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• sending the data from form to db in django

  - by BharatKrishna

  I have a form in which I can input text through text boxes. How do I make these data go into the db on clicking submit. this is the code of the form in the template. <form method="post" action="app/save_page"> <p> Title:<input type="text" name="title"/> </p> <p> Name:<input type="text" name="name"/> </p> <p> Phone:<input type="text" name="phone"/> </p> <p> Email:<input type="text" name="email"/> </p> <p> <textarea name="description" rows=20 cols=60> </textarea><br> </p> <input type="submit" value="Submit"/> </form> I have a function in the views.py for saving the data in the page. But I dont know how to impliment it properly: def save_page(request): title = request.POST["title"] name = request.POST["name"] phone = request.POST["phone"] email = request.POST["email"] description = request.POST["description"] Now how do I send these into the db? And what do I put in views.py so that those data goes into the db? so how do I open a database connection and put those into the db and save it? should I do something like : connection=sqlite3.connect('app.db') cursor= connection.cursor() ..... ..... connection.commit() connection.close() Thank you.

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• Getting a `free()` error when deallocating with `delete` in the backtrace

  - by wonko

  I got the following error from gdb: *** glibc detected *** /.root0/autohome/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/debug/Ipopt/examples/ex3/ex3: free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x0000000120052b60 *** Here's the backtrace: #0 0x000000555626b264 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.6 #1 0x000000555626cc6c in abort () from /lib/libc.so.6 #2 0x00000055562a7b9c in __libc_message () from /lib/libc.so.6 #3 0x00000055562aeabc in malloc_printerr () from /lib/libc.so.6 #4 0x00000055562b036c in free () from /lib/libc.so.6 #5 0x000000555561ddd0 in Ipopt::TNLPAdapter::~TNLPAdapter () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #6 0x00000055556a9910 in Ipopt::GradientScaling::~GradientScaling () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #7 0x00000055557241b8 in Ipopt::OrigIpoptNLP::~OrigIpoptNLP () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #8 0x00000055556ae7f0 in Ipopt::IpoptAlgorithm::~IpoptAlgorithm () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #9 0x0000005555602278 in Ipopt::IpoptApplication::~IpoptApplication () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #10 0x0000005555614428 in FreeIpoptProblem () from /home/ba01/u132/hsreekum/ipopt/ipopt/build/lib/libipopt.so.1 #11 0x0000000120001610 in main () at ex3.c:169` And here's the code for Ipopt::TNLPAdapter::~TNLPAdapter () TNLPAdapter::~TNLPAdapter() { delete [] full_x_; delete [] full_lambda_; delete [] full_g_; delete [] jac_g_; delete [] c_rhs_; delete [] jac_idx_map_; delete [] h_idx_map_; delete [] x_fixed_map_; delete [] findiff_jac_ia_; delete [] findiff_jac_ja_; delete [] findiff_jac_postriplet_; delete [] findiff_x_l_; delete [] findiff_x_u_; } My question is : why does free() throw an error when ~TNLPAdapter() uses delete[]? Also, I would like to step through ~TNLPAdapter() so I can see which deallocation causes the error. I believe the error occurs in the external library (IPOPT) but I have compiled it with debug flags on ; is this sufficient?

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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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• Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website Using OAuth

  Earlier this year I wrote an article about Twitterizer, an open-source .NET library that can be used to integrate your application with Twitter. Using Twitterizer you can allow your visitors to post tweets, view their timeline, and much more, all without leaving your website. The original article, Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website, showed how to post tweets and view a timeline to a particular Twitter account using Twitterizer 1.0. To post a tweet to a specific account, Twitterizer 1.0 uses basic authentication. Basic authentication is a very simple authentication scheme. For an application to post a tweet to JohnDoe's Twitter account, it would submit JohnDoe's username and password (along with the tweet text) to Twitter's servers. Basic authentication, while easy to implement, is not an ideal authentication scheme as it requires that the integrating application know the username(s) and password(s) of the accounts that it is connected to. Consequently, a user must share her password in order to connect her Twitter account with the application. Such password sharing is not only insecure, but it can also cause difficulties down the line if the user changes her password or decides that she no longer wants to connect her account to certain applications (but wants to remain connected to others). To remedy these issues, Twitter introduced support for OAuth, which is a simple, secure protocol for granting API access. In a nutshell, OAuth allows a user to connect an application to their Twitter account without having to share their password. Instead, the user is sent to Twitter's website where they confirm whether they want to connect to the application. Upon confirmation, Twitter generates an token that is then sent back to the application. The application then submits this token when integrating with the user's account. The token serves as proof that the user has allowed this application access to their account. (Twitter users can view what application's they're connected to and may revoke these tokens on an application-by-application basis.) In late 2009, Twitter announced that it was ending its support for basic authentication in June 2010. As a result, the code examined in Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website, which uses basic authentication, will no longer work once the cut off date is reached. The good news is that the Twitterizer version 2.0 supports OAuth. This article examines how to use Twitterizer 2.0 and OAuth from a website. Specifically, we'll see how to retrieve and display a user's latest tweets and how to post a tweet from an ASP.NET page. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website Using OAuth

  Earlier this year I wrote an article about Twitterizer, an open-source .NET library that can be used to integrate your application with Twitter. Using Twitterizer you can allow your visitors to post tweets, view their timeline, and much more, all without leaving your website. The original article, Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website, showed how to post tweets and view a timeline to a particular Twitter account using Twitterizer 1.0. To post a tweet to a specific account, Twitterizer 1.0 uses basic authentication. Basic authentication is a very simple authentication scheme. For an application to post a tweet to JohnDoe's Twitter account, it would submit JohnDoe's username and password (along with the tweet text) to Twitter's servers. Basic authentication, while easy to implement, is not an ideal authentication scheme as it requires that the integrating application know the username(s) and password(s) of the accounts that it is connected to. Consequently, a user must share her password in order to connect her Twitter account with the application. Such password sharing is not only insecure, but it can also cause difficulties down the line if the user changes her password or decides that she no longer wants to connect her account to certain applications (but wants to remain connected to others). To remedy these issues, Twitter introduced support for OAuth, which is a simple, secure protocol for granting API access. In a nutshell, OAuth allows a user to connect an application to their Twitter account without having to share their password. Instead, the user is sent to Twitter's website where they confirm whether they want to connect to the application. Upon confirmation, Twitter generates an token that is then sent back to the application. The application then submits this token when integrating with the user's account. The token serves as proof that the user has allowed this application access to their account. (Twitter users can view what application's they're connected to and may revoke these tokens on an application-by-application basis.) In late 2009, Twitter announced that it was ending its support for basic authentication in June 2010. As a result, the code examined in Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website, which uses basic authentication, will no longer work once the cut off date is reached. The good news is that the Twitterizer version 2.0 supports OAuth. This article examines how to use Twitterizer 2.0 and OAuth from a website. Specifically, we'll see how to retrieve and display a user's latest tweets and how to post a tweet from an ASP.NET page. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 07, 2010 -- #833

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Mendelevich, Siyamand Ayubi, Rudi Grobler(-2-), Josh Smith, VinitYadav, and Dave Campbell. Shoutouts: Jordan Knight has a demo up of a project he did for DigiGirlz: DigiGirlz, Deep Zoom and Azure, hopefully we'll get source later :) Jeremy Likness has a must-read post on his Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework I put this on another post earlier, but if you want some desktop bling for WP7, Ozymandias has some: I Love Windows Phone Wallpaper If you're not going to be in 'Vegas next week, Tim Heuer reminds us there's an alternative: Watch the Silverlight 4 Launch event and LIVE QA with ScottGu and others From SilverlightCream.com: Ghost Lines in Silverlight Alan Mendelevich reports an issue when drawing lines with odd coordinate values. He originated it in Silverlight 3, but it is there in SL4RC as well... check it out and leave him a comment. A Framework to Animate WPF and Silverlight Pages Similar to the PowerPoint Slides Siyamand Ayubi has an interesting post up on animating WPF or Silverlight pages to make them progress in the manner of a PPT slideshow. And it can also make phone calls… Rudi Grobler has a list of 'tasks' you can do with WP7 such as PhoneCallTask or EmailComposeTask ... looks like this should be plasticized :) Using the GPS, Accelerometer & Vibration Controller Rudi Grobler is also investigating how to use the GPS, Accelerometer, and Vibration in WP7 with a bunch of external links to back it up. Assembly-level initialization at design time Josh Smith has a solution to the problem of initializing design-time data in Blend (did you know that was an issue?) ... the solution is great and so is the running commentary between Josh and Karl Shifflett in the comments! ySurf : A Yahoo Messenger Clone built in Silverlight VinitYadav built a Yahoo Messenger app in Silverlight and has detailed out all the ugly bits for us on the post, plus made everything available. Your First Silverlight Application Dave Campbell's first post at DZone cracking open a beginner's series on Silverlight. If you're expecting something heavy-duty, skip this. If you're wanting to learn Silverlight and haven't jumped in yet, give it a try. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2010 -- #810

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Jeremy Likness(-2-), Andrew Veresov, Nokola, SilverLaw, Gill Cleeren, Jim Wightman and Jeremy Likness, Viktor Larsson(-2-), and Walter Ferrari. Shoutouts: Viktor Larsson has a post up about Silverlight Market Penetration ... hope to meet you at MIX10, Viktor! Gergely Orosz has posted the Slides and code for the presentation “An Introduction to Silverlight” It appears that if I miss a day, I can pretty much do an all-submittal post :) From SilverlightCream.com: Writing an AsyncLoader to enqueue long running operations Andrea Boschin has a tutorial on SilverlightShow where he's building up an asynch service to deal with a long-running app on the server. MVVM with MEF in Silverlight: Video Tutorial Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial up for helping beginners wire up MVVM and MEF to Silverlight. Source code for the app in the video is downloadable. MVVM with MEF in Silverlight Video Tutorial Part 2: Plugins and Metadata In part 2, Jeremy Likness redesigns the app using metadata to turn the shapes into objects, and then show how easy it is to add a new plugin... and the source for the app is downloadable. Binding a Converter Parameter Andrew Veresov has a nice code-filled solution up for those times that you need to bind a ConverterParameter value. EasyPainter: Lion Hair styling Nokola has not been idle with Easy Painter... now he's added "Lion Hair" to the list of stylings you can apply... guess if you want to change someone's 'mane' ... sorry! Twisting Navigation - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has another control up - a "Twisting Navigation" control... very cool :) ... and since I'm behind the curve, he already has an update in the Expression Gallery as noted in his post, and a video tutorial on implementing it in an application... and if you understand German, turn up the sound :) Uploading and downloading images using a WCF service with Silverlight Gill Cleeren has a tutorial up at SilverlightShow on uploading and downloading images using WCF Services in Silverlight New Windows Phone 7 Community Developer Hub Jim Wightman and Jeremy Likness have a very cool Silverlight page up where you can paste the URL of your XAP in and have it display in a "Windows 7 Series Phone" ... and that's all I'm saying about that. XAML Transformation 101 Viktor Larsson is discussing Transforms in XAML and has a nice tutorial up that is easily the beginning of a carousel... you may also want to check out his other posts... I'm adding him to my list. Silverlight 4 Webcam Demo In this post, Viktor Larsson has a tutorial up for using the WebCam. This is from a beginner perspective, so if you haven't jumped in, now's a good time. How to extend Bing Maps Silverlight with an elevation profile graph - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has a post up at SilverlightShow discussing extensions to BingMaps such as creating routes using GeoCoding and Route Services plus drawing lines on the maps and getting coordinates of the points. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for March 27, 2010 -- #822

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: MSDN, Bill Reiss, Charlie Kindel(-2-), SilverLaw, Scott Marlowe, Kenny Young, Andrea Boschin, Mike Taulty, Damon Payne, and Jeff Handley(-2-). Shoutouts: Scott Morrison has his material up for his talk at MIX 10: Silverlight 4 Business Applications Matthias Shapiro posted his MIX10 “Information Visualization in Silverlight” Slides and Code for MIX10 Information Visualization Talk Demos Dan Wahlin has his MIX10 material all posted as well: Syncing Audio, Video and Animations in Silverlight Timmy Kokke has an interesting MEF post up: Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF From SilverlightCream.com: How to: Add an Application Bar to Your Application In case you missed this MSDN post on adding an Application Bar to your WP7 app Simulating accelerometer data in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Got a Wii? How about a Wii remote? Bill Reiss shows how to use the Wii remote to simulate accelerometer data on the WP7 emulator ... really! Windows Phone 7 Series Icon Pack Charlie Kindel announced the release of a WP7 Icon pack ... great external MSDN link on using them as well. Windows Phone Developer Documentation Charlie Kindel also posted WP7 Documentation, and a quick overview of what you'll find ... samples, references, all good stuff to check out and download. GlossyTextblock Custom Control - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has his GlossyTextblock rebuilt as a Custom Control and in the Expresseion Gallery. Check the blog for a screenshot. A Windows Phone 7 Silverlight TagList Scott Marlowe has a great post up for WP7 accessing his blog tag list via WCF and displaying the data on the emulator... wow! Dynamic Layout and Transitions in Expression Blend 4 Kenny Young has a great companion blog post to a demo app on Expression Gallery. There's also a link on the page to Kenny's MIX10 session Using XmlDefinition and XmlPrefix to better organize namespaces Andrea Boschin comes to our rescue about the maze of namespaces in XAML by using a solution from the RC: XmlDefinition and XmlPrefix Silverlight 4 RC – Socket Security Changes Mike Taulty is discussing changes in the RC with regard to sockets that have come about since he did his series of posts. Lots of good code. Cascading ItemsSource Bindings in Silverlight Damon Payne addresses an issue he came acros with multiple DataGrids on the same screen. He demonstrates the problem, and then demonstrates his solution. ContosoSales Application for RIA Services RC Jeff Handley posted about the refresh to the ContosoSales application shown in the PDC keynote, and details the changes. Lots of good code and links. DomainDataSource Filters and Parameters Jeff Handley has another post up about RIA Services and the fact that ControlParameter is gone... and he shows how to use ElementName binding instead. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for March 15, 2011 -- #1061

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Peter Kuhn, Emil Stoychev, Viktor Larsson(-2-), Kevin Hoffman, Rudi Grobler, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty(-2-), and Martin Krüger. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Image comparison using a GridSplitter" Martin Krüger WP7: "Using WP7 accent color effectively" Viktor Larsson XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 7 - Collision detection" Peter Kuhn From SilverlightCream.com: XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 7 - Collision detection Peter Kuhn has part 7 of his XNA for Silverlight devs tutorial series up at SilverlightShow... discussing Collision detection... something you need to get your head around if you're going to do a game. Interview with John Papa about the upcoming MIX11 event and the Open Source Fest Emil Stoychev of SilverlightShow reverses the roles with John Papa and interviews John on this MIX11 and Open Source Fest discussion they had at the MVP Summit Debugging Videos or Camera in WP7 Viktor Larsson has a quick post up on the 3 ways of debugging a WP7 app and why and under what circumstances you should change debug method. Using WP7 accent color effectively Viktor Larsson's next post is about the 10 accent colors available on WP7 devices. He shows how to make best use of that capability in XAML and runtime code. WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Hardware and Device Services Kevin Hoffman's part 4 of a 12-part tutorial series at SilverlightShow on WP7 for iPhone/Android devs is up ... this oe concentrates on Hardware and Device Services... Launchers/Choosers/Sensors. How to publish WP7 applications if you live in the Middle-east & Africa region Rudi Grobler has a short post up on a legit way to publish WP7 apps if you are in the MEA region. Creating WP7 Custom Theme – Sample Theme Implementation WindowsPhoneGeek has a new post up and he's starting a series of 3 articles on Creating Wp7 Custom Themes... first up is this tutorial on Basic Theme Implementation... and use it as well. From Android to Windows Phone For "Windows Phone from Scratch #43", Jesse Liberty begins a series on moving apps from Android to WP7, beginning with a tip calculating program. Yet Another Podcast #28–Jeremy Likness Jesse Liberty's next post is his "Yet Another Podcast #28" with Jeremy Likness this time around... the list of all things fun that Jeremy's involved in is getting long... should be a good podcast! Image comparison using a GridSplitter Martin Krüger posted a cool 'Clip Splitter' for comparing images, and what a great set of example images he's using... pretty darn cool lining them up with a grid-splitter. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL – Building a High Traffic, Profitable Blog – A Unique Gift on Author’s Birthday

  - by Pinal Dave

  Every July 30th, I like to do something new. It is my birthday and I like to give gifts to everyone this day. Last year, at this time I had written an article A Year Older and 3 SQL Server Books and 3 Video Courses – 33. I had written a total of 3 books by that time and had published total of  3 Pluralsight courses. When I look back the year, I feel that I gave my best to last year. Sine Last July 30th, I have written 6 more books and 5 more video courses. The total is now 9 books and 8 video courses. It seems that I have been producing one new book or course every month since last July. Building a High Traffic, Profitable Blog Out of my 8 courses my favorite course is my latest course at Pluralsight. This course is about how to build a high traffic blog and monetize it. I have been blogging for over 7 years and there have been many hurdles and roadblocks but I have never stopped blogging any single day. There have been many instances when I felt I should just hit delete and remove my entire blog from the web but fortunately I had courage to stand by on my decisions. Well at the end, I kept on fighting through the difficult time and kept on blogging. Every day there was a lesson to learn and every day there was an issue to resolve. I never gave up and kept on building new content. Today after 7 years, when I look back there are many stories to tell. It was impossible to write down the stories so I decided to build a course based on my experience. In this course, I share all the best tricks to build a high traffic, profitable blog. When we talk about profit, people often talk about money but the reality is that profit is much bigger word than money. There are many different ways one can profit from their own blog. In this course, I discuss about all different ways about how you can be profitable by building a high traffic blog. I believe this course is for everybody who aspire to build a website or blog which gives them a profit.  Here are the major topics based out of this course. Introduction Techniques to Engage Blog Readers Social Media – Social Sharing and Social Networking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Monetizing a Blog Frequently Asked Questions Checklists Personally I believe this is the best gift I can give to all of you my friends. Build a successful high traffic blog and monetize it. Here is the list of the all of my video courses and here is the list of all of the books. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Blogging

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• SqlBuildTask failed due to ArgumentNullException(searchingPaths)

  At one of my customers, they have setup TFS 2010. They are using the UpgradeTemplate.xaml to build all their solutions, including GDR2 database projects. When building the project, I got the following error message DspBuild:   Creating a model to represent the project... C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018: The "SqlBuildTask" task failed unexpectedly. [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018: Parameter name: searchingPaths [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Extensibility.ExtensionAssemblyResolver..ctor(List`1 searchingPaths) [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Extensibility.ExtensionTypeLoader.LoadTypes() [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Extensibility.ExtensionManager..ctor(String databaseSchemaProviderType) [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks.TaskHostLoader.LoadImpl(ITaskHost providedHost, TaskLoggingHelper providedLogger) [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks.TaskHostLoader.Load(ITaskHost providedHost, TaskLoggingHelper providedLogger) [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks.DBBuildTask.Execute() [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute() [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets(58,5): error MSB4018:    at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(ITaskExecutionHost taskExecutionHost, TaskLoggingContext taskLoggingContext, TaskHost taskHost, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask, Boolean& taskResult) [C:\Builds\9\62\Sources\MyDb\MyDb.dbproj] Solution To solve this error you set the MSBuild Platform in the Build Defintion to X86:

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• First impressions of Scala

  - by Scott Weinstein

  I have an idea that it may be possible to predict build success/failure based on commit data. Why Scala? It’s a JVM language, has lots of powerful type features, and it has a linear algebra library which I’ll need later. Project definition and build Neither maven or the scala build tool (sbt) are completely satisfactory. This maven **archetype** (what .Net folks would call a VS project template) mvn archetype:generate `-DarchetypeGroupId=org.scala-tools.archetypes `-DarchetypeArtifactId=scala-archetype-simple `-DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases `-DgroupId=org.SW -DartifactId=BuildBreakPredictor gets you started right away with “hello world” code, unit tests demonstrating a number of different testing approaches, and even a ready made `.gitignore` file - nice! But the Scala version is behind at v2.8, and more seriously, compiling and testing was painfully slow. So much that a rapid edit – test – edit cycle was not practical. So Lab49 colleague Steve Levine tells me that I can either adjust my pom to use fsc – the fast scala compiler, or use sbt. Sbt has some nice features It’s fast – it uses fsc by default It has a continuous mode, so  `> ~test` will compile and run your unit test each time you save a file It’s can consume (and produce) Maven 2 dependencies the build definition file can be much shorter than the equivalent pom (about 1/5 the size, as repos and dependencies can be declared on a single line) And some real limitations Limited support for 3rd party integration – for instance out of the box, TeamCity doesn’t speak sbt, nor does IntelliJ IDEA Steeper learning curve for build steps outside the default Side note: If a language has a fast compiler, why keep the slow compiler around? Even worse, why make it the default? I choose sbt, for the faster development speed it offers. Syntax Scala APIs really like to use punctuation – sometimes this works well, as in the following map1 |+| map2 The `|+|` defines a merge operator which does addition on the `values` of the maps. It’s less useful here: http(baseUrl / url >- parseJson[BuildStatus] sure you can probably guess what `>-` does from the context, but how about `>~` or `>+`? Language features I’m still learning, so not much to say just yet. However case classes are quite usefull, implicits scare me, and type constructors have lots of power. Community A number of projects, such as https://github.com/scalala and https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz are split between github and google code – github for the src, and google code for the docs. Not sure I understand the motivation here.

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• Plan Operator Tuesday round-up

  - by Rob Farley

  Eighteen posts for T-SQL Tuesday #43 this month, discussing Plan Operators. I put them together and made the following clickable plan. It’s 1000px wide, so I hope you have a monitor wide enough. Let me explain this plan for you (people’s names are the links to the articles on their blogs – the same links as in the plan above). It was clearly a SELECT statement. Wayne Sheffield (@dbawayne) wrote about that, so we start with a SELECT physical operator, leveraging the logical operator Wayne Sheffield. The SELECT operator calls the Paul White operator, discussed by Jason Brimhall (@sqlrnnr) in his post. The Paul White operator is quite remarkable, and can consume three streams of data. Let’s look at those streams. The first pulls data from a Table Scan – Boris Hristov (@borishristov)’s post – using parallel threads (Bradley Ball – @sqlballs) that pull the data eagerly through a Table Spool (Oliver Asmus – @oliverasmus). A scalar operation is also performed on it, thanks to Jeffrey Verheul (@devjef)’s Compute Scalar operator. The second stream of data applies Evil (I figured that must mean a procedural TVF, but could’ve been anything), courtesy of Jason Strate (@stratesql). It performs this Evil on the merging of parallel streams (Steve Jones – @way0utwest), which suck data out of a Switch (Paul White – @sql_kiwi). This Switch operator is consuming data from up to four lookups, thanks to Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen), Rick Krueger (@dataogre), Mickey Stuewe (@sqlmickey) and Kathi Kellenberger (@auntkathi). Unfortunately Kathi’s name is a bit long and has been truncated, just like in real plans. The last stream performs a join of two others via a Nested Loop (Matan Yungman – @matanyungman). One pulls data from a Spool (my post – @rob_farley) populated from a Table Scan (Jon Morisi). The other applies a catchall operator (the catchall is because Tamera Clark (@tameraclark) didn’t specify any particular operator, and a catchall is what gets shown when SSMS doesn’t know what to show. Surprisingly, it’s showing the yellow one, which is about cursors. Hopefully that’s not what Tamera planned, but anyway...) to the output from an Index Seek operator (Sebastian Meine – @sqlity). Lastly, I think everyone put in 110% effort, so that’s what all the operators cost. That didn’t leave anything for me, unfortunately, but that’s okay. Also, because he decided to use the Paul White operator, Jason Brimhall gets 0%, and his 110% was given to Paul’s Switch operator post. I hope you’ve enjoyed this T-SQL Tuesday, and have learned something extra about Plan Operators. Keep your eye out for next month’s one by watching the Twitter Hashtag #tsql2sday, and why not contribute a post to the party? Big thanks to Adam Machanic as usual for starting all this. @rob_farley

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• Looking into ASP.Net MVC 4.0 Mobile Development - part 2

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will be continuing my discussion on ASP.Net MVC 4.0 mobile development. You can have a look at my first post on the subject here . Make sure you read it and understand it well before you move one reading the remaining of this post. I will not be writing any code in this post. I will try to explain a few concepts related to the MVC 4.0 mobile functionality. In this post I will be looking into the Browser Overriding feature in ASP.Net MVC 4.0. By that I mean that we override the user agent for a given user session. This is very useful feature for people who visit a site through a device and they experience the mobile version of the site, but what they really want is the option to be able to switch to the desktop view. "Why they might want to do that?", you might wonder.Well first of all the users of our ASP.Net MVC 4.0 application will appreciate that they have the option to switch views while some others will think that they will enjoy more the contents of our website with the "desktop view" since the mobile device they view our site has a quite large display.  Obviously this is only one site. These are just different views that are rendered.To put it simply, browser overriding lets our application treat requests as if they were coming from a different browser rather than the one they are actually from. In order to do that programmatically we must have a look at the System.Web.WebPages namespace and the classes in it. Most specifically the class BrowserHelpers. Have a look at the picture below   In this class we see some extension methods for HttpContext class.These methods are called extensions-helpers methods and we use them to switch to one browser from another thus overriding the current/actual browser. These APIs have effect on layout,views and partial views and will not affect any other ASP.Net Request.Browser related functionality.The overridden browser is stored in a cookie. Let me explain what some of these methods do. SetOverriddenBrowser() -  let us set the user agent string to specific value GetOverriddenBrowser() -  let us get the overridden value ClearOverriddenBrowser() -  let us remove any overridden user agent for the current request   To recap, in our ASP.Net MVC 4.0 applications when our application is viewed in our mobile devices, we can have a link like "Desktop View" for all those who desperately want to see the site with in full desktop-browser version.We then can specify a browser type override. My controller class (snippet of code) that is responsible for handling the switching could be something like that. public class SwitchViewController : Controller{ public RedirectResult SwitchView(bool mobile, string returnUrl){if (Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice == mobile)HttpContext.ClearOverriddenBrowser();elseHttpContext.SetOverriddenBrowser(mobile ? BrowserOverride.Mobile : BrowserOverride.Desktop);return Redirect(returnUrl);}} Hope it helps!!!!

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• Silverlight Cream for June 21, 2011 -- #1110

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Peter Kuhn(-2-, -3-), Mike Gold, WindowsPhoneGeek, Nigel Sampson, Paul Sheriff, Dhananjay Kumar, and Erno de Weerd. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Debug Helper" Peter Kuhn3 WP7: "Metro In Motion #8 – AutoCompleteBox Reveal Animation" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Check out the Top 5 from my friends at SilverlightShow from last week: SilverlightShow for June 13 - 19, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Metro In Motion #8 – AutoCompleteBox Reveal Animation Colin Eberhardt found yet another 'Metro In Motion' to duplicate... this one is the auto-complete effect seen in the WP7 email client... check out the video on the post! Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 16 - How to Create a WP7 Alarm Application? Kunal Chowdhury has a couple more of his Mango tutorials up... number 16 (!) is on creating an Alarm app using scheduled tasks. Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 17 - How to Create a WP7 Reminder Application? Kunal Chowdhury's latest is number 17 in the Mango series and he's discussing the Reminder class which is part of the Scheduler namespace. Silverlight Debug Helper Peter Kuhn has deployed a new version of his "Silverlight Debug Helper"... this time he's added support for FireFox and Chrome. Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 3) Peter Kuhn also has Part 3 of his series posted at SilverlightShow on getting ready for the WP7 exam. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 13 - Mango (2) Finally, Peter Kuhn's latest XNA for Silverlight developers tutorial is up at SilverlightShow and is the 2nd Mango post for game devs. Detecting Altitude using the WP7 Phone WindowsPhoneGeek apparently turned the reigns of his blog over to Mike Gold for this post about Altitude detection on the WP7. Windows Phone Mango: Getting Started with MVVM in 10 Minutes If you're out there and still haven't gotten your head around MVVM, or want to take another look at why you're beating yourself up doing it [ :) ]... WindowsPhoneGeek has a quick write-up on MVVM and WP7.1 apps Creating app promotional videos Nigel Sampson details how he uses Expression Encoder to produce the app videos he has on his blog for his WP7* apps. Sort Data in Windows Phone using Collection View Source Paul Sheriff's latest post is up, and is another WP7 post. This time on how to sort the data you consume by using a CollectionViewSource object in XAML and not write any code! Viewing Flickr Images on Windows 7.1 Phone or Mango Phone Dhananjay Kumar has a tutorial up for WP7.1 showing how to use the Flickr REST service to display images on your device. Windows Phone 7: Drawing graphics for your application with Inkscape – Part II: Icons Part 2 of Erno de Weerd's Trilogy on Drawing graphics for your WP7* apps in Inkscape is up... this tutorial is all about icons... good stuff! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String

  - by pinaldave

  When I was writing this blog post I had a hard time to come up with the title of the blog post so I did my best to come up with one. Here is the reason why? I wrote a blog post earlier SQL SERVER – Find First Non-Numeric Character from String. One of the questions was that how that blog can be useful in real life scenario. This blog post is the answer to that question. Let us first see a problem. We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with example. Prepare a sample data: -- How to find first non numberic character USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE MyTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(100)) GO INSERT INTO MyTable (ID, Col1) SELECT 1, '1one' UNION ALL SELECT 2, '11eleven' UNION ALL SELECT 3, '2two' UNION ALL SELECT 4, '22twentytwo' UNION ALL SELECT 5, '111oneeleven' GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO The above query will give following result set. Now let us use ORDER BY COL1 and observe the result along with Original SELECT. -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable ORDER BY Col1 GO The result of the table is not as per expected. We need the result in following format. Here is the good example of how we can use PATINDEX. -- Use of PATINDEX SELECT ID, LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) 'Numeric Character', Col1 'Original Character' FROM MyTable ORDER BY LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) GO We can use PATINDEX to identify the length of the digit part in the alphanumeric string (Remember: Our string has a first part as an int always. It will not work in any other scenario). Now you can use the LEFT function to extract the INT portion from the alphanumeric string and order the data according to it. You can easily clean up the script by dropping following table. DROP TABLE MyTable GO Here is the complete script so you can easily refer it. -- How to find first non numberic character USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE MyTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(100)) GO INSERT INTO MyTable (ID, Col1) SELECT 1, '1one' UNION ALL SELECT 2, '11eleven' UNION ALL SELECT 3, '2two' UNION ALL SELECT 4, '22twentytwo' UNION ALL SELECT 5, '111oneeleven' GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable ORDER BY Col1 GO -- Use of PATINDEX SELECT ID, Col1 'Original Character' FROM MyTable ORDER BY LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) GO DROP TABLE MyTable GO Well, isn’t it an interesting solution. Any suggestion for better solution? Additionally any suggestion for changing the title of this blog post? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL String, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Silverlight Cream for May 22, 2010 -- #867

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Xianzhong Zhu, Jim Lynn, Laurent Bugnion, and Kyle McClellan. A ton of Shoutouts this time: Cigdem Patlak (CrocusGirl) is interviewed about Silverlight 4 on Channel 9: Silverlight discussion with Cigdem Patlak Timmy Kokke has material up from a presentation he did, and check out the SilverAmp project he's got going: Code & Slides – SDE – What’s new in Silverlight 4 Graham Odds at ScottLogic has an interesting post up: Contextual cues in user interface design Einar Ingebrigtsen is discussing Balder licensing and is asking for input: Balder - Licensing SilverLaw has updated two of his stylings at the Expression Gallery to Silverlight 4: ChildWindow and Accordion Styling Silverlight 4 Keep this page bookmarked -- it's the only page you'll need for Silverlight and Expression links.. well, that and my blog :) .. from Adam Kinney: Silverlight and Expression Blend Jeremy Boyd and John-Daniel Trask have some sweet-looking controls in their new release: Introducing Silverlight Elements 1.1 Matthias Shapiro entered the Design for America competition with his Recovery Review: A Silverlight Sunlight Foundation Visualization Project be sure to check out his blog post about it -- there's a link at the bottom. Koen Zwikstra announed a new release: Document Toolkit 2 Beta 1 available ... built for SL4 and lots of features -- check out the blog post. From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Example To Secure WCF Data Service OData Methods Michael Washington has a follow-on tutorial up on WCF Data Security with OData -- essentially this is the 'securing the data' part ... the Silverlight part was in the previous post... all code is available. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 1 Xianzhong Zhu has the first of a two-part tutorial up on building Freecell in Silverlight 3 ... yeah... SL3 -- oh, can you say WP7?? :) Silverlight Top Tip: Startup page for Navigation Apps Jim Lynn has detailed how to go straight to a specific page you're working on in a complex Silverlight app say for debug purposes rather than page/page/page ... I was just thinking yesterday about putting a shortcut on my taskbar for something similar in .NET :) Handling DataGrid.SelectedItems in an MVVM-friendly manner Laurent Bugnion responded with code to a question about getting a DataGrid's SelectedItems into the ViewModel in MVVMLight. Demo code available too. RIA Services and Windows Live ID Kyle McClellan has a post up discussing using LiveID and RIA Services and Silverlight. Lots of external links sprinkled around. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for December 29, 2010 -- #1018

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Arik Poznanski, Derik Whittaker(-2-), Alex Knight, Maurice de Beijer, Jesse Liberty, Jason Ginchereau, Jeff Blankenburg, Mike Snow, and Peter Kuhn. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Reading from a File Contained in your XAP" Mike Snow WP7: "A ReorderListBox for Windows Phone 7" Jason Ginchereau Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making rockin' animations" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Order in Chaos: Dependency Property Value Resolution Arik Poznanski sent me the link to his blog with this Dependency property value resolution post which demonstrates in successive detail xaml for each of the scenarios. Closing the Virtual Keyboard (SIP) and forcing binding in WP7 Derik Whittaker has a couple new posts up... this first is about how to close the SIP and forcing binding in a WP7 app... if you've run many WP7 apps I'm sure you understand the issue. Help my Slider control does not work inside a Grid in WP7 In Derik Whittaker's next post he details a problem he had with a Slider in a Grid that went AWOL... and how he resolved it.. also is asking why the solution works. PathListBox: making rockin' animations Holy Crap ... Alex Knight has his second PathListBox tutorial up and just stop reading and go check it out... dang! ... I'll still be here when you come back! Windows Phone 7, Animations and Data Binding Maurice de Beijer details an interesting problem he ran into where his databinding was hampering a page animation, what the root problem was and how he resolved it.. good information. Windows Phone From Scratch – Navigation Jesse Liberty has the next episode in the Windows Phone from Scratch series up and is talking about Navigation... he demos an ap with 3 pages and simple navigation this time. A ReorderListBox for Windows Phone 7 Found in Jeff Blankenburg's number 11, this post by Jason Ginchereau is a description of a Drag/Drop reodering ListBox drop-in for WP7 ... very cool, and source is on the post. What I Learned In WP7 – #Issue 11 Jeff Blankenburg's number 11 is a couple links itself... one to Jeff Wilcox for Silverlight UnitTest Framework, and one to Jason Ginchereau for Listbox Drag/Drop reordering... going to have to look that one up. Silverlight: Reading from a File Contained in your XAP Mike Snow's latest is on how to load up an extraneous file into your xap for loading at run-time and how to get that to actually work. XNA: Sophisticated primitives Peter Kuhn has a post up on using the XNA PrimitiveBatch class... he had trouble with it at first, and explains how to use it. XNA you say? ... think WP7. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for December 31, 2010 -- #1019

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Thomas Martinsen, Mike Ormond, William E. Burrows(-2-), Vangos Pterneas, Jesse Liberty, Diptimaya Patra, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Drag from Multiple Source In Silverlight 4" Diptimaya Patra WP7: "What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 12" Jeff Blankenburg Shoutouts: Paul Thurrott posted a great phone comparison chart: Great Windows Phone comparison chart Kunal Chowdhury announced his new Silverlight Site: Welcome to Silverlight-Zone - Site is Live Now ... Good Luck, Kunal! From SilverlightCream.com: MyStudioServer goes Open Source Michael Washington decided to put his "MyStudioServer" on CodePlex... I saw this last spring and it's pretty darn cool... check out the post and examples. UriMapping for WP7 Thomas Martinsen discusses UriMapping in WP7, details the steps you need to follow and has sample code to demonstrate. More Monitoring Web Requests on Windows Phone Mike Ormond revisits a post about monitoring WP7 web requests, and shows how to get the data via Fiddler. New Tutorial – Windows Phone 7 (Getting Started) William E. Burrows has 2 parts of a video tutorial series on WP7 development up. This first gets things rolling, explains what is going on, and gets far enough to display golf courses stored in the database. WP7 Tutorial – Part 2: Managing Courses William E. Burrows's 2nd video tutorial is on building out the app to provide features to manage the gold courses for this gold handicap application. Face detection in Windows Phone 7 Vangos Pterneas has a post up about a WP7 app he did using René Schulte's Facelight to do facial recognition. Source available and also on CodePlex. Windows Phone From Scratch – Navigation II Jesse Liberty has up his latest WP7 from Scratch and is the 2nd post in the Navigation series, which is combining the previous navigation with the animation from the one before to produce a better navigation experience. Drag from Multiple Source In Silverlight 4 Diptimaya Patra has a post up at dotnetslackers on dragging into a drop area from multiple sources of different data templates and contexts. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 12 Jeff Blankenburg's number 12 is up and he's got all the RGB colors on WP7 charted out, name, HEX, RGB, and visual... looks like a good one to bookmark What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 13 Jeff Blankenburg's number 13 is the chart I have listed in the Shoutout above... a complete phone comparison chart. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Why isn't this driver install working (sudo code)?

  - by Nick

  I have a soundcard that I'd like to use and I've been trying to install it and being a new Ubuntu user, I get about half way through this in the Terminal and it stops cooperating with me... See the link (soundcard hyperlink) but basically what I have here: I do the following and it works: sudo apt-get install subversion svn co https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux Change to the directory cd line6linux/driver/trunk Time to build from the source but first make sure you have the latest build and headers sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install linux-headers Then after this point it says must specify file to install. Not sure how to do this or what it means. Then, running make gives the following output: ./set_revision.sh ./set_revision.sh: 9: test: https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk: unexpected operator make -C /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/build CONFIG_LINE6_USB=m SUBDIRS=/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk modules make[1]: Entering directory /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic-pae' CC [M] /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.o /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c: In function ‘line6_init_audio’: /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c:30:57: error: ‘THIS_MODULE’ undeclared (first use in this function) /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c:30:57: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in make[2]: * [/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.o] Error 1 make[1]: * [module/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic-pae' make: * [default] Error 2 This is in Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS Another thing, semi related. Cut, copy, paste? Seems like it's different from program to program. I was in the terminal and hit Ctrl-C and then Ctrl-Shift-V in Firefox and it won't paste. But in terminal it will paste. I'm confused. Here is what it's giving me after I hit "Make": nick@NickUbuntu:~/line6linux/driver/trunk$ make ./set_revision.sh ./set_revision.sh: 9: test: https://line6linux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/line6linux/driver/trunk: unexpected operator make -C /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/build CONFIG_LINE6_USB=m SUBDIRS=/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk modules make[1]: Entering directory /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic-pae' CC [M] /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.o /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c: In function ‘line6_init_audio’: /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c:30:57: error: ‘THIS_MODULE’ undeclared (first use in this function) /home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.c:30:57: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in make[2]: *** [/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk/audio.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** [_module_/home/nick/line6linux/driver/trunk] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic-pae' make: * [default] Error 2 Looks like these folks also had similar problems: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1163608&page=3

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• Nagging As A Strategy For Better Linking: -z guidance

  - by user9154181

  The link-editor (ld) in Solaris 11 has a new feature that we call guidance that is intended to help you build better objects. The basic idea behind guidance is that if (and only if) you request it, the link-editor will issue messages suggesting better options and other changes you might make to your ld command to get better results. You can choose to take the advice, or you can disable specific types of guidance while acting on others. In some ways, this works like an experienced friend leaning over your shoulder and giving you advice — you're free to take it or leave it as you see fit, but you get nudged to do a better job than you might have otherwise. We use guidance to build the core Solaris OS, and it has proven to be useful, both in improving our objects, and in making sure that regressions don't creep back in later. In this article, I'm going to describe the evolution in thinking and design that led to the implementation of the -z guidance option, as well as give a brief description of how it works. The guidance feature issues non-fatal warnings. However, experience shows that once developers get used to ignoring warnings, it is inevitable that real problems will be lost in the noise and ignored or missed. This is why we have a zero tolerance policy against build noise in the core Solaris OS. In order to get maximum benefit from -z guidance while maintaining this policy, I added the -z fatal-warnings option at the same time. Much of the material presented here is adapted from the arc case: PSARC 2010/312 Link-editor guidance The History Of Unfortunate Link-Editor Defaults The Solaris link-editor is one of the oldest Unix commands. It stands to reason that this would be true — in order to write an operating system, you need the ability to compile and link code. The original link-editor (ld) had defaults that made sense at the time. As new features were needed, command line option switches were added to let the user use them, while maintaining backward compatibility for those who didn't. Backward compatibility is always a concern in system design, but is particularly important in the case of the tool chain (compilers, linker, and related tools), since it is a basic building block for the entire system. Over the years, applications have grown in size and complexity. Important concepts like dynamic linking that didn't exist in the original Unix system were invented. Object file formats changed. In the case of System V Release 4 Unix derivatives like Solaris, the ELF (Extensible Linking Format) was adopted. Since then, the ELF system has evolved to provide tools needed to manage today's larger and more complex environments. Features such as lazy loading, and direct bindings have been added. In an ideal world, many of these options would be defaults, with rarely used options that allow the user to turn them off. However, the reality is exactly the reverse: For backward compatibility, these features are all options that must be explicitly turned on by the user. This has led to a situation in which most applications do not take advantage of the many improvements that have been made in linking over the last 20 years. If their code seems to link and run without issue, what motivation does a developer have to read a complex manpage, absorb the information provided, choose the features that matter for their application, and apply them? Experience shows that only the most motivated and diligent programmers will make that effort. We know that most programs would be improved if we could just get you to use the various whizzy features that we provide, but the defaults conspire against us. We have long wanted to do something to make it easier for our users to use the linkers more effectively. There have been many conversations over the years regarding this issue, and how to address it. They always break down along the following lines: Change ld Defaults Since the world would be a better place the newer ld features were the defaults, why not change things to make it so? This idea is simple, elegant, and impossible. Doing so would break a large number of existing applications, including those of ISVs, big customers, and a plethora of existing open source packages. In each case, the owner of that code may choose to follow our lead and fix their code, or they may view it as an invitation to reconsider their commitment to our platform. Backward compatibility, and our installed base of working software, is one of our greatest assets, and not something to be lightly put at risk. Breaking backward compatibility at this level of the system is likely to do more harm than good. But, it sure is tempting. New Link-Editor One might create a new linker command, not called 'ld', leaving the old command as it is. The new one could use the same code as ld, but would offer only modern options, with the proper defaults for features such as direct binding. The resulting link-editor would be a pleasure to use. However, the approach is doomed to niche status. There is a vast pile of exiting code in the world built around the existing ld command, that reaches back to the 1970's. ld use is embedded in large and unknown numbers of makefiles, and is used by name by compilers that execute it. A Unix link-editor that is not named ld will not find a majority audience no matter how good it might be. Finally, a new linker command will eventually cease to be new, and will accumulate its own burden of backward compatibility issues. An Option To Make ld Do The Right Things Automatically This line of reasoning is best summarized by a CR filed in 2005, entitled 6239804 make it easier for ld(1) to do what's best The idea is to have a '-z best' option that unchains ld from its backward compatibility commitment, and allows it to turn on the "best" set of features, as determined by the authors of ld. The specific set of features enabled by -z best would be subject to change over time, as requirements change. This idea is more realistic than the other two, but was never implemented because it has some important issues that we could never answer to our satisfaction: The -z best proposal assumes that the user can turn it on, and trust it to select good options without the user needing to be aware of the options being applied. This is a fallacy. Features such as direct bindings require the user to do some analysis to ensure that the resulting program will still operate properly. A user who is willing to do the work to verify that what -z best does will be OK for their application is capable of turning on those features directly, and therefore gains little added benefit from -z best. The intent is that when a user opts into -z best, that they understand that z best is subject to sometimes incompatible evolution. Experience teaches us that this won't work. People will use this feature, the meaning of -z best will change, code that used to build will fail, and then there will be complaints and demands to retract the change. When (not if) this occurs, we will of course defend our actions, and point at the disclaimer. We'll win some of those debates, and lose others. Ultimately, we'll end up with -z best2 (-z better), or other compromises, and our goal of simplifying the world will have failed. The -z best idea rolls up a set of features that may or may not be related to each other into a unit that must be taken wholesale, or not at all. It could be that only a subset of what it does is compatible with a given application, in which case the user is expected to abandon -z best and instead set the options that apply to their application directly. In doing so, they lose one of the benefits of -z best, that if you use it, future versions of ld may choose a different set of options, and automatically improve the object through the act of rebuilding it. I drew two conclusions from the above history: For a link-editor, backward compatibility is vital. If a given command line linked your application 10 years ago, you have every reason to expect that it will link today, assuming that the libraries you're linking against are still available and compatible with their previous interfaces. For an application of any size or complexity, there is no substitute for the work involved in examining the code and determining which linker options apply and which do not. These options are largely orthogonal to each other, and it can be reasonable not to use any or all of them, depending on the situation, even in modern applications. It is a mistake to tie them together. The idea for -z guidance came from consideration of these points. By decoupling the advice from the act of taking the advice, we can retain the good aspects of -z best while avoiding its pitfalls: -z guidance gives advice, but the decision to take that advice remains with the user who must evaluate its merit and make a decision to take it or not. As such, we are free to change the specific guidance given in future releases of ld, without breaking existing applications. The only fallout from this will be some new warnings in the build output, which can be ignored or dealt with at the user's convenience. It does not couple the various features given into a single "take it or leave it" option, meaning that there will never be a need to offer "-zguidance2", or other such variants as things change over time. Guidance has the potential to be our final word on this subject. The user is given the flexibility to disable specific categories of guidance without losing the benefit of others, including those that might be added to future versions of the system. Although -z fatal-warnings stands on its own as a useful feature, it is of particular interest in combination with -z guidance. Used together, the guidance turns from advice to hard requirement: The user must either make the suggested change, or explicitly reject the advice by specifying a guidance exception token, in order to get a build. This is valuable in environments with high coding standards. ld Command Line Options The guidance effort resulted in new link-editor options for guidance and for turning warnings into fatal errors. Before I reproduce that text here, I'd like to highlight the strategic decisions embedded in the guidance feature: In order to get guidance, you have to opt in. We hope you will opt in, and believe you'll get better objects if you do, but our default mode of operation will continue as it always has, with full backward compatibility, and without judgement. Guidance suggestions always offers specific advice, and not vague generalizations. You can disable some guidance without turning off the entire feature. When you get guidance warnings, you can choose to take the advice, or you can specify a keyword to disable guidance for just that category. This allows you to get guidance for things that are useful to you, without being bothered about things that you've already considered and dismissed. As the world changes, we will add new guidance to steer you in the right direction. All such new guidance will come with a keyword that let's you turn it off. In order to facilitate building your code on different versions of Solaris, we quietly ignore any guidance keywords we don't recognize, assuming that they are intended for newer versions of the link-editor. If you want to see what guidance tokens ld does and does not recognize on your system, you can use the ld debugging feature as follows: % ld -Dargs -z guidance=foo,nodefs debug: debug: Solaris Linkers: 5.11-1.2275 debug: debug: arg[1] option=-D: option-argument: args debug: arg[2] option=-z: option-argument: guidance=foo,nodefs debug: warning: unrecognized -z guidance item: foo The -z fatal-warning option is straightforward, and generally useful in environments with strict coding standards. Note that the GNU ld already had this feature, and we accept their option names as synonyms: -z fatal-warnings | nofatal-warnings --fatal-warnings | --no-fatal-warnings The -z fatal-warnings and the --fatal-warnings option cause the link-editor to treat warnings as fatal errors. The -z nofatal-warnings and the --no-fatal-warnings option cause the link-editor to treat warnings as non-fatal. This is the default behavior. The -z guidance option is defined as follows: -z guidance[=item1,item2,...] Provide guidance messages to suggest ld options that can improve the quality of the resulting object, or which are otherwise considered to be beneficial. The specific guidance offered is subject to change over time as the system evolves. Obsolete guidance offered by older versions of ld may be dropped in new versions. Similarly, new guidance may be added to new versions of ld. Guidance therefore always represents current best practices. It is possible to enable guidance, while preventing specific guidance messages, by providing a list of item tokens, representing the class of guidance to be suppressed. In this way, unwanted advice can be suppressed without losing the benefit of other guidance. Unrecognized item tokens are quietly ignored by ld, allowing a given ld command line to be executed on a variety of older or newer versions of Solaris. The guidance offered by the current version of ld, and the item tokens used to disable these messages, are as follows. Specify Required Dependencies Dynamic executables and shared objects should explicitly define all of the dependencies they require. Guidance recommends the use of the -z defs option, should any symbol references remain unsatisfied when building dynamic objects. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nodefs. Do Not Specify Non-Required Dependencies Dynamic executables and shared objects should not define any dependencies that do not satisfy the symbol references made by the dynamic object. Guidance recommends that unused dependencies be removed. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nounused. Lazy Loading Dependencies should be identified for lazy loading. Guidance recommends the use of the -z lazyload option should any dependency be processed before either a -z lazyload or -z nolazyload option is encountered. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nolazyload. Direct Bindings Dependencies should be referenced with direct bindings. Guidance recommends the use of the -B direct, or -z direct options should any dependency be processed before either of these options, or the -z nodirect option is encountered. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nodirect. Pure Text Segment Dynamic objects should not contain relocations to non-writable, allocable sections. Guidance recommends compiling objects with Position Independent Code (PIC) should any relocations against the text segment remain, and neither the -z textwarn or -z textoff options are encountered. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=notext. Mapfile Syntax All mapfiles should use the version 2 mapfile syntax. Guidance recommends the use of the version 2 syntax should any mapfiles be encountered that use the version 1 syntax. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nomapfile. Library Search Path Inappropriate dependencies that are encountered by ld are quietly ignored. For example, a 32-bit dependency that is encountered when generating a 64-bit object is ignored. These dependencies can result from incorrect search path settings, such as supplying an incorrect -L option. Although benign, this dependency processing is wasteful, and might hide a build problem that should be solved. Guidance recommends the removal of any inappropriate dependencies. This guidance can be disabled with -z guidance=nolibpath. In addition, -z guidance=noall can be used to entirely disable the guidance feature. See Chapter 7, Link-Editor Quick Reference, in the Linker and Libraries Guide for more information on guidance and advice for building better objects. Example The following example demonstrates how the guidance feature is intended to work. We will build a shared object that has a variety of shortcomings: Does not specify all it's dependencies Specifies dependencies it does not use Does not use direct bindings Uses a version 1 mapfile Contains relocations to the readonly allocable text (not PIC) This scenario is sadly very common — many shared objects have one or more of these issues. % cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> void hello(void) { printf("hello user %d\n", getpid()); } % cat mapfile.v1 # This version 1 mapfile will trigger a guidance message % cc hello.c -o hello.so -G -M mapfile.v1 -lelf As you can see, the operation completes without error, resulting in a usable object. However, turning on guidance reveals a number of things that could be better: % cc hello.c -o hello.so -G -M mapfile.v1 -lelf -zguidance ld: guidance: version 2 mapfile syntax recommended: mapfile.v1 ld: guidance: -z lazyload option recommended before first dependency ld: guidance: -B direct or -z direct option recommended before first dependency Undefined first referenced symbol in file getpid hello.o (symbol belongs to implicit dependency /lib/libc.so.1) printf hello.o (symbol belongs to implicit dependency /lib/libc.so.1) ld: warning: symbol referencing errors ld: guidance: -z defs option recommended for shared objects ld: guidance: removal of unused dependency recommended: libelf.so.1 warning: Text relocation remains referenced against symbol offset in file .rodata1 (section) 0xa hello.o getpid 0x4 hello.o printf 0xf hello.o ld: guidance: position independent (PIC) code recommended for shared objects ld: guidance: see ld(1) -z guidance for more information Given the explicit advice in the above guidance messages, it is relatively easy to modify the example to do the right things: % cat mapfile.v2 # This version 2 mapfile will not trigger a guidance message $mapfile_version 2 % cc hello.c -o hello.so -Kpic -G -Bdirect -M mapfile.v2 -lc -zguidance There are situations in which the guidance does not fit the object being built. For instance, you want to build an object without direct bindings: % cc -Kpic hello.c -o hello.so -G -M mapfile.v2 -lc -zguidance ld: guidance: -B direct or -z direct option recommended before first dependency ld: guidance: see ld(1) -z guidance for more information It is easy to disable that specific guidance warning without losing the overall benefit from allowing the remainder of the guidance feature to operate: % cc -Kpic hello.c -o hello.so -G -M mapfile.v2 -lc -zguidance=nodirect Conclusions The linking guidelines enforced by the ld guidance feature correspond rather directly to our standards for building the core Solaris OS. I'm sure that comes as no surprise. It only makes sense that we would want to build our own product as well as we know how. Solaris is usually the first significant test for any new linker feature. We now enable guidance by default for all builds, and the effect has been very positive. Guidance helps us find suboptimal objects more quickly. Programmers get concrete advice for what to change instead of vague generalities. Even in the cases where we override the guidance, the makefile rules to do so serve as documentation of the fact. Deciding to use guidance is likely to cause some up front work for most code, as it forces you to consider using new features such as direct bindings. Such investigation is worthwhile, but does not come for free. However, the guidance suggestions offer a structured and straightforward way to tackle modernizing your objects, and once that work is done, for keeping them that way. The investment is often worth it, and will replay you in terms of better performance and fewer problems. I hope that you find guidance to be as useful as we have.

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• Virtual Lab part 2&ndash;Templates, Patterns, Baselines

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Once you have a good virtualization platform chosen, whether it is a desktop, server or laptop environment, the temptation is to build “X”.  “X” may be a SharePoint lab, a Virtual Cluster, an AD test environment or some other cool project that you really need RIGHT NOW.  That would be doing it wrong. My grandfather taught woodworking and cabinetmaking for twenty-seven years at a trade school in Alabama.  He was the first instructor hired at that school and the only teacher for the first two years.  His students built tables, chairs, and workbenches so the school could start its HVAC courses.   Visiting as a child, I also noticed many extra “helper” stands, benches, holders, and gadgets all built from wood.  What does that have to do with a virtual lab, you ask?  Well, that is the same approach you should take.  Build stuff that you will use.  Not for solving a particular problem, but to let the Virtual Lab be part of your normal troubleshooting toolkit. Start with basic copies of various Operating Systems.  Load and patch server and desktop OS environments.  This also helps build your collection of ISO files, another essential element of a virtual Lab.  Once you have these “baseline” images, you can use your Virtualization software’s snapshot capability to freeze the image.  Clone the snapshot and you have a brand new fully patched machine in mere moments.  You may have to sysprep some of the Microsoft OS environments if you are going to create a domain environment or experiment with clustering.  That is still much faster than loading and patching from scratch. So once you have a stock of raw materials (baseline images in this case) where should you start.  Again, my grandfather’s workshop gives us the answer.  In the shop it was workbenches and tables to hold large workpieces that made the equipment more useful.  In a Windows environment the same role falls to the fundamental network services:  DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Routing, File Services, and Storage services.  Plan your internal network setup.  Build out an AD controller with all the features listed.  Make the actual domain an isolated domain so it will not care about where you take it.  Add the Microsoft iSCSI target.  Once you have this single system, you can leverage it for almost any network environment beyond a simple stand-alone system. Having these templates and fundamental infrastructure elements ready to run means I can build a quick lab in minutes instead of hours.  My solutions are well-tested, my processes fully documented with screenshots, and my plans validated well before I have to make any changes to client systems.  the work I put in is easily returned in increased value and client satisfaction.

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• SQL SERVER – QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON/OFF Explanation and Example – Question on Real World Usage

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a follow up blog post of SQL SERVER – QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON/OFF and ANSI_NULL ON/OFF Explanation. I wrote that blog six years ago and I had plans that I will write a follow up blog post of the same. Today, when I was going over my to-do list and I was surprised that I had an item there which was six years old and I never got to do that. In the earlier blog post I wrote about exploitation of the Quoted Identifier and ANSI Null. In this blog post we will see a quick example of Quoted Identifier. However, before we continue this blog post, let us see a refresh what both of Quoted Identifider do. QUOTED IDENTIFIER ON/OFF This option specifies the setting for use of double quotes. When this is on, double quotation mark is used as part of the SQL Server identifier (object name). This can be useful in situations in which identifiers are also SQL Server reserved words. In simple words when we have QUOTED IDENTIFIER ON, anything which is wrapped in double quotes becomes an object. E.g. -- The following will work SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE DATABASE "Test1" GO -- The following will throw an error about Incorrect syntax near 'Test2'. SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF GO CREATE DATABASE "Test2" GO This feature is particularly helpful when we are working with reserved keywords in SQL Server. For example if you have to create a database with the name VARCHAR or INT or DATABASE you may want to put double quotes around your database name and turn on quoted identifiers to create a database with the such name. Personally, I do not think so anybody will ever create a database with the reserve keywords intentionally, as it will just lead to confusion. Here is another example to give you further clarity about how Quoted Idenifier setting works with SELECT statement. -- The following will throw an error about Invalid column name 'Column'. SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO SELECT "Column" GO -- The following will work SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF GO SELECT "Column" GO Personally, I always use the following method to create database as it works irrespective of what is the quoted identifier’s status. It always creates objects with my desire name whenever I would like to create. CREATE DATABASE [Test3] I believe the future of the quoted identifier on or off is useful in the real world when we have script generated from another database where this setting was ON and we have to now execute the same script again in our environment again. Question to you - I personally have never used this feature as I mentioned earlier. I believe this feature is there to support the scripts which are generated in another SQL Database or generate the script for other database. Do you have a real world scenario where we need to turn on or off Quoted Identifiers. Click to Download Scripts Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Visual Studio 2010 Launch Events

  - by Jim Duffy

  Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about the new features in Visual Studio 2010. Check out the MSDN Events page and find out when the talented folks of the Developer & Evangelism group will be visiting your city to prove to you that /*Life Runs On Code*/. I’ll be attending the Raleigh event June 2, 2010 from 1:00 - 5:00 PM. North Carolina State University, Jane S. McKimmon Conference Center 1101 Gorman St Raleigh North Carolina 27606 United States From the Raleigh Event page: Event Overview Learn about the rich application platforms that Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 supports, including Windows® 7, the Web, SharePoint®, Windows Azure™, SQL®, and Windows® Phone 7 Series. From tighter tester and dev collaboration to new ALM tools, there’s a lot that’s new. Here’s what you can expect: Windows Development with Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio has always been the best way to build compelling visual solutions for Windows. Visual Studio 2010 continues this trend with great new tooling support for Silverlight 4, WPF, and native development. In this demo heavy session, you’ll see how you can build rich Windows applications with Silverlight 4 using new trusted application features including out-of-browser execution, saving to the file system, and even COM Automation. You’ll also see how you can use the new Task Parallel Library from within a WPF application to take advantage of all those cores in today’s modern computers. Web and Cloud Development with Visual Studio 2010 If you build solutions for the web, then this session is for you. Come see how your existing skills move forward with Visual Studio 2010 both for in-house ASP.NET development and the new frontier of the Cloud. In this session, you’ll see improved designers, new HTML and JavaScript snippets, Web Forms enhancements, and how you can quickly build great web sites using Dynamic Data. You’ll see the changes made to testable web sites with MVC 2.0 and how we’ve integrated JQuery support into the platform. You’ll then see how easy it is to leverage your existing code and move to the cloud with Windows Azure. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools and Platform Overview This session provides an overview of Visual Studio® 2010 for Windows Phone. Learn about the powerful capabilities of this new application platform and the developer tools experience including basic IDE usage, debugging, packaging, and deployment. This session also shows how you can use Microsoft Expression® Blend™ for Windows Phone to build great Silverlight applications. Have a day. :-|

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• Speed up your Silverlight Debugging for large projects

  - by Aligned

  I'm working on a 5+ year old ASP.NET project that has 74+ projects and we've been adding new Silverlight applications to run in the ASP.NET page islands. My machine at work isn't the most powerful, so I find myself waiting a lot for the whole thing to build. I'm using Visual Studio 2010, so that takes up a lot of resources as well. This causes me to get distracted and I start looking at the news... I need to combat that more :-). I can't get a new machine, that's up to someone else, so I've found a few tricks to help. 1. Only build the Silverlight project you're working with. This will build all referenced projects (you can see these by right clicking and clicking Project Dependencies) and package a new XAP (you can see all the actions in your output build window). Then refresh your page with the Silverlight app and it's up-to-date. 2. I was working with a co-worker (thanks Jordan) who was using the the Debug -> attach to processes window. In the Attach to: row there is a "Select..." button. In the dialog, click "Debug these code types:" and select Silverlight. Hit ok. Then all you need to do is find your process (you might need to click the refresh button). I'm usually debugging in IE, so I select the first one and push "i" on the keyboard. That brings me to the IE windows open. Find the one with type of Silverlight, x86. It is usually directly above one with type of x86 that has the page title for "title". Click attach and watch your output window spit out messages about loading debug symbols and your breakpoints enabled (if this doesn't happen you chose the wrong process, hit stop and try again). Now you can debug the client code as normal, server code requires a full F5 or attaching to the correct process. To improve this even further, bind the menu item to a key stroke. I chose ctrl + x, x. (Tools -> Options -> Keyboard, search for Debug.AttachToProcess, set the shortcut keys globaly and assign). Most of the time I build the project, then hit ctrl + x, x then i, then enter and I'm debugging. The process I want is usually the first IE in the list.

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