anyway, Laura did all the work, I just took it one small step forward… as always, feel free to leave any additional insights you may have. We’re all learning here!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 19, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 19, 2010New ProjectsApplication Management Library: Application Management makes your application life easier. It will automatic do memory management, handle and log unhandled exceptions, profiling y...Audio Service - Play Wave Files From Windows Service: This is a windows service that Check a registry key, when the key is updated with a new wave file path the service plays the wave file.Aviamodels: 3d drawing AviamodelsControl of payment proofs program for Greek citizens: This is a program that is used for Greek citizens who want to keep track of their payment proofs.Cover Creator: Cover Creator gives you the possibility to create and print CD covers. Content of CD is taken from http://www.freedb.org/ or can be added/modyfied ...DevBoard: DevBoard is a webbased scrum tool that helps developers/team get a clear overview of the project progress. It's developed in C# and silverlight.Flex AdventureWorks: The is mostly a skunk-works application to help me get acclimated to CodePlex. The long term goal is to integrate a Flex UI with the AdventureWor...GRE Wordlist: An intuitive and customizable word list for GRE aspirants. Developed in Java using a word list similar to Barron's.Indexer: A desktop file Index and Search tool which allows you to choose a list of folders to index, and then search on later. It is based on Lucene.net an...Project Management Office (PMO) for SharePoint: Sample web part for the Code Mastery event in Boston, February 11, 2010.Restart SQL Audit Policy and Job: Resolve SQL 2008 Audit Network Connectivity Issue.Rounded Corners / DIV Container: The RoundedDiv round corners container is a skin-able, CSS compliant UI control. Select which corners should be rounded, collapse and expand the c...Silverlight Google Search Application: The Silverlight Google Search Application uses Google Search API and behaves like Internet Search Application with option to preview desired page i...Weather Forecast Control: MyWeather forecast control pulls up to date weather forecast information from The Weather Channel for your website.New ReleasesApplication Management Library: ApplicationManagement v1.0: First ReleaseAudio Service - Play Wave Files From Windows Service: Audio Service v1.0: This is a working version of the Audio Service. Please use as you need to.AutoMapper: 1.0.1 for Silverlight 3.0 Alpha: AutoMapper for Silverlight 3.0. Features not supported: IDataReader mapping IListSource mapping All other features are supported.Buzz Dot Net: Buzz Dot Net v.1.10219: Buzz Dot Net Library (Parser & Objects) + WPF Example (using MVVM & Threading)Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: V 1.0.0.0a: This release contains two JavaScript files: canvas-utils.js (can be referenced in both runtime and development environment) canvas-vsdoc.js (must ...Control of payment proofs program for Greek citizens: Payment Proofs: source codeCourier: Beta 2: Added Rx Framework support and re-factored how message registration and un-registration works Blog post explaining the updates and re-factoring c...Cover Creator: Initial release: This is initial stable release. For now only in Polish language.Employee Scheduler: Employee Scheduler 2.2: Small Bug found. Small total hour calculation bug. See http://employeescheduler.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=6059 Extract the files...EnhSim: Release v1.9.7.1: Release v1.9.7.1Implemented Dislodged Foreign Object trinket Whispering Fanged Skull now also procs off Flame shock dots You can toggle bloodlust o...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.007: added SimpleSquareTest added Tortoise.Approve() for virtual proctor how to use virtual proctor: change the path in the proctor.txt file (located i...FolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.1.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.1.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...GLB Virtual Player Builder: v0.4.0 Beta: Allows for user to import and use archetypes for building players. The archetypes are contained in the file "archetypes.xml". This file is editab...Google Map WebPart from SharePoint List: GMap Stable Release: GMap Stable ReleaseHenge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02 R2): Fixed a build error related to an assembly attribute in XBOX 360 builds. Tweaked the controls in the sample when targeting the 360. Reduced the...Indexer: Beta Release 1: Just the initial/rough cut.NukeCS: NukeCS 5.2.3 Source Code: update version to 5.2.3ODOS: ODOS STABLE 1.5.0: Thank you for your patience while we develop this version. Not that much has been added, though. Just doing some sub-conscious stuff to make life...PoshBoard: PoshBoard 3.0 Beta 1: Welcome to the first beta release of PoshBoard 3.0 ! IMPORTANT WARNING : this release is absolutly not feature complete and is error-prone. Okay, ...Restart SQL Audit Policy and Job: Restart SQL 2008 Audit Policy and Job: This folder contains three pieces of source code: Server Audit Status (Started).xml - Import this on-schedule policy into your server's Policy-Ba...SAL- Self Artificial Learning: Artificial Learning 2AQV Working Proof Of Concept: This is the Simulation proof of concept version that comes after the 1aq version. AQ stands for Anwering Questions.SharePoint 2010 Word Automation: SP 2010 Word Automation - Workflow Actions 1.1: This release includes two new custom workflow activities for SharePoint designer Convert Folder Convert Library More information about these new...SharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.1: Exception Logging has been improved.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.2 Alpha: This is the third Sharpy release. A change has been made to allow overriding the master page from the controller. The release contains the single ...Silverlight Google Search Application: SL Google Search App Alpha: This is just a first alpha version of the application, as it looks like when I uploaded it to CodePlex. The application works, requires Silverlight...Starter Kit Mytrip.Mvc.Entity: Mytrip.Mvc.Entity 1.0 RC: EF Membership UserManager FileManager Localization Captcha ClientValidation Theme CrossBrowser VS 2010 RC MVC 2 RC db MSSQL2008thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.6): This release is an update for WSCF.blue V1. Below are the bug fixes made since the V1.0.5 release: The data contract type filter was not including...TS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.18.13.0: Changelog Added overloads to all methods of QueryRunenr class handling permission tasks to allow passing of permission name instead of permissionid...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.1 Beta 2: This is the second beta of Umbraco 4.1. Umbraco 4.1 is more advanced than ever, yet faster, lighter and simpler to use than ever. We, on behalf of...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30218.0: Automatic drop of latest buildZack's Fiasco - Code Generated DAL: v1.2.4: Enhancements: SQL Server CRUD Stored Procedures added option for USE <db> added option to create or not create INSERT sprocs added option to cr...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsRawrSharpyDinnerNow.netBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer ToolkitFluent Ribbon Control Suite

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  • Converting a Visual Studio 2003 Web Project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web Application Project

    - by navaneeth
    This walkthrough describes how to convert a Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project. The Visual Studio 2008 Web application project model is like the Visual Studio 2005 Web application project model. Therefore, the conversion processes are similar. For more information about Web application projects, see ASP.NET Web Application Projects. You can also convert from a Visual Studio .NET Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web site project. However, conversion to a Web application project is the approach that is supported, and gives you the convenience of tools to help with the conversion. For example, when you convert to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project, you can use the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard to automate part of the process. For information about how to convert a Visual Studio .NET Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web site, see Common Web Project Conversion Issues and Solutions. There are two parts involved in converting a Visual Studio 2002 or 2003 Web project to a Visual Studio 2008 Web application project. The parts are as follows: Converting the project. You can use the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard for the initial conversion of the project and Web.config files. You can later use the Convert To Web Application command to update the project's files and structure. Upgrading the .NET Framework version of the project. You must upgrade the project's .NET Framework version to either .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 or to .NET Framework 3.5. This .NET Framework version upgrade is required because Visual Studio 2008 cannot target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. You can perform this upgrade during the project conversion, by using the Conversion Wizard. Alternatively, you can upgrade the .NET Framework version after you convert the project.   NoteYou can change a project's .NET Framework version manually. To do so, in Visual Studio open the property pages for the project, click the Application tab, and then select a new version from the Target Framework list. This walkthrough illustrates the following tasks: Opening the Visual Studio .NET project in Visual Studio 2008 and creating a backup of the project files. Upgrading the .NET Framework version that the project targets. Converting the project file and the Web.config file. Converting ASP.NET code files. Testing the converted project. Prerequisites    To complete this walkthrough, you will need: Visual Studio 2008. A Web site project that was created in Visual Studio .NET version 2002 or 2003 that compiles and runs without errors. Converting the Project and Upgrading the .NET Framework Version    To begin, you open the project in Visual Studio 2008, which starts the conversion. It offers you an opportunity to back up the project before converting it. NoteIt is strongly recommended that you back up the project. The conversion works on the original project files, which cannot be recovered if the conversion is not successful.To convert the project and back up the files In Visual Studio 2008, in the File menu, click Open and then click Project. The Open Project dialog box is displayed. Browse to the folder that contains the project or solution file for the Visual Studio .NET project, select the file, and then click Open. NoteMake sure that you open the project by using the Open Project command. If you use the Open Web Site command, the project will be converted to the Web site project format.The Conversion Wizard opens and prompts you to create a backup before converting the project. To create the backup, click Yes. Click Browse, select the folder in which the backup should be created, and then click Next. Click Finish. The backup starts. NoteThere might be significant delays as the Conversion Wizard copies files, with no updates or progress indicated. Wait until the process finishes before you continue.When the conversion finishes, the wizard prompts you to upgrade the targeted version of the .NET Framework for the project. To upgrade to the .NET Framework 3.5, click Yes. To upgrade the project to target the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1, click No. It is recommended that you leave the check box selected that asks whether you want to upgrade all Webs in the solution. If you upgrade to .NET Framework 3.5, the project's Web.config file is modified at the same time as the project file. When the upgrade and conversion have finished, a message is displayed that indicates that you have completed the first step in converting your project. Click OK. The wizard displays status information about the conversion. Click Close. Testing the Converted Project    After the conversion has finished, you can test the project to make sure that it runs. This will also help you identify code in the project that must be updated. To verify that the project runs If you know about changes that are required for the code to run with the new version of the .NET Framework, make those changes. In the Build menu, click Build. Any missing references or other compilation issues in the project are displayed in the Error List window. The most likely issues are missing assembly references or issues with dynamically generated types. In Solution Explorer, right-click the Web page that will be used to launch the application, and then click Set as Start Page. On the Debug menu, click Start Debugging. If debugging is not enabled, the Debugging Not Enabled dialog box is displayed. Select the option to add a Web.config file that has debugging enabled, and then click OK. Verify that the converted project runs as expected. Do not continue with the conversion process until all build and run-time errors are resolved. Converting ASP.NET Code Files    ASP.NET Web page files and user-control files in Visual Studio 2008 that use the code-behind model have an associated designer file. The files that you just converted will have an associated code-behind file, but no designer file. Therefore, the next step is to generate designer files. NoteOnly ASP.NET Web pages and user controls that have their code in a separate code file require a separate designer file. For pages that have inline code and no associated code file, no designer file will be generated.To convert ASP.NET code files In Solution Explorer, right-click the project node, and then click Convert To Web Application. The files are converted. Verify that the converted code files have a code file and a designer file. Build and run the project to verify the results of the conversion.

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  • Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC today

    - by Matthew Guay
    Anticipation has been building for the new Windows Phone 7 Series ever since Microsoft unveiled it at the Mobile World Congress in February.  Now, thanks to free developer tools, you can get a first-hand experience of the basic Windows Phone 7 Series devices on your PC. Windows Phone 7 Series represents a huge change in the mobile field for Microsoft, bringing the acclaimed Zune HD UI to an innovative phone platform.  Windows Mobile has often been criticized for being behind other Smartphone platforms, but Microsoft seeks to regain the lead with this new upcoming release.  A platform must have developers behind it to be useful, so they have released a full set of free development tools so anyone can make apps for it today.  Or, if you simply want to play with Windows Phone 7, you can use the included emulator to try out the new Metro UI.  Here’s how to do this today on your Vista or 7 computer. Please note: These tools are a Customer Technology Preview release, so only install them if you’re comfortable using pre-release software. Getting Started First, download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below), and run the installer.  This will install the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) versions of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, Silverlight for Windows Phone, and XNA 4.0 Game Studio on your computer, all of which are required and cannot be installed individually. Accept the license agreement when prompted. Click “Install Now” to install the tools you need.  The only setup customization option is where to save the files, so choose Customize if you need to do so. Setup will now automatically download and install the components you need, and will additionally download either 32 or 64 bit programs depending on your operating system. About halfway thorough the installation, you’ll be prompted to reboot your system.  Once your computer is rebooted, setup will automatically resume without further input.   When setup is finished, click “Run the Product Now” to get started. Running Windows Phone 7 on your PC Now that you’ve got the Windows Phone Developer tools installed, it’s time to get the Windows Phone emulator running.  If you clicked “Run the Product Now” when the setup finished, Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone should have already started.   If not, simply enter “visual studio” in your start menu search and select “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone”. Now, to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator, we have to test an application.  So, even if you don’t know how to program, we can open a phone application template, and then test it to run the emulator.  First, click New Project on the left hand side of the front page. Any of the application templates would work for this, but here let’s select “Windows Phone Application”, and then click Ok. Here’s your new application template, which already contains the basic phone application framework.  This is where you’d start if you want to develop a Windows Phone app, but for now we just want to see Windows Phone 7 in action. So, to run the emulator, click Debug in the menu and then select Start Debugging. Your new application will launch inside the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator.  The default template doesn’t give us much, but it does show an example application running in Windows Phone 7.   Exploring Windows Phone 7 Click the Windows button on the emulator to go to the home screen.  Notice the Zune HD-like transition animation.  The emulator only includes Internet Explorer, your test application, and a few settings. Click the arrow on the right to see the available applications in a list. Settings lets you change the theme, regional settings, and the date and time in your emulator.  It also has an applications settings pane, but this currently isn’t populated. The Time settings shows a unique Windows Phone UI. You can return to the home screen by pressing the Windows button.  Here’s the Internet Explorer app running, with the virtual keyboard open to enter an address.  Please note that this emulator can also accept input from your keyboard, so you can enter addresses without clicking on the virtual keyboard. And here’s Google running in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 supports accelerometers, and you can simulate this in the emulator.  Click one of the rotate buttons to rotate the screen in that direction. Here’s our favorite website in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 in landscape mode. All this, running right inside your Windows 7 desktop… Developer tools for Windows Phone 7 Although it may be fun to play with the Windows Phone 7 emulator, developers will be more excited to actually be able to create new and exciting apps for it.  The Windows Phone Developer Tools download includes Visual Studio Express and XNA Game Studio 4.0 which lets you create enticing games and apps for Windows Phones.  All development for Windows Phones will be in C#, Silverlight, and the XNA game framework.  Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone includes templates for these, and additionally has code samples to help you get started with development. Conclusion Many features are still not functional in this preview version, such as the search button and most of the included applications.  However, this still gives you a great way to experience firsthand the future of the Windows Phone platform.  And, for developers, this is your chance to set your mark on the Windows Phone 7 Series even before it is released to the public.  Happy playing and developing! Links Download Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Windows Phone Developer Site Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Keep Track of Homework Assignments with SoshikuWeekend Fun: Watch Television On Your PC With TVUPlayerEasily Manage Your Downloads with Download StatusbarCreate a Shortcut or Hotkey to Mute the System Volume in WindowsHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family

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  • Oracle Coherence, Split-Brain and Recovery Protocols In Detail

    - by Ricardo Ferreira
    This article provides a high level conceptual overview of Split-Brain scenarios in distributed systems. It will focus on a specific example of cluster communication failure and recovery in Oracle Coherence. This includes a discussion on the witness protocol (used to remove failed cluster members) and the panic protocol (used to resolve Split-Brain scenarios). Note that the removal of cluster members does not necessarily indicate a Split-Brain condition. Oracle Coherence does not (and cannot) detect a Split-Brain as it occurs, the condition is only detected when cluster members that previously lost contact with each other regain contact. Cluster Topology and Configuration In order to create an good didactic for the article, let's assume a cluster topology and configuration. In this example we have a six member cluster, consisting of one JVM on each physical machine. The member IDs are as follows: Member ID  IP Address  1  10.149.155.76  2  10.149.155.77  3  10.149.155.236  4  10.149.155.75  5  10.149.155.79  6  10.149.155.78 Members 1, 2, and 3 are connected to a switch, and members 4, 5, and 6 are connected to a second switch. There is a link between the two switches, which provides network connectivity between all of the machines. Member 1 is the first member to join this cluster, thus making it the senior member. Member 6 is the last member to join this cluster. Here is a log snippet from Member 6 showing the complete member set: 2010-02-26 15:27:57.390/3.062 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=main, member=6): Started DefaultCacheServer... SafeCluster: Name=cluster:0xDDEB Group{Address=224.3.5.3, Port=35465, TTL=4} MasterMemberSet ( ThisMember=Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) OldestMember=Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) ActualMemberSet=MemberSet(Size=6, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:49.095, Address=10.149.155.79:8088, MachineId=1103, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:3229, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) RecycleMillis=120000 RecycleSet=MemberSet(Size=0, BitSetCount=0 ) ) At approximately 15:30, the connection between the two switches is severed: Thirty seconds later (the default packet timeout in development mode) the logs indicate communication failures across the cluster. In this example, the communication failure was caused by a network failure. In a production setting, this type of communication failure can have many root causes, including (but not limited to) network failures, excessive GC, high CPU utilization, swapping/virtual memory, and exceeding maximum network bandwidth. In addition, this type of failure is not necessarily indicative of a split brain. Any communication failure will be logged in this fashion. Member 2 logs a communication failure with Member 5: 2010-02-26 15:30:32.638/196.928 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=2): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:49.095, Address=10.149.155.79:8088, MachineId=1103, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:3229, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) ) The Coherence clustering protocol (TCMP) is a reliable transport mechanism built on UDP. In order for the protocol to be reliable, it requires an acknowledgement (ACK) for each packet delivered. If a packet fails to be acknowledged within the configured timeout period, the Coherence cluster member will log a packet timeout (as seen in the log message above). When this occurs, the cluster member will consult with other members to determine who is at fault for the communication failure. If the witness members agree that the suspect member is at fault, the suspect is removed from the cluster. If the witnesses unanimously disagree, the accuser is removed. This process is known as the witness protocol. Since Member 2 cannot communicate with Member 5, it selects two witnesses (Members 1 and 4) to determine if the communication issue is with Member 5 or with itself (Member 2). However, Member 4 is on the switch that is no longer accessible by Members 1, 2 and 3; thus a packet timeout for member 4 is recorded as well: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.648/199.938 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=2): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) Member 1 has the ability to confirm the departure of member 4, however Member 6 cannot as it is also inaccessible. At the same time, Member 3 sends a request to remove Member 6, which is followed by a report from Member 3 indicating that Member 6 has departed the cluster: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.706/199.996 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=2): MemberLeft request for Member 6 received from Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) 2010-02-26 15:30:35.709/199.999 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=2): MemberLeft notification for Member 6 received from Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) The log for Member 3 determines how Member 6 departed the cluster: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.161/191.694 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=3): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) ) 2010-02-26 15:30:35.165/191.698 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=3): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) In this case, Member 3 happened to select two witnesses that it still had connectivity with (Members 1 and 2) thus resulting in a simple decision to remove Member 6. Given the departure of Member 6, Member 2 is left with a single witness to confirm the departure of Member 4: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.713/200.003 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=2): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=1, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) In the meantime, Member 4 logs a missing heartbeat from the senior member. This message is also logged on Members 5 and 6. 2010-02-26 15:30:07.906/150.453 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=PacketListenerN, member=4): Scheduled senior member heartbeat is overdue; rejoining multicast group. Next, Member 4 logs a TcpRing failure with Member 2, thus resulting in the termination of Member 2: 2010-02-26 15:30:21.421/163.968 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D4> (thread=Cluster, member=4): TcpRing: Number of socket exceptions exceeded maximum; last was "java.net.SocketTimeoutException: connect timed out"; removing the member: 2 For quick process termination detection, Oracle Coherence utilizes a feature called TcpRing which is a sparse collection of TCP/IP-based connections between different members in the cluster. Each member in the cluster is connected to at least one other member, which (if at all possible) is running on a different physical box. This connection is not used for any data transfer, only heartbeat communications are sent once a second per each link. If a certain number of exceptions are thrown while trying to re-establish a connection, the member throwing the exceptions is removed from the cluster. Member 5 logs a packet timeout with Member 3 and cites witnesses Members 4 and 6: 2010-02-26 15:30:29.791/165.037 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=5): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) 2010-02-26 15:30:29.798/165.044 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=5): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) Eventually we are left with two distinct clusters consisting of Members 1, 2, 3 and Members 4, 5, 6, respectively. In the latter cluster, Member 4 is promoted to senior member. The connection between the two switches is restored at 15:33. Upon the restoration of the connection, the cluster members immediately receive cluster heartbeats from the two senior members. In the case of Members 1, 2, and 3, the following is logged: 2010-02-26 15:33:14.970/369.066 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=1): The member formerly known as Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:30:35.341, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) has been forcefully evicted from the cluster, but continues to emit a cluster heartbeat; henceforth, the member will be shunned and its messages will be ignored. Likewise for Members 4, 5, and 6: 2010-02-26 15:33:14.343/336.890 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=4): The member formerly known as Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:30:31.64, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) has been forcefully evicted from the cluster, but continues to emit a cluster heartbeat; henceforth, the member will be shunned and its messages will be ignored. This message indicates that a senior heartbeat is being received from members that were previously removed from the cluster, in other words, something that should not be possible. For this reason, the recipients of these messages will initially ignore them. After several iterations of these messages, the existence of multiple clusters is acknowledged, thus triggering the panic protocol to reconcile this situation. When the presence of more than one cluster (i.e. Split-Brain) is detected by a Coherence member, the panic protocol is invoked in order to resolve the conflicting clusters and consolidate into a single cluster. The protocol consists of the removal of smaller clusters until there is one cluster remaining. In the case of equal size clusters, the one with the older Senior Member will survive. Member 1, being the oldest member, initiates the protocol: 2010-02-26 15:33:45.970/400.066 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=1): An existence of a cluster island with senior Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) containing 3 nodes have been detected. Since this Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) is the senior of an older cluster island, the panic protocol is being activated to stop the other island's senior and all junior nodes that belong to it. Member 3 receives the panic: 2010-02-26 15:33:45.803/382.336 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=3): Received panic from senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) caused by Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member 4, the senior member of the younger cluster, receives the kill message from Member 3: 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. In turn, Member 4 requests the departure of its junior members 5 and 6: 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. 2010-02-26 15:33:43.343/349.015 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=6): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. Once Members 4, 5, and 6 restart, they rejoin the original cluster with senior member 1. The log below is from Member 4. Note that it receives a different member id when it rejoins the cluster. 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. 2010-02-26 15:33:46.921/369.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Service Cluster left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Invocation:InvocationService, member=4): Service InvocationService left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=OptimisticCache, member=4): Service OptimisticCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=ReplicatedCache, member=4): Service ReplicatedCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=DistributedCache, member=4): Service DistributedCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Invocation:Management, member=4): Service Management left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service Management with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service DistributedCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service ReplicatedCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service OptimisticCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service InvocationService with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:33:47.046, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) left Cluster with senior member 4 2010-02-26 15:33:49.218/371.765 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=main, member=n/a): Restarting cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:49.421/371.968 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Service Cluster joined the cluster with senior service member n/a 2010-02-26 15:33:49.625/372.172 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): This Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:33:50.499, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=1) joined cluster "cluster:0xDDEB" with senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) Cool isn't it?

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  • Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

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

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  • Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library

    - by Sky Sanders
    Soapi.CS for .Net / Silverlight / Windows Phone 7 / Mono as easy as breathing...: var context = new ApiContext(apiKey).Initialize(false); Question thisPost = context.Official .StackApps .Questions.ById(386) .WithComments(true) .First(); Console.WriteLine(thisPost.Title); thisPost .Owner .Questions .PageSize(5) .Sort(PostSort.Votes) .ToList() .ForEach(q=> { Console.WriteLine("\t" + q.Score + "\t" + q.Title); q.Timeline.ToList().ForEach(t=> Console.WriteLine("\t\t" + t.TimelineType + "\t" + t.Owner.DisplayName)); Console.WriteLine(); }); // if you can think it, you can get it. Output Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library 21 Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet 14 SOAPI-WATCH: A realtime service that notifies subscribers via twitter when the API changes in any way. Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Comment lfoust Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet 11 SOAPI-EXPLORE: Self-updating single page JavaSript API test harness Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet 11 Soapi.JS V1.0: fluent JavaScript wrapper for the StackOverflow API Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Answer George Edison Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet 9 SOAPI-DIFF: Your app broke? Check SOAPI-DIFF to find out what changed in the API Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dennis Williamson Answer Dennis Williamson Votes code poet Votes Dennis Williamson Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet About A robust, fully relational, easy to use, strongly typed, end-to-end StackOverflow API Client Library. Out of the box, Soapi provides you with a robust client library that abstracts away most all of the messy details of consuming the API and lets you concentrate on implementing your ideas. A few features include: A fully relational model of the API data set exposed via a fully 'dot navigable' IEnumerable (LINQ) implementation. Simply tell Soapi what you want and it will get it for you. e.g. "On my first question, from the author of the first comment, get the first page of comments by that person on any post" my.Questions.First().Comments.First().Owner.Comments.ToList(); (yes this is a real expression that returns the data as expressed!) Full coverage of the API, all routes and all parameters with an intuitive syntax. Strongly typed Domain Data Objects for all API data structures. Eager and Lazy Loading of 'stub' objects. Eager\Lazy loading may be disabled. When finer grained control of requests is desired, the core RouteMap objects may be leveraged to request data from any of the API paths using all available parameters as documented on the help pages. A rich Asynchronous implementation. A configurable request cache to reduce unnecessary network traffic and to simplify your usage logic. There is no need to go out of your way to be frugal. You may set a distinct cache duration for any particular route. A configurable request throttle to ensure compliance with the api terms of usage and to simplify your code in that you do not have to worry about and respond to 50X errors. The RequestCache and Throttled Queue are thread-safe, so can make as many requests as you like from as many threads as you like as fast as you like and not worry about abusing the api or having to write reams of management/compensation code. Configurable retry threshold that will, by default, make up to 3 attempts to retrieve a request before failing. Every request made by Soapi is properly formed and directed so most any http error will be the result of a timeout or other network infrastructure. A retry buffer provides a level of fault tolerance that you can rely on. An almost identical javascript library, Soapi.JS, and it's full figured big brother, Soapi.JS2, that will enable you to leverage your server cycles and bandwidth for only those tasks that require it and offload things like status updates to the client's browser. License Licensed GPL Version 2 license. Why is Soapi.CS GPL? Can I get an LGPL license for Soapi.CS? (hint: probably) Platforms .NET 3.5 .NET 4.0 Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone 7 Mono Download Source code lives @ http://soapics.codeplex.com. Binary releases are forthcoming. codeplex is acting up again. get the source and binaries @ http://bitbucket.org/bitpusher/soapi.cs/downloads The source is C# 3.5. and includes projects and solutions for the following IDEs Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio 2010 ModoDevelop 2.4 Documentation Full documentation is available at http://soapi.info/help/cs/index.aspx Sample Code / Usage Examples Sample code and usage examples will be added as answers to this question. Full API Coverage all API routes are covered Full Parameter Parity If the API exposes it, Soapi giftwraps it for you. Building a simple app with Soapi.CS - a simple app that gathers all traces of a user in the whole stackiverse. Fluent Configuration - Setting up a Soapi.ApiContext could not be easier Bulk Data Import - A tiny app that quickly loads a SQLite data file with all users in the stackiverse. Paged Results - Soapi.CS transparently handles multi-page operations. Asynchronous Requests - Soapi.CS provides a rich asynchronous model that is especially useful when writing api apps in Silverlight or Windows Phone 7. Caching and Throttling - how and why Apps that use Soapi.CS Soapi.FindUser - .net utility for locating a user anywhere in the stackiverse Soapi.Explore - The entire API at your command Soapi.LastSeen - List users by last access time Add your app/site here - I know you are out there ;-) if you are not comfortable editing this post, simply add a comment and I will add it. The CS/SL/WP7/MONO libraries all compile the same code and with the exception of environmental considerations of Silverlight, the code samples are valid for all libraries. You may also find guidance in the test suites. More information on the SOAPI eco-system. Contact This library is currently the effort of me, Sky Sanders (code poet) and can be reached at gmail - sky.sanders Any who are interested in improving this library are welcome. Support Soapi You can help support this project by voting for Soapi's Open Source Ad post For more information about the origins of Soapi.CS and the rest of the Soapi eco-system see What is Soapi and why should I care?

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  • Toorcon 15 (2013)

    - by danx
    The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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  • How Mary Meeker’s Latest Findings May Make You Re-Imagine Commerce

    - by Brenna Johnson-Oracle
    0 0 1 954 5439 Endeca Technologies 45 12 6381 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;} Today, Mary Meeker released her highly anticipated annual “Internet Trends” presentation for 2014. All 164 slides are jam-packed with pretty much everything you need to know about the state of the Internet. And as luck would have it, Oracle is staying ahead of these trends (but we’ll talk about that later). There were a few surprises, some stats to solidify what you likely already know, and Meeker’s novel observations about where we are all going. What interested me the most is not only how people are engaging in their personal lives, but how they engage with brands. As you could probably predict, Internet usage growth is slowing while tablet user and mobile data traffic growth continue their meteoric rise around the globe, with tremendous growth in underpenetrated markets like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Now hold those the “Internet is dead” comments. Keep in mind there’s still plenty of room to grow, and a multiscreen model is Meeker’s vision for our future. Despite 1.5x YOY growth for mobile traffic, mobile still only makes up about 23% of all traffic today. With tablet shipments easily outpacing figures for PCs even at their height (in 2007), mobile will only continue on it’s path, but won’t be everything to everyone. Mobile won’t replace every touchpoint, it’s just created our shorter attention spans and demand for simpler, more personal experiences. As Meeker points out TVs, tablets, PCs, and smartphones are used for different activities at present, but lines will blur (for example, 84% of smartphones owners use their device while watching TV). Day-to-day activities are being re-imagining through simple, beautiful user experiences. It seems like every day I discover a new way a brand/site/app made the most mundane or mounting task enjoyable and frictionless – and I’m not alone. Meeker points out the evolution of how we do everything from how we communicate, get information, use money, meet someone, get places, order a meal, and consume media is all done through new user interfaces that make day-to-day tasks simpler. This movement has caused just about everyone’s patience for a poor UX to take a nosedive. And it’s not just the digital user experience, technology is making a lot of people’s offline lives easier, and less expensive. Today 47% of online shopping utilizes free shipping— nearly half. And Meeker predicts same day local delivery will be the “next big thing” (and you can take a guess on who will own that). Content, Community and Commerce creates the “Internet Trifecta.” Meeker pointed out that when content, communities and commerce occur in a single experience it’s embraced by consumers, which translates to big dollars for brands. The magic happens when consumers can get inspired, research, and buy in a single experience. As the buying cycle has changed and touchpoints (Web, mobile, social, store) are no longer tied to “roles” or steps in the customer journey, brands must make all experiences (content and commerce) available in a single, adaptable experience. (We at Oracle Commerce have a lot to say on this topic – stay tuned!) And in what Meeker calls the “biggest re-imagination of all:” consumers enabled with smartphones and sensors are creating troves of findable and sharable data, which she says is in the early stages, by growing rapidly. She notes that transparency and patterns of consumers with this hardware (FYI - there are up to 10 sensors embedded in smartphones now) has created a Big Data treasure chest to be mined to improve business and the life of the consumer. The opportunities are endless. So what does it all mean for a company doing business online? Start thinking about how you can: Re-imagine your experience. Not your online experience and your mobile experience and your social experience – your overall experience. When consumers can research, buy, and advocate from anywhere (and their attention spans are at an all-time low) channels don’t exist. Enable simple and beautiful interactions informed by all of the online and offline data you leverage across your enterprise. Ethically leverage the endless supply of data (user generated content, clicks, purchases, in-store behavior, social activity) to make experiences more beautiful, more accurate, and more personalized (not to mention, more lucrative for you). Re-imagine content and commerce. Content and commerce must co-exist in a single destination where shoppers can get inspired, explore, research, share, and purchase in a collective experience. Think of how you can deliver an experience where all types of experiences (brand stories and commerce) adapt to every customer need. (Look for more on this topic coming soon). Re-imagine your reach. Look to Meeker’s findings to see how the global appetite for digital experiences is growing, but under-served in many places (i.e.: India, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Philippines, etc.). Growing your online business to a new geography doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch or having an entirely new team manage the new endeavor. Expand using what you’ve already built in a multisite framework, with global language support. And of course, make sure it’s optimized for mobile! Re-imagine the possible. After every Meeker report, I’m always left with the thought “we are just at the beginning.” Everyday there is more data, more possibilities, more online consumers, and more opportunities to use new latest technology to get closer to your customers and be more successful. There’s a lot going on in our Product Development and Product Innovations groups to automate innovation for our customers, so that they can continue to stay ahead of these trends, without disrupting their business. Check out a recent interview with our Innovations Team on some of these new possibilities. Staying on track despite the seemingly endless possibilities out there is the hard part. Prioritizing where you will focus based on your unique brand promise, customer and goals is what you do best. To learn how Oracle Commerce can help your business achieve your goals check out oracle.com/commerce. Check out Meeker’s entire report here.

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  • Thursday Community Keynote: "By the Community, For the Community"

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Sharat Chander, JavaOne Community Chairperson, began Thursday's Community Keynote. As part of the morning’s theme of "By the Community, For the Community," Chander noted that 60% of the material at the 2012 JavaOne conference was presented by Java Community members. "So next year, when the call for papers starts, put-in your submissions," he urged.From there, Gary Frost, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD, expanded upon Sunday's Strategy Keynote exploration of Project Sumatra, an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to heterogeneous computing platforms (which combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon). Sumatra entails enhancing the JVM to make maximum use of these advanced platforms. Within this development space, AMD created the Aparapi API, which converts Java bytecode into OpenCL for execution on such GPU devices. The Aparapi API was open sourced in September 2011.Whether it was zooming-in on a Mandelbrot set, "the game of life," or a swarm of 10,000 Dukes in a space-bound gravitational dance, Frost's demos, using an Aparapi/OpenCL implementation, produced stunningly faster display results. He indicated that the Java 9 timeframe is where they see Project Sumatra coming to ultimate fruition, employing the Lamdas of Java 8.Returning to the theme of the keynote, Donald Smith, Director, Java Product Management, Oracle, explored a mind map graphic demonstrating the importance of Community in terms of fostering innovation. "It's the sharing and mixing of culture, the diversity, and the rapid prototyping," he said. Within this topic, Smith, brought up a panel of representatives from Cloudera, Eclipse, Eucalyptus, Perrone Robotics, and Twitter--ideal manifestations of community and innovation in the world of Java.Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, explored his company's open source cloud software platform, written in Java, and used by gaming companies, technology companies, media companies, and more. Chris Aniszczyk, Operations Engineering,Twitter, noted the importance of the JVM in terms of their multiple-language development environment. Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera, described his company's Apache Hadoop-based software, support, and training. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, noted that they have about 270 tools projects at Eclipse, with 267 of them written in Java. Milinkovich added that Eclipse will even be going into space in 2013, as part of the control software on various experiments aboard the International Space Station. Lastly, Paul Perrone, CEO, Perrone Robotics, detailed his company's robotics and automation software platform built 100% on Java, including Java SE and Java ME--"on rat, to cat, to elephant-sized systems." Milinkovic noted that communities are by nature so good at innovation because of their very openness--"The more open you make your innovation process, the more ideas are challenged, and the more developers are focused on justifying their choices all the way through the process."From there, Georges Saab, VP Development Java SE OpenJDK, continued the topic of innovation and helping the Java Community to "Make the Future Java." Martijn Verburg, representing the London Java Community (winner of a Duke's Choice Award 2012 for their activity in OpenJDK and JCP), soon joined Saab onstage. Verburg detailed the LJC's "Adopt a JSR" program--"to get day-to-day developers more involved in the innovation that's happening around them."  From its London launching pad, the innovative program has spread to Brazil, Morocco, Latvia, India, and more.Other active participants in the program joined Verburg onstage--Ben Evans, London Java Community; James Gough, Stackthread; Bruno Souza, SOUJava; Richard Warburton, jClarity; and Cecelia Borg, Oracle--OpenJDK Onboarding. Together, the group explored the goals and tasks inherent in the Adopt a JSR program--from organizing hack days (testing prototype implementations), to managing mailing lists and forums, to triaging issues, to evangelism—all with the goal of fostering greater community/developer involvement, but equally importantly, building better open standards. “Come join us, and make your ecosystem better!" urged Verburg.Paul Perrone returned to profile the latest in his company's robotics work around Java--including the AARDBOTS family of smaller robotic vehicles, running the Perrone MAX platform on top of the Java JVM. Perrone took his "Rumbles" four-wheeled robot out for a spin onstage--a roaming, ARM-based security-bot vehicle, complete with IR, ultrasonic, and "cliff" sensors (the latter, for the raised stage at JavaOne). As an ultimate window into the future of robotics, Perrone displayed a "head-set" controller--a sensor directed at the forehead to monitor brainwaves, for the someday-implementation of brain-to-robot control.Then, just when it seemed this might be the end of the day's futuristic offerings, a mystery voice from offstage pronounced "I've got some toys"--proving to be guest-visitor James Gosling, there to explore his cutting-edge work with Liquid Robotics. While most think of robots as something with wheels or arms or lasers, Gosling explained, the Liquid Robotics vehicle is an entirely new and innovative ocean-going 'bot. Looking like a floating surfboard, with an attached set of underwater wings, the autonomous devices roam the oceans using only the energy of ocean waves to propel them, and a single actuated rudder to steer. "We have to accomplish all guidance just by wiggling the rudder," Gosling said. The devices offer applications from self-installing weather buoy, to pollution monitoring station, to marine mammal monitoring device, to climate change data gathering, to even ocean life genomic sampling. The early versions of the vehicle used C code on very tiny industrial micro controllers, where they had to "count the bytes one at a time."  But the latest generation vehicles, which just hit the water a week or so ago, employ an ARM processor running Linux and the ARM version of JDK 7. Gosling explained that vehicle communication from remote locations is achieved via the Iridium satellite network. But because of the costs of this communication path, the data must be sent in very small bursts--using SBD short burst data. "It costs $1/kb, so that rules everything in the software design,” said Gosling. “If you were trying to stream a Netflix video over this, it would cost a million dollars a movie. …We don't have a 'big data' problem," he quipped. There are currently about 150 Liquid Robotics vehicles out traversing the oceans. Gosling demonstrated real time satellite tracking of several vehicles currently at sea, noting that Java is actually particularly good at AI applications--due to the language having garbage collection, which facilitates complex data structures. To close-out his time onstage, Gosling of course participated in the ceremonial Java tee-shirt toss out to the audience…In parting, Chander passed the JavaOne Community Chairperson baton to Stephen Chin, Java Technology Evangelist, Oracle. Onstage in full motorcycle gear, Chin noted that he'll soon be touring Europe by motorcycle, meeting Java Community Members and streaming live via UStream--the ultimate manifestation of community and technology!  He also reminded attendees of the upcoming JavaOne Latin America 2012, São Paulo, Brazil (December 4-6, 2012), and stated that the CFP (call for papers) at the conference has been extended for one more week. "Remember, December is summer in Brazil!" Chin said.

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  • Ops Center Solaris 11 IPS Repository Management: Using ISO Images

    - by S Stelting
    Please join us for a live WebEx presentation of this topic on Tuesday, November 20th at 9am MDT. Details for the call are provided below: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209834017&UID=1512096072&PW=NYTVlZTYxMzdm&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D Meeting password: oracle123 Call-in toll-free number: 1-866-682-4770 International numbers: http://www.intercall.com/oracle/access_numbers.htm Conference Code: 762 9343 # Security Code: 7777 # With Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, you can provision, patch, monitor and manage Oracle Solaris 11 instances. To do this, Ops Center creates and maintains a Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) repository on the Enterprise Controller. During the Enterprise Controller configuration, you can load repository content directly from Oracle's Support Web site and subsequently synchronize the repository as new content becomes available. Of course, you can also use Solaris 11 ISO images to create and update your Ops Center repository. There are a few excellent reasons for doing this: You're running Ops Center in disconnected mode, and don't have Internet access on your Enterprise Controller You'd rather avoid the bandwidth associated with live synchronization of a Solaris 11 package repository This demo will show you how to use Solaris 11 ISO images to set up and update your Ops Center repository. Prerequisites This tip assumes that you've already installed the Enterprise Controller on a Solaris 11 OS instance and that you're ready for post-install configuration. In addition, there are specific Ops Center and OS version requirements depending on which version of Solaris 11 you plan to install.You can get full details about the requirements in the Release Notes for Ops Center 12c update 2. Additional information is available in the Ops Center update 2 Readme document. Part 1: Using a Solaris 11 ISO Image to Create an Ops Center Repository Step 1 – Download the Solaris 11 Repository Image The Oracle Web site provides a number of download links for official Solaris 11 images. Among those links is a two-part downloadable repository image, which provides repository content for Solaris 11 SPARC and X86 architectures. In this case, I used the Solaris 11 11/11 image. First, navigate to the Oracle Web site and accept the OTN License agreement: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html Next, download both parts of the Solaris 11 repository image. I recommend using the Solaris 11 11/11 image, and have provided the URLs here: http://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-ahttp://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b Finally, use the cat command to generate an ISO image you can use to create your repository: # cat sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-a sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso The process is very similar if you plan to set up a Solaris 11.1 release in Ops Center. In that case, navigate to the Solaris 11 download page, accept the license agreement and download both parts of the Solaris 11.1 repository image. Use the cat command to create a single ISO image for Solaris 11.1 Step 2 – Mount the Solaris 11 ISO Image in your Local Filesystem Once you have created the Solaris 11 ISO file, use the mount command to attach it to your local filesystem. After the image has been mounted, you can browse the repository from the ./repo subdirectory, and use the pkgrepo command to verify that Solaris 11 recognizes the content: Step 3 – Use the Image to Create your Ops Center Repository When you have confirmed the repository is available, you can use the image to create the Enterprise Controller repository. The operation will be slightly different depending on whether you configure Ops Center for Connected or Disconnected Mode operation.For connected mode operation, specify the mounted ./repo directory in step 4.1 of the configuration wizard, replacing the default Web-based URL. Since you're synchronizing from an OS repository image, you don't need to specify a key or certificate for the operation. For disconnected mode configuration, specify the Solaris 11 directory along with the path to the disconnected mode bundle downloaded by running the Ops Center harvester script: Ops Center will run a job to import package content from the mounted ISO image. A synchronization job can take several hours to run – in my case, the job ran for 3 hours, 22 minutes on a SunFire X4200 M2 server. During the job, Ops Center performs three important tasks: Synchronizes all content from the image and refreshes the repository Updates the IPS publisher information Creates OS Provisioning profiles and policies based on the content When the job is complete, you can unmount the ISO image from your Enterprise Controller. At that time, you can view the repository contents in your Ops Center Solaris 11 library. For the Solaris 11 11/11 release, you should see 8,668 packages and patches in the contents. You should also see default deployment plans for Solaris 11 provisioning. As part of the repository import, Ops Center generates plans and profiles for desktop, small and large servers for the SPARC and X86 architecture. Part 2: Using a Solaris 11 SRU to update an Ops Center Repository It's possible to use the same approach to upgrade your Ops Center repository to a Solaris 11 Support Repository Update, or SRU. Each SRU provides packages and updates to Solaris 11 - for example, SRU 8.5 provided the packaged for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 SRUs are available for download as ISO images from My Oracle Support, under document ID 1372094.1. The document provides download links for all SRUs which have been released by Oracle for Solaris 11. SRUs are cumulative, so later versions include the packages from earlier SRUs. After downloading an ISO image for an SRU, you can mount it to your local filesystem using a mount command similar to the one shown for Solaris 11 11/11. When the ISO image is mounted to the file system, you can perform the Add Content action from the Solaris 11 Library to synchronize packages and patches from the mounted image. I used the same mount point, so the repository URL was file://mnt/repo once again: After the synchronization of an SRU is complete, you can verify its content in the Solaris 11 library using the search function. The version pattern is 0.175.0.#, where the # is the same value as the SRU. In this example, I upgraded to SRU 1. The update job ran in just under 8 minutes, and a quick search shows that 22 software components were added to the repository: It's also possible to search for "Support Repository Update" to confirm the SRU was successfully added to the repository. Details on any of the update content are available by clicking the "View Details" button under the Packages/Patches entry.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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  • What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

    - by Bil Simser
    It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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  • The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

    - by Piet
    The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’. Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day. According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year. Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead? Making non knowledge workers aware You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (’give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it. The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity. Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as: It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task. Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions. How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it. Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done. Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”. Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived. Use Do Not Disturb signals When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though. Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book. If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting. Hide Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping. Counter-act interruptions Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor. Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing. This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour. TDD as a way to minimize recovery time I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet. BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’. Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

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  • Company Review: Google Products

    Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics  Books Search the full text of books  Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community  Desktop Search and personalize your computer  Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone  Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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  • Top tweets SOA Partner Community – October 2012

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community Deploying Fusion Order Demo on 11.1.1.6 by Antony Reynolds http://wp.me/p10C8u-vA leonsmiers ?Cant wait to test it >> 't waiRT @OracleSOA: Case Management patterns, session coverage from #OOW #OracleBPM #ACM #BPM http://bit.ly/OdcZL6 Danilo Schmiedel Bye bye San Francisco. #oow was a great conference in a wonderful city! Thanks! @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/lcYSe9xC OPITZ CONSULTING ?The Journey towards #Oracle #BPM @OpenWorld 2012 - Slides by @t_winterberg & H. Normann: http://ow.ly/edkWE #oow demed Full house at the SOA Customer Advisory Board! #oow12 http://instagr.am/p/QX9B8eLMLS/ Danilo Schmiedel "@whitehorsesnl: Had some great talks with the BPM guys at the DEMOgrounds. It is one of the best things at #oow" -> I agree!! @soacommunity Mark Simpson ?Fusion Middleware Global Innovation Awards: nice to pick up a soa and bpm with our customer. #oow Mark Simpson ?RT @SOASimone: #oraclesoa #oow hands on lab fully booked pic.twitter.com/pwI94Ew7 <--quick, provision some more compute power on the cloud! Oracle SOA ?Join us for BPM and Analytics: Process Dashboards. BAM, and Intelligent OptimizationMoscone South - 308#OracleBPM #OOW Oracle SOA ?Real-time public safety demo! License plate recognition and processing in London via Oracle Event Processing. #oow pic.twitter.com/WufesDBq Marc ?Nice session on customer success stories on #SOA11g on with @SOASimone Pro and cons and architectural overview. #oow pic.twitter.com/bzuhsujm Lucas Jellema Full length Keynote on Middleware #oow : http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/1873556035001 … #oow_amis OracleBlogs ?Why Fusion Middleware matters to Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications customers? http://ow.ly/2stVQ0 OracleBlogs ?Open World Session - BPM, SOA and ADF Combined:Patterns learned from Fusion Applications http://ow.ly/2suhzf Ronald Luttikhuizen ?VENNSTER BLOG | Presentations at OpenWorld 2012 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/10/presentations-at-openworld-2012.html … Andrejus Baranovskis @dschmied @soacommunity next OOW for sure, and may be SOA community event ! @soacommunity Danilo Schmiedel ?@andrejusb Thanks Andrejus - I really enjoyed having a session with you at #oow. When is next time :-) ? @soacommunity Lionel Dubreuil ?@soacommunity #oow12 Today-1:15pm-Marriott Marquis Salon 7 Jump-starting Integration with Oracle Foundation Pack http://bit.ly/QKKJzF Ronald Luttikhuizen ?Impression from our fault handling session in OSB and SOA Suite from the audience @soacommunity @gschmutz #oow pic.twitter.com/WSg1Z89E Marc Nice session on Oracle Virtual Assembly for #SOA11g, @soacommunity Works with #exalogic but not required SOA Community ?Send your #soacommunity #oow pictures and blog posts @soacommunity or http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity Enjoy OOW ;-) Jon petter hjulstad Oracle BPM- Big leap forward in 11.1.1.7 ! Whitehorses ?Common BPM Use Cases from Oracle #bpm #oow pic.twitter.com/ofOv04EF Whitehorses ?Oracle BPM 11.1.1.7 top new features. Interesting #oow #oowbenelux pic.twitter.com/HY9QN5un SOA Community Industrialized SOA - topic of Business Technology Magazine http://wp.me/p10C8u-vi orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: The curious case of SOA Human tasks' automatic completion http://ow.ly/1mq6YU Simone Geib Look for this sign #oow #oraclesoa pic.twitter.com/MJsPV4PO Lucas Jellema My summary of Larry Ellison's keynote at #oow on the AMIS Blog: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/10/01/oow-2012-larry-ellisons-keynote-announcements-exa-cloud-database/ … #oow_amis gschmutz ?Join my #oow session "Five Cool Use Cases for the Spring Component" to see the power of Spring and SOA Suite combined! Moscone 310 - 3:15 PM Ronald Luttikhuizen Thanks to @soacommunity for great SOA/BPM dinner event yesterday night! #oow pic.twitter.com/v7x3i0DC OracleBlogs ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL http://ow.ly/2sq6B2 OracleBlogs ?Cloud and On-Premises Applications Integration using Oracle Integration Adapters http://ow.ly/2sqiDy OracleBlogs ?Adapters, SOA Suite and More @Openworld 2012 http://ow.ly/2srdTg Eric Elzinga ?OSB, Service Callouts and OQL - Part 3, http://see.sc/JodzEx #oracleservicebus Donatas Valys interesting articles about soa industrialization to read #soa #industrialization http://it-republik.de/business-technology/bt-magazin-ausgaben/Industrialized-SOA-000516.html … gschmutz ?“@techsymp: 2012 Symposium Presentation Download Page Now Available! 75% of presentations published. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com ” find mine there.. Oracle BPM Customer Experience and BPM – From Efficiency to Engagement #bpm #oraclebpm #processmanagement #socialbpm http://pub.vitrue.com/Tahi SOA Community ?@soacommunity SOA Community Newsletter September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wa SOA Community again again again.... it is Oracle Open World 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-wk OracleBlogs ?SOA Proactive support http://ow.ly/2smrSJ demed ?@gschmutz on NoSQL at @techsymp http://lockerz.com/s/247601661 demed ?Just finished "#BigData and its impact on #SOA" talk @techsymp. Really enjoyed getting out of beaten path. #london #oep http://lockerz.com/s/247636974 OTNArchBeat ?Need help selling SOA to business stakeholders? Give them this free eBook. #soasuite http://pub.vitrue.com/hsQY SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; September 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-vc SOA Community Move Data into the grid for scalable, predictable response times http://wp.me/p10C8u-vv ServiceTechSymposium ?The September issue of the Service Technology Magazine is now published with six new items! Read them at http://www.servicetechmag.com Marc ?Reviewed @Packt_OracleFMW new book on SOA11g administration! Very good ! http://tinyurl.com/8pzd5ww SOA Community ?BPM Solution Catalogue&ndash;promote your process templates http://wp.me/p10C8u-vt OTNArchBeat ?BPM ADF Task forms: Checking whether the current user is in a BPM Swimlane | @ChrisKarlChan http://pub.vitrue.com/aPMG OTNArchBeat ?Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | @JoeMcKendrick http://pub.vitrue.com/hNPv Simon Haslam ?Looking for "oak style"(!) advanced content but you're a middleware specialist? See #ukoug2012 #middlewaresunday http://2012.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=9355 … Simon Haslam ?The #ukoug2012 agenda is "go, go, go!" (as Murray would say!) http://2012.ukoug.org/agendagrid Germán Gazzoni SOA Spezial II verfügbar – Industralized SOA: Die überarbeitete und ergänzte Neuauflage des SOA Spezial Sonderhe... http://bit.ly/PAWwN9 Oracle SOA ?Flip thru new interactive "Oracle SOA Suite eBook-In the Customers Words" #middleware #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/NzFZ SOA Community Follow SOA Community on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity #opn SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010New Projects.radiko: エアログラス採用のシンプルなradiko(http://radiko.jp/)クライアントです。タスクトレイのアイコンからラジオ局の切り替えができます。7Scale: EmptyB2C MVC Plattform: The B2C MVC Plattform aims to be pluggable site framework to help small busisness accomplish basic tasks between business and customers.ElValWeb: The goal of the project to create full featured implementation of ModelValidatorProvider for Enterprise Library Application Validation Block, wich ...esatis yazilimi: asp.net yazılımı ile satış magazasi websitesi kur.IEnumerable.It sample code: IEnumerable.It sample codejQuery MicroAjax for ASP.NET: MicroAjax is a set of jQuery plugins and .NET components designed to provide simple, powerful and efficient Ajax centric web application design pat...Karbon VOS: Karbon VOS is an advanced Virtual Operating System Template for Visual Basic Express. It's developed in Visual Basic. Karbon VOS hopes to one day b...LINQ Mapper: LINQ Mapper translates simple LINQ queries between different sources. It allows you to write queries against your domain model, but have them run ...Meccano Silverlight Framework: Meccano is a new generation of frameworks for creation of LOB Silverlight applications based on MEF, RX, WCF, ADO.NET Data Services etc. It is inte...Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: This project is an open source library for the Multiuse Model View (MMV) pattern for building robust WPF and ASP.Net applications. Visit my blog ht...Process Affinity Control: Process Affinity Control allows to set the affinity masks of processes based on rules.SilverSpatial: This project helps bridge the gap between Silverlight and Geo-Spatial data type (such as SQL Spatial). It implements the Well-Known-Binary (WKB) fo...StageAssets: Application for storing data about "things" and people in theatre. For example equipment, actors and so on.Stratosphere: Mono compatible library with set of primitives to work with scalable table, queue and block containers with corresponding implementations for Amazo...TRX Web-Viewer: A simple web-based application to upload and view VSTS 2008 and VSTS 2010 test result files with some basic lookup and feature-wise management of r...WDT2: WDT 2 is the school project to begin learning .NET enviroment, The main focus is on learning the use of almost all the componenets.WPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library is a set of additional actions for WPF that allow you to add extra behaviors to a control quickly and easily. Currently the on...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: A Control to embed YouTube videos in ASP.NET pages. Works in C# and VB.NETNew Releases.radiko: beta: 東京局のみ対応 あとは手抜きActiveWorlds Managed .NET SDK: AwManaged Technology Preview - WIN32 (Alpha): This WIN32 release contains the Server Console Application. The Setup executable should be run as administrator on O.S. using UAC (Vista/Win7)AJAX Control Framework: v1.0.1.0: v1.0.1.0 - Contains a Bing Maps sample project, a number of bug fixes and a few performance improvements. - AJAX enable ANY custom control that der...App_Code (and Usercontrol) Editor (ACE): v1.0.0 alpha: The first alpha release of the AppCode Editor for Umbraco 4.0.3 is now available to download! Tested to work with usercontrols - pre-compilation wi...ElValWeb: ElValWeb 0.0.1.0: Version 0.0.1.0 contains client validation support forAndCompositeValidator ContainsCharactersValidator DomainValidator NotNullValidator Or...esatis yazilimi: magaza: magazanın yazılımları ve veri tabanının yazılımlarıGrunty OS: Grunty OS USB: Download Grunty OS for USBGrunty OS: Grunty OS.ISO: Grunty OS ISOKarbon VOS: Milestone 1 (Kaptua): Milestone 1...Live Meeting API Wrapper: LiveMeetingAPIWrapperV1.2: Added get meeting and update meeting.Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: v0.3: first alpha release. Medium amount of functionality and some use cases tested.MVC Foolproof Validation: Beta 0.9.3774: Adds resource provided error messages, regular expression operators and a new RegularExpressionIf attribute.Process Affinity Control: Version 1.0.0: This is the first release. Planned features for the next release: No administrative privileges needed to run the manager Select the active scena...SharePoint 2010 Service Manager: SharePoint 2010 Service Manager 1.1: Added support to run under UAC with automatic security elevationSharePoint Event Handler Manager: Event Handler Manager 2.0: Please download the application here: http://www.ackermantech.com/registerevents.aspxSkyDrive Synchronizer: SkyDrive Sync Beta 0.1: Beta release includes: Upload and download Synchronize updated files Delete files on web/locally if not in source Split larger files into sma...Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.0.0: Initial beta releaseSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: 0.8.0.0 VS2010 - focus on displaying content: This is the first release of Suggested Resources that can be downloaded from the internet. While there is still a lot of work to be done this rele...TRX Web-Viewer: TRX Web-Viewer V1.0: First working versionVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30502.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.04.00: !Whats New New Tag Mode: Search Referrers (Shows Search Tags From Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and the Dnn Site Search) Taxonomy Tags now contains L...Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2e: Fully featured beta version of Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Applicaiton Development FrameworkWPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library 0.1 Release: First alpha release of the WPF Behavior Library. It should be stable but doesn't have all of the features it will have in the future and the API ma...xvanneste: Sharepoint Social Network Client: Client permettant d'avoir accés au social network de sharepoint a l'exterieur du navigateur.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerAJAX Control Frameworkpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleDambach Linear Algebra Framework

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  • Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 Event and its SNMP Interface

    - by user12609115
    Background The cluster event SNMP interface was first introduced in Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.2 release. The details of the SNMP interface are described in the Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide and the Cluster 3.2 SNMP blog. Prior to the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release, when the event SNMP interface was enabled, it would take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. The events with WARNING or higher severity are usually for the status change of a cluster component from ONLINE to OFFLINE. The interface worked like an alert/alarm interface when some components in the cluster were out of service (changed to OFFLINE). The consumers of this interface could not get notification for all status changes and configuration changes in the cluster. Cluster Event and its SNMP Interface in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 The user model of the cluster event SNMP interface is the same as what was provided in the previous releases. The cluster event SNMP interface is not enabled by default on a freshly installed cluster; you can enable it by using the cluster event SNMP administration commands on any cluster nodes. Usually, you only need to enable it on one of the cluster nodes or a subset of the cluster nodes because all cluster nodes get the same cluster events. When it is enabled, it is responsible for two basic tasks. • Logs up to 100 most recent NOTICE or higher severity events to the MIB. • Sends SNMP traps to the hosts that are configured to receive the above events. The changes in the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release are1) Introduction of the NOTICE severity for the cluster configuration and status change events.The NOTICE severity is introduced for the cluster event in the 4.2 release. It is the severity between the INFO and WARNING severity. Now all severities for the cluster events are (from low to high) • INFO (not exposed to the SNMP interface) • NOTICE (newly introduced in the 4.2 release) • WARNING • ERROR • CRITICAL • FATAL In the 4.2 release, the cluster event system is enhanced to make sure at least one event with the NOTICE or a higher severity will be generated when there is a configuration or status change from a cluster component instance. In other words, the cluster events from a cluster with the NOTICE or higher severities will cover all status and configuration changes in the cluster (include all component instances). The cluster component instance here refers to an instance of the following cluster componentsnode, quorum, resource group, resource, network interface, device group, disk, zone cluster and geo cluster heartbeat. For example, pnode1 is an instance of the cluster node component, and oracleRG is an instance of the cluster resource group. With the introduction of the NOTICE severity event, when the cluster event SNMP interface is enabled, the consumers of the SNMP interface will get notification for all status and configuration changes in the cluster. A thrid-party system management platform with the cluster SNMP interface integration can generate alarms and clear alarms programmatically, because it can get notifications for the status change from ONLINE to OFFLINE and also from OFFLINE to ONLINE. 2) Customization for the cluster event SNMP interface • The number of events logged to the MIB is 100. When the number of events stored in the MIB reaches 100 and a new qualified event arrives, the oldest event will be removed before storing the new event to the MIB (FIFO, first in, first out). The 100 is the default and minimum value for the number of events stored in the MIB. It can be changed by setting the log_number property value using the clsnmpmib command. The maximum number that can be set for the property is 500. • The cluster event SNMP interface takes effect on the NOTICE or high severity events. The NOTICE severity is also the default and lowest event severity for the SNMP interface. The SNMP interface can be configured to take effect on other higher severity events, such as WARNING or higher severity events by setting the min_severity property to the WARNING. When the min_severity property is set to the WARNING, the cluster event SNMP interface would behave the same as the previous releases (prior to the 4.2 release). Examples, • Set the number of events stored in the MIB to 200 # clsnmpmib set -p log_number=200 event • Set the interface to take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. # clsnmpmib set -p min_severity=WARNING event Administering the Cluster Event SNMP Interface Oracle Solaris Cluster provides the following three commands to administer the SNMP interface. • clsnmpmib: administer the SNMP interface, and the MIB configuration. • clsnmphost: administer hosts for the SNMP traps • clsnmpuser: administer SNMP users (specific for SNMP v3 protocol) Only clsnmpmib is changed in the 4.2 release to support the aforementioned customization of the SNMP interface. Here are some simple examples using the commands. Examples: 1. Enable the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib enable event 2. Display the status of the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib show -v 3. Configure my_host to receive the cluster event SNMP traps. # clsnmphost add my_host Cluster Event SNMP Interface uses the common agent container SNMP adaptor, which is based on the JDMK SNMP implementation as its SNMP agent infrastructure. By default, the port number for the SNMP MIB is 11161, and the port number for the SNMP traps is 11162. The port numbers can be changed by using the cacaoadm. For example, # cacaoadm list-params Print all changeable parameters. The output includes the snmp-adaptor-port and snmp-adaptor-trap-port properties. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-port=1161 Set the SNMP MIB port number to 1161. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-trap-port=1162 Set the SNMP trap port number to 1162. The cluster event SNMP MIB is defined in sun-cluster-event-mib.mib, which is located in the /usr/cluster/lib/mibdirectory. Its OID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.42.2.80, that can be used to walk through the MIB data. Again, for more detail information about the cluster event SNMP interface, please see the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 System Administration Guide. - Leland Chen 

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  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #051

    - by Pinal Dave
    Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Explanation and Understanding NOT NULL Constraint NOT NULL is integrity CONSTRAINT. It does not allow creating of the row where column contains NULL value. Most discussed questions about NULL is what is NULL? I will not go in depth analysis it. Simply put NULL is unknown or missing data. When NULL is present in database columns, it can affect the integrity of the database. I really do not prefer NULL in the database unless they are absolutely necessary. Three T-SQL Script to Create Primary Keys on Table I have always enjoyed writing about three topics Constraint and Keys, Backup and Restore and Datetime Functions. Primary Keys constraints prevent duplicate values for columns and provides a unique identifier to each column, as well it creates clustered index on the columns. 2008 Get Numeric Value From Alpha Numeric String – UDF for Get Numeric Numbers Only SQL is great with String operations. Many times, I use T-SQL to do my string operation. Let us see User Defined Function, which I wrote a few days ago, which will return only Numeric values from Alpha Numeric values. Introduction and Example of UNION and UNION ALL It is very much interesting when I get requests from blog reader to re-write my previous articles. I have received few requests to rewrite my article SQL SERVER – Union vs. Union All – Which is better for performance? with examples. I request you to read my previous article first to understand what is the concept and read this article to understand the same concept with an example. Downgrade Database for Previous Version The main questions is how they can downgrade the from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000? The answer is : Not Possible. Get Common Records From Two Tables Without Using Join Following is my scenario, Suppose Table 1 and Table 2 has same column e.g. Column1 Following is the query, 1. Select column1,column2 From Table1 2. Select column1 From Table2 I want to find common records from these tables, but I don’t want to use the Join clause because for that I need to specify the column name for Join condition. Will you help me to get common records without using Join condition? I am using SQL Server 2005. Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice – Part 2 A year ago I wrote a post about SQL SERVER – Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice where I have discussed two different methods of getting the date part from datetime. Introduction to CLR – Simple Example of CLR Stored Procedure CLR is an abbreviation of Common Language Runtime. In SQL Server 2005 and later version of it database objects can be created which are created in CLR. Stored Procedures, Functions, Triggers can be coded in CLR. CLR is faster than T-SQL in many cases. CLR is mainly used to accomplish tasks which are not possible by T-SQL or can use lots of resources. The CLR can be usually implemented where there is an intense string operation, thread management or iteration methods which can be complicated for T-SQL. Implementing CLR provides more security to the Extended Stored Procedure. 2009 Comic Slow Query – SQL Joke Before Presentation After Presentation Enable Automatic Statistic Update on Database In one of the recent projects, I found out that despite putting good indexes and optimizing the query, I could not achieve an optimized performance and I still received an unoptimized response from the SQL Server. On examination, I figured out that the culprit was statistics. The database that I was trying to optimize had auto update of the statistics was disabled. Recently Executed T-SQL Query Please refer to blog post  query to recently executed T-SQL query on database. Change Collation of Database Column – T-SQL Script – Consolidating Collations – Extention Script At some time in your DBA career, you may find yourself in a position when you sit back and realize that your database collations have somehow run amuck, or are faced with the ever annoying CANNOT RESOLVE COLLATION message when trying to join data of varying collation settings. 2010 Visiting Alma Mater – Delivering Session on Database Performance and Career – Nirma Institute of Technology Everyone always dreams of visiting their school and college, where they have studied once. It is a great feeling to see the college once again – where you have spent the wonderful golden years of your time. College time is filled with studies, education, emotions and several plans to build a future. I consider myself fortunate as I got the opportunity to study at some of the best places in the world. Change Column DataTypes There are times when I feel like writing that I am a day older in SQL Server. In fact, there are many who are looking for a solution that is simple enough. Have you ever searched online for something very simple. I often do and enjoy doing things which are straight forward and easy to change. 2011 Three DMVs – sys.dm_server_memory_dumps – sys.dm_server_services – sys.dm_server_registry In this blog post we will see three new DMVs which are introduced in Denali. The DMVs are very simple and there is not much to describe them. So here is the simple game. I will be asking a question back to you after seeing the result of the each of the DMV and you help me to complete this blog post. A Simple Quiz – T-SQL Brain Trick If you have some time, I strongly suggest you try this quiz out as it is for sure twists your brain. 2012 List All The Column With Specific Data Types in Database 5 years ago I wrote script SQL SERVER – 2005 – List All The Column With Specific Data Types, when I read it again, it is very much relevant and I liked it. This is one of the script which every developer would like to keep it handy. I have upgraded the script bit more. I have included few additional information which I believe I should have added from the beginning. It is difficult to visualize the final script when we are writing it first time. Find First Non-Numeric Character from String The function PATINDEX exists for quite a long time in SQL Server but I hardly see it being used. Well, at least I use it and I am comfortable using it. Here is a simple script which I use when I have to identify first non-numeric character. Finding Different ColumnName From Almost Identitical Tables Well here is the interesting example of how we can use sys.column catalogue views and get the details of the newly added column. I have previously written about EXCEPT over here which is very similar to MINUS of Oracle. Storing Data and Files in Cloud – Dropbox – Personal Technology Tip I thought long and hard about doing a Personal Technology Tips series for this blog.  I have so many tips I’d like to share.  I am on my computer almost all day, every day, so I have a treasure trove of interesting tidbits I like to share if given the chance.  The only thing holding me back – which tip to share first?  The first tip obviously has the weight of seeming like the most important.  But this would mean choosing amongst my favorite tricks and shortcuts.  This is a hard task. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Advanced TSQL Tuning: Why Internals Knowledge Matters

    - by Paul White
    There is much more to query tuning than reducing logical reads and adding covering nonclustered indexes.  Query tuning is not complete as soon as the query returns results quickly in the development or test environments.  In production, your query will compete for memory, CPU, locks, I/O and other resources on the server.  Today’s entry looks at some tuning considerations that are often overlooked, and shows how deep internals knowledge can help you write better TSQL. As always, we’ll need some example data.  In fact, we are going to use three tables today, each of which is structured like this: Each table has 50,000 rows made up of an INTEGER id column and a padding column containing 3,999 characters in every row.  The only difference between the three tables is in the type of the padding column: the first table uses CHAR(3999), the second uses VARCHAR(MAX), and the third uses the deprecated TEXT type.  A script to create a database with the three tables and load the sample data follows: USE master; GO IF DB_ID('SortTest') IS NOT NULL DROP DATABASE SortTest; GO CREATE DATABASE SortTest COLLATE LATIN1_GENERAL_BIN; GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest', SIZE = 3GB, MAXSIZE = 3GB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest_log', SIZE = 256MB, MAXSIZE = 1GB, FILEGROWTH = 128MB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_SHRINK OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET PARAMETERIZATION SIMPLE ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET MULTI_USER ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET RECOVERY SIMPLE ; USE SortTest; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.TestCHAR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding CHAR(3999) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestCHAR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAX ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAX (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestTEXT ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding TEXT NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestTEXT (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; -- ============= -- Load TestCHAR (about 3s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestCHAR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT padding = REPLICATE(CHAR(65 + (Data.n % 26)), 3999) FROM ( SELECT TOP (50000) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) - 1 FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) AS Data ORDER BY Data.n ASC ; -- ============ -- Load TestMAX (about 3s) -- ============ INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAX WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ============= -- Load TestTEXT (about 5s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestTEXT WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(TEXT, padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ========== -- Space used -- ========== -- EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestCHAR'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAX'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestTEXT'; ; CHECKPOINT ; That takes around 15 seconds to run, and shows the space allocated to each table in its output: To illustrate the points I want to make today, the example task we are going to set ourselves is to return a random set of 150 rows from each table.  The basic shape of the test query is the same for each of the three test tables: SELECT TOP (150) T.id, T.padding FROM dbo.Test AS T ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; Test 1 – CHAR(3999) Running the template query shown above using the TestCHAR table as the target, we find that the query takes around 5 seconds to return its results.  This seems slow, considering that the table only has 50,000 rows.  Working on the assumption that generating a GUID for each row is a CPU-intensive operation, we might try enabling parallelism to see if that speeds up the response time.  Running the query again (but without the MAXDOP 1 hint) on a machine with eight logical processors, the query now takes 10 seconds to execute – twice as long as when run serially. Rather than attempting further guesses at the cause of the slowness, let’s go back to serial execution and add some monitoring.  The script below monitors STATISTICS IO output and the amount of tempdb used by the test query.  We will also run a Profiler trace to capture any warnings generated during query execution. DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TC.id, TC.padding FROM dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; Let’s take a closer look at the statistics and query plan generated from this: Following the flow of the data from right to left, we see the expected 50,000 rows emerging from the Clustered Index Scan, with a total estimated size of around 191MB.  The Compute Scalar adds a column containing a random GUID (generated from the NEWID() function call) for each row.  With this extra column in place, the size of the data arriving at the Sort operator is estimated to be 192MB. Sort is a blocking operator – it has to examine all of the rows on its input before it can produce its first row of output (the last row received might sort first).  This characteristic means that Sort requires a memory grant – memory allocated for the query’s use by SQL Server just before execution starts.  In this case, the Sort is the only memory-consuming operator in the plan, so it has access to the full 243MB (248,696KB) of memory reserved by SQL Server for this query execution. Notice that the memory grant is significantly larger than the expected size of the data to be sorted.  SQL Server uses a number of techniques to speed up sorting, some of which sacrifice size for comparison speed.  Sorts typically require a very large number of comparisons, so this is usually a very effective optimization.  One of the drawbacks is that it is not possible to exactly predict the sort space needed, as it depends on the data itself.  SQL Server takes an educated guess based on data types, sizes, and the number of rows expected, but the algorithm is not perfect. In spite of the large memory grant, the Profiler trace shows a Sort Warning event (indicating that the sort ran out of memory), and the tempdb usage monitor shows that 195MB of tempdb space was used – all of that for system use.  The 195MB represents physical write activity on tempdb, because SQL Server strictly enforces memory grants – a query cannot ‘cheat’ and effectively gain extra memory by spilling to tempdb pages that reside in memory.  Anyway, the key point here is that it takes a while to write 195MB to disk, and this is the main reason that the query takes 5 seconds overall. If you are wondering why using parallelism made the problem worse, consider that eight threads of execution result in eight concurrent partial sorts, each receiving one eighth of the memory grant.  The eight sorts all spilled to tempdb, resulting in inefficiencies as the spilled sorts competed for disk resources.  More importantly, there are specific problems at the point where the eight partial results are combined, but I’ll cover that in a future post. CHAR(3999) Performance Summary: 5 seconds elapsed time 243MB memory grant 195MB tempdb usage 192MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort Warning Test 2 – VARCHAR(MAX) We’ll now run exactly the same test (with the additional monitoring) on the table using a VARCHAR(MAX) padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TM.id, TM.padding FROM dbo.TestMAX AS TM ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query takes around 8 seconds to complete (3 seconds longer than Test 1).  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes are very slightly larger, and the overall memory grant has also increased very slightly to 245MB.  The most marked difference is in the amount of tempdb space used – this query wrote almost 391MB of sort run data to the physical tempdb file.  Don’t draw any general conclusions about VARCHAR(MAX) versus CHAR from this – I chose the length of the data specifically to expose this edge case.  In most cases, VARCHAR(MAX) performs very similarly to CHAR – I just wanted to make test 2 a bit more exciting. MAX Performance Summary: 8 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 391MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort warning Test 3 – TEXT The same test again, but using the deprecated TEXT data type for the padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TT.id, TT.padding FROM dbo.TestTEXT AS TT ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query runs in 500ms.  If you look at the metrics we have been checking so far, it’s not hard to understand why: TEXT Performance Summary: 0.5 seconds elapsed time 9MB memory grant 5MB tempdb usage 5MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 596 LOB logical reads Sort warning SQL Server’s memory grant algorithm still underestimates the memory needed to perform the sorting operation, but the size of the data to sort is so much smaller (5MB versus 193MB previously) that the spilled sort doesn’t matter very much.  Why is the data size so much smaller?  The query still produces the correct results – including the large amount of data held in the padding column – so what magic is being performed here? TEXT versus MAX Storage The answer lies in how columns of the TEXT data type are stored.  By default, TEXT data is stored off-row in separate LOB pages – which explains why this is the first query we have seen that records LOB logical reads in its STATISTICS IO output.  You may recall from my last post that LOB data leaves an in-row pointer to the separate storage structure holding the LOB data. SQL Server can see that the full LOB value is not required by the query plan until results are returned, so instead of passing the full LOB value down the plan from the Clustered Index Scan, it passes the small in-row structure instead.  SQL Server estimates that each row coming from the scan will be 79 bytes long – 11 bytes for row overhead, 4 bytes for the integer id column, and 64 bytes for the LOB pointer (in fact the pointer is rather smaller – usually 16 bytes – but the details of that don’t really matter right now). OK, so this query is much more efficient because it is sorting a very much smaller data set – SQL Server delays retrieving the LOB data itself until after the Sort starts producing its 150 rows.  The question that normally arises at this point is: Why doesn’t SQL Server use the same trick when the padding column is defined as VARCHAR(MAX)? The answer is connected with the fact that if the actual size of the VARCHAR(MAX) data is 8000 bytes or less, it is usually stored in-row in exactly the same way as for a VARCHAR(8000) column – MAX data only moves off-row into LOB storage when it exceeds 8000 bytes.  The default behaviour of the TEXT type is to be stored off-row by default, unless the ‘text in row’ table option is set suitably and there is room on the page.  There is an analogous (but opposite) setting to control the storage of MAX data – the ‘large value types out of row’ table option.  By enabling this option for a table, MAX data will be stored off-row (in a LOB structure) instead of in-row.  SQL Server Books Online has good coverage of both options in the topic In Row Data. The MAXOOR Table The essential difference, then, is that MAX defaults to in-row storage, and TEXT defaults to off-row (LOB) storage.  You might be thinking that we could get the same benefits seen for the TEXT data type by storing the VARCHAR(MAX) values off row – so let’s look at that option now.  This script creates a fourth table, with the VARCHAR(MAX) data stored off-row in LOB pages: CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAXOOR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAXOOR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; EXECUTE sys.sp_tableoption @TableNamePattern = N'dbo.TestMAXOOR', @OptionName = 'large value types out of row', @OptionValue = 'true' ; SELECT large_value_types_out_of_row FROM sys.tables WHERE [schema_id] = SCHEMA_ID(N'dbo') AND name = N'TestMAXOOR' ; INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAXOOR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT SPACE(0) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; UPDATE TM WITH (TABLOCK) SET padding.WRITE (TC.padding, NULL, NULL) FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS TM JOIN dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ON TC.id = TM.id ; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAXOOR' ; CHECKPOINT ; Test 4 – MAXOOR We can now re-run our test on the MAXOOR (MAX out of row) table: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) MO.id, MO.padding FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS MO ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; TEXT Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 446 LOB logical reads No sort warning The query runs very quickly – slightly faster than Test 3, and without spilling the sort to tempdb (there is no sort warning in the trace, and the monitoring query shows zero tempdb usage by this query).  SQL Server is passing the in-row pointer structure down the plan and only looking up the LOB value on the output side of the sort. The Hidden Problem There is still a huge problem with this query though – it requires a 245MB memory grant.  No wonder the sort doesn’t spill to tempdb now – 245MB is about 20 times more memory than this query actually requires to sort 50,000 records containing LOB data pointers.  Notice that the estimated row and data sizes in the plan are the same as in test 2 (where the MAX data was stored in-row). The optimizer assumes that MAX data is stored in-row, regardless of the sp_tableoption setting ‘large value types out of row’.  Why?  Because this option is dynamic – changing it does not immediately force all MAX data in the table in-row or off-row, only when data is added or actually changed.  SQL Server does not keep statistics to show how much MAX or TEXT data is currently in-row, and how much is stored in LOB pages.  This is an annoying limitation, and one which I hope will be addressed in a future version of the product. So why should we worry about this?  Excessive memory grants reduce concurrency and may result in queries waiting on the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE wait type while they wait for memory they do not need.  245MB is an awful lot of memory, especially on 32-bit versions where memory grants cannot use AWE-mapped memory.  Even on a 64-bit server with plenty of memory, do you really want a single query to consume 0.25GB of memory unnecessarily?  That’s 32,000 8KB pages that might be put to much better use. The Solution The answer is not to use the TEXT data type for the padding column.  That solution happens to have better performance characteristics for this specific query, but it still results in a spilled sort, and it is hard to recommend the use of a data type which is scheduled for removal.  I hope it is clear to you that the fundamental problem here is that SQL Server sorts the whole set arriving at a Sort operator.  Clearly, it is not efficient to sort the whole table in memory just to return 150 rows in a random order. The TEXT example was more efficient because it dramatically reduced the size of the set that needed to be sorted.  We can do the same thing by selecting 150 unique keys from the table at random (sorting by NEWID() for example) and only then retrieving the large padding column values for just the 150 rows we need.  The following script implements that idea for all four tables: SET STATISTICS IO ON ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestCHAR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id = ANY (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAX ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestTEXT ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; All four queries now return results in much less than a second, with memory grants between 6 and 12MB, and without spilling to tempdb.  The small remaining inefficiency is in reading the id column values from the clustered primary key index.  As a clustered index, it contains all the in-row data at its leaf.  The CHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) tables store the padding column in-row, so id values are separated by a 3999-character column, plus row overhead.  The TEXT and MAXOOR tables store the padding values off-row, so id values in the clustered index leaf are separated by the much-smaller off-row pointer structure.  This difference is reflected in the number of logical page reads performed by the four queries: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestMAX'. logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 00412 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 00413 lob logical reads 446 We can increase the density of the id values by creating a separate nonclustered index on the id column only.  This is the same key as the clustered index, of course, but the nonclustered index will not include the rest of the in-row column data. CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestCHAR (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAX (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestTEXT (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAXOOR (id); The four queries can now use the very dense nonclustered index to quickly scan the id values, sort them by NEWID(), select the 150 ids we want, and then look up the padding data.  The logical reads with the new indexes in place are: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestMAX' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 448 With the new index, all four queries use the same query plan (click to enlarge): Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 6MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 1MB sort set 835 logical reads (CHAR, MAX) 686 logical reads (TEXT, MAXOOR) 597 LOB logical reads (TEXT) 448 LOB logical reads (MAXOOR) No sort warning I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out why trying to eliminate the Key Lookup by adding the padding column to the new nonclustered indexes would be a daft idea Conclusion This post is not about tuning queries that access columns containing big strings.  It isn’t about the internal differences between TEXT and MAX data types either.  It isn’t even about the cool use of UPDATE .WRITE used in the MAXOOR table load.  No, this post is about something else: Many developers might not have tuned our starting example query at all – 5 seconds isn’t that bad, and the original query plan looks reasonable at first glance.  Perhaps the NEWID() function would have been blamed for ‘just being slow’ – who knows.  5 seconds isn’t awful – unless your users expect sub-second responses – but using 250MB of memory and writing 200MB to tempdb certainly is!  If ten sessions ran that query at the same time in production that’s 2.5GB of memory usage and 2GB hitting tempdb.  Of course, not all queries can be rewritten to avoid large memory grants and sort spills using the key-lookup technique in this post, but that’s not the point either. The point of this post is that a basic understanding of execution plans is not enough.  Tuning for logical reads and adding covering indexes is not enough.  If you want to produce high-quality, scalable TSQL that won’t get you paged as soon as it hits production, you need a deep understanding of execution plans, and as much accurate, deep knowledge about SQL Server as you can lay your hands on.  The advanced database developer has a wide range of tools to use in writing queries that perform well in a range of circumstances. By the way, the examples in this post were written for SQL Server 2008.  They will run on 2005 and demonstrate the same principles, but you won’t get the same figures I did because 2005 had a rather nasty bug in the Top N Sort operator.  Fair warning: if you do decide to run the scripts on a 2005 instance (particularly the parallel query) do it before you head out for lunch… This post is dedicated to the people of Christchurch, New Zealand. © 2011 Paul White email: @[email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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  • Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

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

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  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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