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  • programming/selling mobile apps internationally

    - by dootcher
    If I'm looking to sell my app in other markets other than the U.S. on both Android and iOS, do I need to do anything inside the app coding-wise? I don't imagine that I need to but I just want to make sure. Also, while I'm at it, how do I collect on international app purchases considering they are in another currency? Will the currency be automatically converted to U.S. dollars or is that my job? Any insight on either of these questions would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Why is there no Sum() extension for IEnumerable<uint>

    - by dss539
    It seems that Sum not defined for IEnumerable<uint> (and other unsigned integers, for that matter) var s = new int[] { 1, 2, 3 }; s.Sum(); //works fine var us = new uint[] { 1, 2, 3 }; us.Sum(); //missing method I would like to know: Have I done something fundamentally wrong/misunderstood the situation? What design decisions might cause the omission of IEnumerable<uint>.Sum()? MSDN: Enumerable.Sum

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  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Design by Contract with Microsoft .Net Code Contract

    - by Fredrik N
    I have done some talks on different events and summits about Defensive Programming and Design by Contract, last time was at Cornerstone’s Developer Summit 2010. Next time will be at SweNug (Sweden .Net User Group). I decided to write a blog post about of some stuffs I was talking about. Users are a terrible thing! Protect your self from them ”Human users have a gift for doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.” – Michael T. Nygard, Release It! The kind of users Michael T. Nygard are talking about is the users of a system. We also have users that uses our code, the users I’m going to focus on is the users of our code. Me and you and another developers. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler Good programmers also writes code that humans know how to use, good programmers also make sure software behave in a predictable manner despise inputs or user actions. Design by Contract   Design by Contract (DbC) is a way for us to make a contract between us (the code writer) and the users of our code. It’s about “If you give me this, I promise to give you this”. It’s not about business validations, that is something completely different that should be part of the domain model. DbC is to make sure the users of our code uses it in a correct way, and that we can rely on the contract and write code in a way where we know that the users will follow the contract. It will make it much easier for us to write code with a contract specified. Something like the following code is something we may see often: public void DoSomething(Object value) { value.DoIKnowThatICanDoThis(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Where “value” can be uses directly or passed to other methods and later be used. What some of us can easily forget here is that the “value” can be “null”. We will probably not passing a null value, but someone else that uses our code maybe will do it. I think most of you (including me) have passed “null” into a method because you don’t know if the argument need to be specified to a valid value etc. I bet most of you also have got the “Null reference exception”. Sometimes this “Null reference exception” can be hard and take time to fix, because we need to search among our code to see where the “null” value was passed in etc. Wouldn’t it be much better if we can as early as possible specify that the value can’t not be null, so the users of our code also know it when the users starts to use our code, and before run time execution of the code? This is where DbC comes into the picture. We can use DbC to specify what we need, and by doing so we can rely on the contract when we write our code. So the code above can actually use the DoIKnowThatICanDoThis() method on the value object without being worried that the “value” can be null. The contract between the users of the code and us writing the code, says that the “value” can’t be null.   Pre- and Postconditions   When working with DbC we are specifying pre- and postconditions.  Precondition is a condition that should be met before a query or command is executed. An example of a precondition is: “The Value argument of the method can’t be null”, and we make sure the “value” isn’t null before the method is called. Postcondition is a condition that should be met when a command or query is completed, a postcondition will make sure the result is correct. An example of a postconditon is “The method will return a list with at least 1 item”. Commands an Quires When using DbC, we need to know what a Command and a Query is, because some principles that can be good to follow are based on commands and queries. A Command is something that will not return anything, like the SQL’s CREATE, UPDATE and DELETE. There are two kinds of Commands when using DbC, the Creation commands (for example a Constructor), and Others. Others can for example be a Command to add a value to a list, remove or update a value etc. //Creation commands public Stack(int size) //Other commands public void Push(object value); public void Remove(); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   A Query, is something that will return something, for example an Attribute, Property or a Function, like the SQL’s SELECT.   There are two kinds of Queries, the Basic Queries  (Quires that aren’t based on another queries), and the Derived Queries, queries that is based on another queries. Here is an example of queries of a Stack: //Basic Queries public int Count; public object this[int index] { get; } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To understand about some principles that are good to follow when using DbC, we need to know about the Commands and different Queries. The 6 Principles When working with DbC, it’s advisable to follow some principles to make it easier to define and use contracts. The following DbC principles are: Separate commands and queries. Separate basic queries from derived queries. For each derived query, write a postcondition that specifies what result will be returned, in terms of one or more basic queries. For each command, write a postcondition that specifies the value of every basic query. For every query and command, decide on a suitable precondition. Write invariants to define unchanging properties of objects. Before I will write about each of them I want you to now that I’m going to use .Net 4.0 Code Contract. I will in the rest of the post uses a simple Stack (Yes I know, .Net already have a Stack class) to give you the basic understanding about using DbC. A Stack is a data structure where the first item in, will be the first item out. Here is a basic implementation of a Stack where not contract is specified yet: public class Stack { private object[] _array; //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { return _array[index]; } set { _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { return this[Count]; } //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { this[Count] = null; Count--; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Note: The Stack is implemented in a way to demonstrate the use of Code Contract in a simple way, the implementation may not look like how you would implement it, so don’t think this is the perfect Stack implementation, only used for demonstration.   Before I will go deeper into the principles I will simply mention how we can use the .Net Code Contract. I mention before about pre- and postcondition, is about “Require” something and to “Ensure” something. When using Code Contract, we will use a static class called “Contract” and is located in he “System.Diagnostics.Contracts” namespace. The contract must be specified at the top or our member statement block. To specify a precondition with Code Contract we uses the Contract.Requires method, and to specify a postcondition, we uses the Contract.Ensure method. Here is an example where both a pre- and postcondition are used: public object Top() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0, "Stack is empty"); Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   The contract above requires that the Count is greater than 0, if not we can’t get the item at the Top of a Stack. We also Ensures that the results (By using the Contract.Result method, we can specify a postcondition that will check if the value returned from a method is correct) of the Top query is equal to this[Count].   1. Separate Commands and Queries   When working with DbC, it’s important to separate Command and Quires. A method should either be a command that performs an Action, or returning information to the caller, not both. By asking a question the answer shouldn’t be changed. The following is an example of a Command and a Query of a Stack: public void Push(object value) public object Top() .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   The Push is a command and will not return anything, just add a value to the Stack, the Top is a query to get the item at the top of the stack.   2. Separate basic queries from derived queries There are two different kinds of queries,  the basic queries that doesn’t rely on another queries, and derived queries that uses a basic query. The “Separate basic queries from derived queries” principle is about about that derived queries can be specified in terms of basic queries. So this principles is more about recognizing that a query is a derived query or a basic query. It will then make is much easier to follow the other principles. The following code shows a basic query and a derived query: //Basic Queries public uint Count; //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   We can see that IsEmpty will use the Count query, and that makes the IsEmpty a Derived query.   3. For each derived query, write a postcondition that specifies what result will be returned, in terms of one or more basic queries.   When the derived query is recognize we can follow the 3ed principle. For each derived query, we can create a postcondition that specifies what result our derived query will return in terms of one or more basic queries. Remember that DbC is about contracts between the users of the code and us writing the code. So we can’t use demand that the users will pass in a valid value, we must also ensure that we will give the users what the users wants, when the user is following our contract. The IsEmpty query of the Stack will use a Count query and that will make the IsEmpty a Derived query, so we should now write a postcondition that specified what results will be returned, in terms of using a basic query and in this case the Count query, //Basic Queries public uint Count; //Derived Queries public bool IsEmpty() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<bool>() == (Count == 0)); return Count == 0; } The Contract.Ensures is used to create a postcondition. The above code will make sure that the results of the IsEmpty (by using the Contract.Result to get the result of the IsEmpty method) is correct, that will say that the IsEmpty will be either true or false based on Count is equal to 0 or not. The postcondition are using a basic query, so the IsEmpty is now following the 3ed principle. We also have another Derived Query, the Top query, it will also need a postcondition and it uses all basic queries. The Result of the Top method must be the same value as the this[] query returns. //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { return _array[index]; } set { _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   4. For each command, write a postcondition that specifies the value of every basic query.   For each command we will create a postconditon that specifies the value of basic queries. If we look at the Stack implementation we will have three Commands, one Creation command, the Constructor, and two others commands, Push and Remove. Those commands need a postcondition and they should include basic query to follow the 4th principle. //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Contract.Ensures(Count == 0); Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) + 1); Contract.Ensures(this[Count] == value); this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   As you can see the Create command will Ensures that Count will be 0 when the Stack is created, when a Stack is created there shouldn’t be any items in the stack. The Push command will take a value and put it into the Stack, when an item is pushed into the Stack, the Count need to be increased to know the number of items added to the Stack, and we must also make sure the item is really added to the Stack. The postconditon of the Push method will make sure the that old value of the Count (by using the Contract.OldValue we can get the value a Query has before the method is called)  plus 1 will be equal to the Count query, this is the way we can ensure that the Push will increase the Count with one. We also make sure the this[] query will now contain the item we pushed into the Stack. The Remove method must make sure the Count is decreased by one when the top item is removed from the Stack. The Commands is now following the 4th principle, where each command now have a postcondition that used the value of basic queries. Note: The principle says every basic Query, the Remove only used one Query the Count, it’s because this command can’t use the this[] query because an item is removed, so the only way to make sure an item is removed is to just use the Count query, so the Remove will still follow the principle.   5. For every query and command, decide on a suitable precondition.   We have now focused only on postcondition, now time for some preconditons. The 5th principle is about deciding a suitable preconditon for every query and command. If we starts to look at one of our basic queries (will not go through all Queries and commands here, just some of them) the this[] query, we can’t pass an index that is lower then 1 (.Net arrays and list are zero based, but not the stack in this blog post ;)) and the index can’t be lesser than the number of items in the stack. So here we will need a preconditon. public object this[uint index] { get { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); return _array[index]; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Think about the Contract as an documentation about how to use the code in a correct way, so if the contract could be specified elsewhere (not part of the method body), we could simply write “return _array[index]” and there is no need to check if index is greater or lesser than Count, because that is specified in a “contract”. The implementation of Code Contract, requires that the contract is specified in the code. As a developer I would rather have this contract elsewhere (Like Spec#) or implemented in a way Eiffel uses it as part of the language. Now when we have looked at one Query, we can also look at one command, the Remove command (You can see the whole implementation of the Stack at the end of this blog post, where precondition is added to more queries and commands then what I’m going to show in this section). We can only Remove an item if the Count is greater than 0. So we can write a precondition that will require that Count must be greater than 0. public void Remove() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   6. Write invariants to define unchanging properties of objects.   The last principle is about making sure the object are feeling great! This is done by using invariants. When using Code Contract we can specify invariants by adding a method with the attribute ContractInvariantMethod, the method must be private or public and can only contains calls to Contract.Invariant. To make sure the Stack feels great, the Stack must have 0 or more items, the Count can’t never be a negative value to make sure each command and queries can be used of the Stack. Here is our invariant for the Stack object: [ContractInvariantMethod] private void ObjectInvariant() { Contract.Invariant(Count >= 0); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Note: The ObjectInvariant method will be called every time after a Query or Commands is called. Here is the full example using Code Contract:   public class Stack { private object[] _array; //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); return _array[index]; } set { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<bool>() == (Count == 0)); return Count == 0; } //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0, "Stack is empty"); Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Contract.Requires(size > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == 0); Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { Contract.Requires(value != null); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) + 1); Contract.Ensures(this[Count] == value); this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } [ContractInvariantMethod] private void ObjectInvariant() { Contract.Invariant(Count >= 0); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Summary By using Design By Contract we can make sure the users are using our code in a correct way, and we must also make sure the users will get the expected results when they uses our code. This can be done by specifying contracts. To make it easy to use Design By Contract, some principles may be good to follow like the separation of commands an queries. With .Net 4.0 we can use the Code Contract feature to specify contracts.

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  • Working with PivotTables in Excel

    - by Mark Virtue
    PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 29, 2010 -- #851

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Carlos Figueira(-2-), Subodh Pushpak, Gergely Orosz, John Papa, Mike Snow(-2-), Rishi, Tim Heuer, Stefan Olson, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Josh Holmes blogged about a cool app the City of Miami has up: Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure Gergely Orosz reports on the state of a bug he found pre SL4: Silverlight 4 still displays large elements incorrectly Laura Foy and Charlie Kindel discuss WP7 on Channel 9: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Refresh Announced Charlie Kindel has an announcement, good instructions, and what's new notes on the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! Tim Heuer mentioned the workaround for this in his post (below), but I thought you might like to read Brandon Watson's debrief of what it's all about: Signed Assemblies Bug in the Windows Phone Tools CTP Refresh Laurent Bugnion posted about interrelations between versions of Blend and WP7 code... read it closely: Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In From SilverlightCream.com: Consuming REST/POX services in Silverlight 4 Carlos Figueira has a pair of posts up about consuming services in Silverlight 4. This first one is about consuming REST/POX services. He provides a Service Contract that can be used with either and the full project code is available as well. Consuming REST/JSON services in Silverlight 4 In the second post, Carlos Figueira provides the code to allow WCF and Silverlight 4 to consume strongly-typed REST/JSON... and again, all the code is available. Silverlight and WCF caching Subodh Pushpak has a post up discussing caching in WCF, and has code demonstrating turning caching on at run-time. Detecting Silverlight Version Installed Gergely Orosz said it right when he said "Detecting the Silverlight version installed on a client machine isn’t entirely straightforward." ... and after reading this post, if you take the link to his ScottLogic blog, you'll get a full break-out of how it's done. Silverlight TV 22: Tim Heuer on Extending the SMF It's Thursday, and that means Silverlight TV! ... this week, John Papa has on Tim Heuer who has always been out there pushing media... and he's talking about SMF or Silverlight Media Framework for the uninitiated, and also extending it. Silverlight Tip of the Day #7 – Localized Resources Mike Snow has Tip Number 7 up and it's about localization... good end-to-end discussion and demonstration. Just thought I should use that to prove to my daughter that the tatoo she had put on the back of her neck actually reads "Eat More Broccoli" :) Silverlight Tip of the Day #8 – Detecting Alt, Shift, Control, Window & Apple Keys Combinations I just realized Mike Snow's site logo reads "Silverlight Tips of the Day" (bolding mine) ... that answers why I'm seeing more than one -- sorry Mike, couldn't pass it up :) ... Mike's second tip today and number 8 in the series is on detecting all the mouse button and ctl/alt/shift combinations in Silverlight. nRoute: More Wholesomeness, with SL 4 and .NET 4.0 Rishi has a post up announcing a new nRoute release for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4.0 He's tweaked the code to take advantages of enhancements in the new platforms, so check it out. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools April 2010 Refresh Booya... Tim Heuer announced the release of the next drop in the WP7 tools ... dang wish I was at home today :) ... be sure to read the post for info such as the notes about Authenticode Assemblies and the release notes. Updates to Silverlight Multi-binding support Stefan Olson points up a SL4 change to Multi-binding support that he had previously blogged about. He shows the previous non-working example, and what you have to do to make it work now. Using XAML to create a custom wallpaper image for your mobile device David Anson has a solution for those pesky lost devices, and let me go on the record right now saying if anyone finds a WP7 phone laying around, just call me, it's mine :) [think that'd work??] ... ok, David's solution is a WPF app "MobileDeviceHomeScreenMaker" that you get the info set and it produces a png you then put on your device. But seriously about that lost phone... 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 for Windows Embedded tutorial (step 4)

    - by Valter Minute
    I’m back with my Silverlight for Windows Embedded tutorial. Sorry for the long delay between step 3 and step 4, the MVP summit and some work related issue prevented me from working on the tutorial during the last weeks. In our first,  second and third tutorial steps we implemented some very simple applications, just to understand the basic structure of a Silverlight for Windows Embedded application, learn how to handle events and how to operate on images. In this third step our sample application will be slightly more complicated, to introduce two new topics: list boxes and custom control. We will also learn how to create controls at runtime. I choose to explain those topics together and provide a sample a bit more complicated than usual just to start to give the feeling of how a “real” Silverlight for Windows Embedded application is organized. As usual we can start using Expression Blend to define our main page. In this case we will have a listbox and a textblock. Here’s the XAML code: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="ListDemo.Page" Width="640" Height="480" x:Name="ListPage" xmlns:ListDemo="clr-namespace:ListDemo">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <ListBox Margin="19,57,19,66" x:Name="FileList" SelectionChanged="Filelist_SelectionChanged"/> <TextBlock Height="35" Margin="19,8,19,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" TextWrapping="Wrap" x:Name="CurrentDir" Text="TextBlock" FontSize="20"/> </Grid> </UserControl> In our listbox we will load a list of directories, starting from the filesystem root (there are no drives in Windows CE, the filesystem has a single root named “\”). When the user clicks on an item inside the list, the corresponding directory path will be displayed in the TextBlock object and the subdirectories of the selected branch will be shown inside the list. As you can see we declared an event handler for the SelectionChanged event of our listbox. We also used a different font size for the TextBlock, to make it more readable. XAML and Expression Blend allow you to customize your UI pretty heavily, experiment with the tools and discover how you can completely change the aspect of your application without changing a single line of code! Inside our ListBox we want to insert the directory presenting a nice icon and their name, just like you are used to see them inside Windows 7 file explorer, for example. To get this we will define a user control. This is a custom object that will behave like “regular” Silverlight for Windows Embedded objects inside our application. First of all we have to define the look of our custom control, named DirectoryItem, using XAML: <UserControl xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" x:Class="ListDemo.DirectoryItem" Width="500" Height="80">   <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Canvas Width="31.6667" Height="45.9583" Margin="10,10,10,10" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5"> <Canvas.RenderTransform> <TransformGroup> <ScaleTransform/> <SkewTransform/> <RotateTransform Angle="-31.27"/> <TranslateTransform/> </TransformGroup> </Canvas.RenderTransform> <Rectangle Width="31.6667" Height="45.8414" Canvas.Left="0" Canvas.Top="0.116943" Stretch="Fill"> <Rectangle.Fill> <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0.142631,0.75344" EndPoint="1.01886,0.75344"> <LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <SkewTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" AngleX="19.3128" AngleY="0"/> <RotateTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" Angle="-35.3436"/> </TransformGroup> </LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color="#FF7B6802" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#FFF3D42C" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> </LinearGradientBrush> </Rectangle.Fill> </Rectangle> <Rectangle Width="29.8441" Height="43.1517" Canvas.Left="0.569519" Canvas.Top="1.05249" Stretch="Fill"> <Rectangle.Fill> <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0.142632,0.753441" EndPoint="1.01886,0.753441"> <LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <SkewTransform CenterX="0.142632" CenterY="0.753441" AngleX="19.3127" AngleY="0"/> <RotateTransform CenterX="0.142632" CenterY="0.753441" Angle="-35.3437"/> </TransformGroup> </LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color="#FFCDCDCD" Offset="0.0833333"/> <GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> </LinearGradientBrush> </Rectangle.Fill> </Rectangle> <Rectangle Width="29.8441" Height="43.1517" Canvas.Left="0.455627" Canvas.Top="2.28036" Stretch="Fill"> <Rectangle.Fill> <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0.142631,0.75344" EndPoint="1.01886,0.75344"> <LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <SkewTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" AngleX="19.3128" AngleY="0"/> <RotateTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" Angle="-35.3436"/> </TransformGroup> </LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color="#FFCDCDCD" Offset="0.0833333"/> <GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> </LinearGradientBrush> </Rectangle.Fill> </Rectangle> <Rectangle Width="29.8441" Height="43.1517" Canvas.Left="0.455627" Canvas.Top="1.34485" Stretch="Fill"> <Rectangle.Fill> <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0.142631,0.75344" EndPoint="1.01886,0.75344"> <LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <SkewTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" AngleX="19.3128" AngleY="0"/> <RotateTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" Angle="-35.3436"/> </TransformGroup> </LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color="#FFCDCDCD" Offset="0.0833333"/> <GradientStop Color="#FFFFFFFF" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> </LinearGradientBrush> </Rectangle.Fill> </Rectangle> <Rectangle Width="26.4269" Height="45.8414" Canvas.Left="0.227798" Canvas.Top="0" Stretch="Fill"> <Rectangle.Fill> <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0.142631,0.75344" EndPoint="1.01886,0.75344"> <LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <SkewTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" AngleX="19.3127" AngleY="0"/> <RotateTransform CenterX="0.142631" CenterY="0.75344" Angle="-35.3436"/> </TransformGroup> </LinearGradientBrush.RelativeTransform> <LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color="#FF7B6802" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#FFF3D42C" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> </LinearGradientBrush> </Rectangle.Fill> </Rectangle> <Rectangle Width="1.25301" Height="45.8414" Canvas.Left="1.70862" Canvas.Top="0.116943" Stretch="Fill" Fill="#FFEBFF07"/> </Canvas> <TextBlock Height="80" x:Name="Name" Width="448" TextWrapping="Wrap" VerticalAlignment="Center" FontSize="24" Text="Directory"/> </StackPanel> </UserControl> As you can see, this XAML contains many graphic elements. Those elements are used to design the folder icon. The original drawing has been designed in Expression Design and then exported as XAML. In Silverlight for Windows Embedded you can use vector images. This means that your images will look good even when scaled or rotated. In our DirectoryItem custom control we have a TextBlock named Name, that will be used to display….(suspense)…. the directory name (I’m too lazy to invent fancy names for controls, and using “boring” intuitive names will make code more readable, I hope!). Now that we have some XAML code, we may execute XAML2CPP to generate part of the aplication code for us. We should then add references to our XAML2CPP generated resource file and include in our code and add a reference to the XAML runtime library to our sources file (you can follow the instruction of the first tutorial step to do that), To generate the code used in this tutorial you need XAML2CPP ver 1.0.1.0, that is downloadable here: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2010/03/08/xaml2cpp-1.0.1.0.aspx We can now create our usual simple Win32 application inside Platform Builder, using the same step described in the first chapter of this tutorial (http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2009/10/01/silverlight-for-embedded-tutorial.aspx). We can declare a class for our main page, deriving it from the template that XAML2CPP generated for us: class ListPage : public TListPage<ListPage> { ... } We will see the ListPage class code in a short time, but before we will see the code of our DirectoryItem user control. This object will be used to populate our list, one item for each directory. To declare a user control things are a bit more complicated (but also in this case XAML2CPP will write most of the “boilerplate” code for use. To interact with a user control you should declare an interface. An interface defines the functions of a user control that can be called inside the application code. Our custom control is currently quite simple and we just need some member functions to store and retrieve a full pathname inside our control. The control will display just the last part of the path inside the control. An interface is declared as a C++ class that has only abstract virtual members. It should also have an UUID associated with it. UUID means Universal Unique IDentifier and it’s a 128 bit number that will identify our interface without the need of specifying its fully qualified name. UUIDs are used to identify COM interfaces and, as we discovered in chapter one, Silverlight for Windows Embedded is based on COM or, at least, provides a COM-like Application Programming Interface (API). Here’s the declaration of the DirectoryItem interface: class __declspec(novtable,uuid("{D38C66E5-2725-4111-B422-D75B32AA8702}")) IDirectoryItem : public IXRCustomUserControl { public:   virtual HRESULT SetFullPath(BSTR fullpath) = 0; virtual HRESULT GetFullPath(BSTR* retval) = 0; }; The interface is derived from IXRCustomControl, this will allow us to add our object to a XAML tree. It declares the two functions needed to set and get the full path, but don’t implement them. Implementation will be done inside the control class. The interface only defines the functions of our control class that are accessible from the outside. It’s a sort of “contract” between our control and the applications that will use it. We must support what’s inside the contract and the application code should know nothing else about our own control. To reference our interface we will use the UUID, to make code more readable we can declare a #define in this way: #define IID_IDirectoryItem __uuidof(IDirectoryItem) Silverlight for Windows Embedded objects (like COM objects) use a reference counting mechanism to handle object destruction. Every time you store a pointer to an object you should call its AddRef function and every time you no longer need that pointer you should call Release. The object keeps an internal counter, incremented for each AddRef and decremented on Release. When the counter reaches 0, the object is destroyed. Managing reference counting in our code can be quite complicated and, since we are lazy (I am, at least!), we will use a great feature of Silverlight for Windows Embedded: smart pointers.A smart pointer can be connected to a Silverlight for Windows Embedded object and manages its reference counting. To declare a smart pointer we must use the XRPtr template: typedef XRPtr<IDirectoryItem> IDirectoryItemPtr; Now that we have defined our interface, it’s time to implement our user control class. XAML2CPP has implemented a class for us, and we have only to derive our class from it, defining the main class and interface of our new custom control: class DirectoryItem : public DirectoryItemUserControlRegister<DirectoryItem,IDirectoryItem> { ... } XAML2CPP has generated some code for us to support the user control, we don’t have to mind too much about that code, since it will be generated (or written by hand, if you like) always in the same way, for every user control. But knowing how does this works “under the hood” is still useful to understand the architecture of Silverlight for Windows Embedded. Our base class declaration is a bit more complex than the one we used for a simple page in the previous chapters: template <class A,class B> class DirectoryItemUserControlRegister : public XRCustomUserControlImpl<A,B>,public TDirectoryItem<A,XAML2CPPUserControl> { ... } This class derives from the XAML2CPP generated template class, like the ListPage class, but it uses XAML2CPPUserControl for the implementation of some features. This class shares the same ancestor of XAML2CPPPage (base class for “regular” XAML pages), XAML2CPPBase, implements binding of member variables and event handlers but, instead of loading and creating its own XAML tree, it attaches to an existing one. The XAML tree (and UI) of our custom control is created and loaded by the XRCustomUserControlImpl class. This class is part of the Silverlight for Windows Embedded framework and implements most of the functions needed to build-up a custom control in Silverlight (the guys that developed Silverlight for Windows Embedded seem to care about lazy programmers!). We have just to initialize it, providing our class (DirectoryItem) and interface (IDirectoryItem). Our user control class has also a static member: protected:   static HINSTANCE hInstance; This is used to store the HINSTANCE of the modules that contain our user control class. I don’t like this implementation, but I can’t find a better one, so if somebody has good ideas about how to handle the HINSTANCE object, I’ll be happy to hear suggestions! It also implements two static members required by XRCustomUserControlImpl. The first one is used to load the XAML UI of our custom control: static HRESULT GetXamlSource(XRXamlSource* pXamlSource) { pXamlSource->SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_DirectoryItem); return S_OK; }   It initializes a XRXamlSource object, connecting it to the XAML resource that XAML2CPP has included in our resource script. The other method is used to register our custom control, allowing Silverlight for Windows Embedded to create it when it load some XAML or when an application creates a new control at runtime (more about this later): static HRESULT Register() { return XRCustomUserControlImpl<A,B>::Register(__uuidof(B), L"DirectoryItem", L"clr-namespace:DirectoryItemNamespace"); } To register our control we should provide its interface UUID, the name of the corresponding element in the XAML tree and its current namespace (namespaces compatible with Silverlight must use the “clr-namespace” prefix. We may also register additional properties for our objects, allowing them to be loaded and saved inside XAML. In this case we have no permanent properties and the Register method will just register our control. An additional static method is implemented to allow easy registration of our custom control inside our application WinMain function: static HRESULT RegisterUserControl(HINSTANCE hInstance) { DirectoryItemUserControlRegister::hInstance=hInstance; return DirectoryItemUserControlRegister<A,B>::Register(); } Now our control is registered and we will be able to create it using the Silverlight for Windows Embedded runtime functions. But we need to bind our members and event handlers to have them available like we are used to do for other XAML2CPP generated objects. To bind events and members we need to implement the On_Loaded function: virtual HRESULT OnLoaded(__in IXRDependencyObject* pRoot) { HRESULT retcode; IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode; return ((A*)this)->Init(pRoot,hInstance,app); } This function will call the XAML2CPPUserControl::Init member that will connect the “root” member with the XAML sub tree that has been created for our control and then calls BindObjects and BindEvents to bind members and events to our code. Now we can go back to our application code (the code that you’ll have to actually write) to see the contents of our DirectoryItem class: class DirectoryItem : public DirectoryItemUserControlRegister<DirectoryItem,IDirectoryItem> { protected:   WCHAR fullpath[_MAX_PATH+1];   public:   DirectoryItem() { *fullpath=0; }   virtual HRESULT SetFullPath(BSTR fullpath) { wcscpy_s(this->fullpath,fullpath);   WCHAR* p=fullpath;   for(WCHAR*q=wcsstr(p,L"\\");q;p=q+1,q=wcsstr(p,L"\\")) ;   Name->SetText(p); return S_OK; }   virtual HRESULT GetFullPath(BSTR* retval) { *retval=SysAllocString(fullpath); return S_OK; } }; It’s pretty easy and contains a fullpath member (used to store that path of the directory connected with the user control) and the implementation of the two interface members that can be used to set and retrieve the path. The SetFullPath member parses the full path and displays just the last branch directory name inside the “Name” TextBlock object. As you can see, implementing a user control in Silverlight for Windows Embedded is not too complex and using XAML also for the UI of the control allows us to re-use the same mechanisms that we learnt and used in the previous steps of our tutorial. Now let’s see how the main page is managed by the ListPage class. class ListPage : public TListPage<ListPage> { protected:   // current path TCHAR curpath[_MAX_PATH+1]; It has a member named “curpath” that is used to store the current directory. It’s initialized inside the constructor: ListPage() { *curpath=0; } And it’s value is displayed inside the “CurrentDir” TextBlock inside the initialization function: virtual HRESULT Init(HINSTANCE hInstance,IXRApplication* app) { HRESULT retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TListPage<ListPage>::Init(hInstance,app))) return retcode;   CurrentDir->SetText(L"\\"); return S_OK; } The FillFileList function is used to enumerate subdirectories of the current dir and add entries for each one inside the list box that fills most of the client area of our main page: HRESULT FillFileList() { HRESULT retcode; IXRItemCollectionPtr items; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode; // retrieves the items contained in the listbox if (FAILED(retcode=FileList->GetItems(&items))) return retcode;   // clears the list if (FAILED(retcode=items->Clear())) return retcode;   // enumerates files and directory in the current path WCHAR filemask[_MAX_PATH+1];   wcscpy_s(filemask,curpath); wcscat_s(filemask,L"\\*.*");   WIN32_FIND_DATA finddata; HANDLE findhandle;   findhandle=FindFirstFile(filemask,&finddata);   // the directory is empty? if (findhandle==INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) return S_OK;   do { if (finddata.dwFileAttributes&=FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY) { IXRListBoxItemPtr listboxitem;   // add a new item to the listbox if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRListBoxItem,&listboxitem))) { FindClose(findhandle); return retcode; }   if (FAILED(retcode=items->Add(listboxitem,NULL))) { FindClose(findhandle); return retcode; }   IDirectoryItemPtr directoryitem;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IDirectoryItem,&directoryitem))) { FindClose(findhandle); return retcode; }   WCHAR fullpath[_MAX_PATH+1];   wcscpy_s(fullpath,curpath); wcscat_s(fullpath,L"\\"); wcscat_s(fullpath,finddata.cFileName);   if (FAILED(retcode=directoryitem->SetFullPath(fullpath))) { FindClose(findhandle); return retcode; }   XAML2CPPXRValue value((IXRDependencyObject*)directoryitem);   if (FAILED(retcode=listboxitem->SetContent(&value))) { FindClose(findhandle); return retcode; } } } while (FindNextFile(findhandle,&finddata));   FindClose(findhandle); return S_OK; } This functions retrieve a pointer to the collection of the items contained in the directory listbox. The IXRItemCollection interface is used by listboxes and comboboxes and allow you to clear the list (using Clear(), as our function does at the beginning) and change its contents by adding and removing elements. This function uses the FindFirstFile/FindNextFile functions to enumerate all the objects inside our current directory and for each subdirectory creates a IXRListBoxItem object. You can insert any kind of control inside a list box, you don’t need a IXRListBoxItem, but using it will allow you to handle the selected state of an item, highlighting it inside the list. The function creates a list box item using the CreateObject function of XRApplication. The same function is then used to create an instance of our custom control. The function returns a pointer to the control IDirectoryItem interface and we can use it to store the directory full path inside the object and add it as content of the IXRListBox item object, adding it to the listbox contents. The listbox generates an event (SelectionChanged) each time the user clicks on one of the items contained in the listbox. We implement an event handler for that event and use it to change our current directory and repopulate the listbox. The current directory full path will be displayed in the TextBlock: HRESULT Filelist_SelectionChanged(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRSelectionChangedEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode;   IXRListBoxItemPtr listboxitem;   if (!args->pAddedItem) return S_OK;   if (FAILED(retcode=args->pAddedItem->QueryInterface(IID_IXRListBoxItem,(void**)&listboxitem))) return retcode;   XRValue content; if (FAILED(retcode=listboxitem->GetContent(&content))) return retcode;   if (content.vType!=VTYPE_OBJECT) return E_FAIL;   IDirectoryItemPtr directoryitem;   if (FAILED(retcode=content.pObjectVal->QueryInterface(IID_IDirectoryItem,(void**)&directoryitem))) return retcode;   content.pObjectVal->Release(); content.pObjectVal=NULL;   BSTR fullpath=NULL;   if (FAILED(retcode=directoryitem->GetFullPath(&fullpath))) return retcode;   CurrentDir->SetText(fullpath);   wcscpy_s(curpath,fullpath); FillFileList(); SysFreeString(fullpath);     return S_OK; } }; The function uses the pAddedItem member of the XRSelectionChangedEventArgs object to retrieve the currently selected item, converts it to a IXRListBoxItem interface using QueryInterface, and then retrives its contents (IDirectoryItem object). Using the GetFullPath method we can get the full path of our selected directory and assing it to the curdir member. A call to FillFileList will update the listbox contents, displaying the list of subdirectories of the selected folder. To build our sample we just need to add code to our WinMain function: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1;   if (FAILED(retcode=DirectoryItem::RegisterUserControl(hInstance))) return retcode;   ListPage page;   if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;   page.FillFileList();   UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return 0; } This code is very similar to the one of the WinMains of our previous samples. The main differences are that we register our custom control (you should do that as soon as you have initialized the XAML runtime) and call FillFileList after the initialization of our ListPage object to load the contents of the root folder of our device inside the listbox. As usual you can download the full sample source code from here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/ListBoxTest.zip

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  • JavaScript Browser Hacks

    Recently during one of my client side scripting classes, I was trying to show my students some basic examples of JavaScript as an introduction to the language.  My first basic example was to show an alert box using JavaScript via the address bar. The student’s reaction to my browser hack example really caught me off guard in a good way. After programming with a language for close to 10 years you start to lose the "Awe Cool!" effect that new learners of a language experience when writing code. New learns of JavaScript are the reason why I created this post. Please enjoy. Note: Place JavaScript in to address bar and then press the enter key. Example 1: JavaScript Alert box displaying My name: John Doe Javascript:alert('My name: \n John Doe') ; Example 2: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user. javascript:alert('My name: \n ' + prompt('Enter Name','Name')) ; Example 3: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user, and then displays the length of the name. javascript:var name= prompt('Enter Name','Name'); alert('My name: \n ' + name); alert(name.length); If you notice, the address bar will execute JavaScript on the current page loaded in the browser using the Document Object Model (DOM). Additionally, the address bar will allow multiple lines to be executed sequentially even though all of the code is contained within one line due to the fact that the JavaScript interpreter uses the “;” to indicate where a line of ends and a new one begins. After doing a little more research on the topic of JavaScript Browser Hacks I found a few other cool JavaScript hacks which I will list below. Example 4: Make any webpage editableSource: http://www.openjason.com/2008/09/02/browser-hack-make-any-web-page-editable/ javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0; Example 5: CHINESE DRAGON DANCING Source: http://nzeyi.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/dwrajaxjavascript-hacks-the-secrets-of-javascript-in-the-adress-bar/ javascript:R=0;x1=0.1;y1=0.05;x2=0.25;y2=0.24;x3=1.6; y3=0.24;x4=300;y4=200;x5=300;y5=200;DI=document.links; DIL=DI.length;A=function(){for(i=0;i-DIL;i++){DI[i].style. position='absolute';DI[i].style.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+ x5;DI[i].style.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++;}; setInterval('A()',5);void(0); Example 6: Reveal content stored in password protected fields javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = “”; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j Example 7: Force user to close browser windowSource: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=767053 javascript:while(1){alert('Restart your brower to close this box!')} Learn more about JavaScript Browser Hacks.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 26, 2010 -- #821

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Christian Schormann, John Papa, Phani Raj, David Anson(-2-, -3-), Brad Abrams(-2-), and Jeff Wilcox(-2-, -3-). Shoutouts: Jeff Wilcox posted his material from mix and some preview TestFramework bits: Unit Testing Silverlight & Windows Phone Applications – talk now online At MIX10, Jeff Wilcox demo'd an app called "Peppermint"... here's the bleeding edge demo: “Peppermint” MIX demo sources Erik Mork and Co. have put out their weekly This Week In Silverlight 3.25.2010 Brad Abrams has all his materials posted for his MIX10 session Mix2010: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight... including play-by-play of the demo and all source. Do you use Rooler? Well you should! Watch a video Pete Brown did with Pete Blois on Expression Blend, Windows Phone, Rooler Interested in Silverlight and XNA for WP7? Me too! Michael Klucher has a post outlining the two: Silverlight and XNA Framework Game Development and Compatibility From SilverlightCream.com: Modularity in Silverlight Applications - An Issue With ModuleInitializeException Max Paulousky has a truly ugly error trace listed by way of not having a reference listed, and the obvious simple solution. Next time he'll talk about the difficult situations. Using SketchFlow to Prototype for Windows Phone Christian Schormann has a tutorial up on using Expression Blend to develop for WP7 ... who better than Christian for that task?? Silverlight TV 18: WCF RIA Services Validation John Papa held forth with Nikhil Kothari on WCF RIA Services and validation just prior to MIX10, and was posted yesterday. Building SL3 applications using OData client Library with Vs 2010 RC Phani Raj walks through building an OData consumer in SL3, the first problem you're going to hit, and the easy solution to it. Tip: When creating a DependencyProperty, follow the handy convention of "wrapper+register+static+virtual" David Anson has a couple more of his 'Tips' up... this first is about Dependency Properties again... having a good foundation for all your Dependency Properties is a great way to avoid problems. Tip: Do not assign DependencyProperty values in a constructor; it prevents users from overriding them In the next post, David Anson talks about not assigning Dependency Property values in a constructor and gives one of the two ways to get around doing so. Tip: Set DependencyProperty default values in a class's default style if it's more convenient In his latest post, David Anson gives the second way to avoid setting a Dependency Property value in the constructor. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Brad Abrams Abrams adds SEO to the tutorial series he's doing. He begins with his PDC09 session material on the subject and then takes off on a great detailed tutorial all with source. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application Brad Abrams then discusses localization and Silverlight in another detailed tutorial with all code included. Silverlight Toolkit and the Windows Phone: WrapPanel, and a few others Jeff Wilcox has a few WP7 posts I'm going to push today. This first is from earlier this week and is about using the Toolkit in WP7 and better than that, he includes the bits you need if all you want is the WrapPanel Data binding user settings in Windows Phone applications In the next one from yesterday, Jeff Wilcox demonstrates saving some user info in Isolated Storage to improve the user experience, and shares all the necessary plumbing files, and other external links as well. Displaying 2D QR barcodes in Windows Phone applications In a post from today, Jeff Wilcox ported his Silverlight 2D QR Barcode app from last year into WP7 ... just very cool... get the source and display your Microsoft Tag. 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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  • IIS7 web farm - local or shared content?

    - by rbeier
    We're setting up an IIS7 web farm with two servers. Should each server have its own local copy of the content, or should they pull content directly from a UNC share? What are the pros and cons of each approach? We currently have a single live server WEB1, with content stored locally on a separate partition. A job periodically syncs WEB1 to a standby server WEB2, using robocopy for content and msdeploy for config. If WEB1 goes down, Nagios notifies us, and we manually run a script to move the IP addresses to WEB2's network interface. Both servers are actually VMs running on separate VMWare ESX 4 hosts. The servers are domain-joined. We have around 50-60 live sites on WEB1 - mostly ASP.NET, with a few that are just static HTML. Most are low-traffic "microsites". A few have moderate traffic, but none are massive. We'd like to change this so both WEB1 and WEB2 are actively serving content. This is mainly for reliability - if WEB1 goes down, we don't want to have to manually intervene to fail things over. Spreading the load is also nice, but the load is not high enough right now for us to need this. We're planning to configure our firewall to balance traffic across the two servers. It will detect when a server goes down and will send all the traffic to the remaining live server. We're planning to use sticky sessions for now... eventually we may move to SQL Server session state and stateless load balancing. But we need a way for the servers to share content. We were originally planning to move all the content to a UNC share. Our storage provider says they can set up a highly available SMB share for us. So if we go the UNC route, the storage shouldn't be a single point of failure. But we're wondering about the downsides to this approach: We'll need to change the physical paths for each site and virtual directory. There are also some projects that have absolute paths in their web.config files - we'll have to update those as well. We'll need to create a domain user for the web servers to access the share, and grant that user appropriate permissions. I haven't looked into this yet - I'm not sure if the application pool identity needs to be changed to this user, or if there's another way to tell IIS to use this account when connecting to the share. Sites will no longer be able to access their content if there's ever an Active Directory problem. In general, it just seems a lot more complicated, with more moving parts that could break. Our storage provider would create a volume for us on their redundant SAN. If I understand correctly, this SAN volume would be mounted on a VM running in their redundant VMWare environment; this VM would then expose the SMB share to our web servers. On the other hand, a benefit of the shared content approach is that we'd only need to deploy code to one place, and there would never be a temporary inconsistency between multiple copies of the content. This thread is pretty interesting, though some of these people are working at a much larger scale. I've just been discussing content so far, but we also need to think about configuration. I don't know if we can just use DFS replication for the applicationHost.config and other files, or if it's best to use the shared configuration feature with the config on a UNC share. What do you think? Thanks for your help, Richard

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  • Silverlight Firestarter thoughts, and thanks to one and all!

    - by Dave Campbell
    A few metrics that of course got out of hand, but some may find interesting:   1/2 My share of the MVP of the Year award in February of 2009 with Laurent Bugnion 2 Number of degrees I hold: B.S., M.S. Electrical Engineering 3 Number of years in the U.S. Army 3.5 Number of years SilverlighCream has been posted 4 Number of times awarded MVP 6 Number of professional positions I've worked: Antenna Rigger, Boilermaker, Musician, Electronic Technician, Hardware Engineer, Software Engineer 16 Number of companies I've worked for during my career as an Engineer 19 Age at which I turned my first line of code 28 Age at which I hit the workforce as an Engineer 33 Number of years working as an Engineer 43 Number of years writing code 62 Number of years since instantiation 116 Number of tags to search SilverlightCream with 645 Number of blogs I view to find articles (at this moment) 664 Number of articles tagged wp7dev at SilverlightCream right now 700 Number of Twitter followers for WynApse 981 Number of individual bloggers in the SilverlightCream database 1002 Number of SilverlightCream blogposts 1100 Number of people live in Redmond for the Firestarter (I think) 1428 Number of total blogposts at GeeksWithBlogs (not counting this one) 4200 Number of Feedburner subscribers (approximately) 6500 Number of Twitter followers for SilverlightNews (approximately) 7087 Number of posts tagged and aggregated at SilverlightCream right now 13000 Number of people registered to watch the Firestarter online (I think) The overwhelming feeling I have returning from the Silverlight Firestarter: Priceless There is absolutely no way that I could personally thank everyone that over the last few years has held their hand out and offered me a step up to get to the point that Scott Guthrie called me out in his keynote. So I'm just going to hit the highlights here... Scott Guthrie Thanks for not only being the level you are at Microsoft, but for being so approachable, easy to talk to, willing to help everyone, and above all knowledgable. My first level manager at my last position asked if Visual Studio was a graphics program... and you step up to a laptop at a conference and type "File->New Program" ... 'nuff said... oh yeah, thanks for the shoutout! John Papa Thanks for being a good friend, ramroding the Firestarter, being a great guy to be around, and for the poster... holy crap is that cool. Tim Heuer Thanks for all you did as a great DE in Phoenix, and for helping out so many of us, of course being a great guy, and for the poster as well... I think you and John shared that task. In no order at all my buddy Michael Washington, Laurent Bugnion (the other half of the first Silverlight MVP of the Year) Tim Sneath, Mike Harsh, Chad Campbell and Bryant Likes (from back in the day), Adam Kinney, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Paries, Pete Brown, András Velvárt, David Kelly, Michael Palermo, Scott Cate, Erik Mork, and on and on... don't feel bad if your name didn't appear, I have simply too many supporters to name. Silverlight Firestarter Indeed All the people mentioned here, and all the MVPs knew Silverlight was NOT dead, but because of a very unfortunate circumstance, the popular media opinion became that. Consequently the Firestarter exploded from a laid-back event to a global conference. People worked their ass off getting bits ready and presentations using those bits. All to stem the flow of misinformation. All involved please accept my personal thanks for an absolutely awesome job. I had the priviledge of watching the 'prep' on Wednesday afternoon, and was blown away the first time I saw the 3D demo... and have been blown away every time I've seen it since. Not to mention all the other goodness in Silverlight 5. Yes I hit 1000 on my blog, but more importantly, all of you are blogging and using Silverlight, and Microsoft hit one completely out of the park... no... they knocked it out of the neighborhood with the Firestarter. It was amazing to be there for it, and it will be awesome to use the new bits as we get them. Keep reading, there's tons more to come with Silverlight and SilverlightCream following along behind. As usual, this old hacker is humbled to be allowed to play with all the cool kids... Thanks one and all for everything, and Stay in the 'Light

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  • Expression Studio 4 - without SketchFlow&hellip;

    - by mbcrump
    is kinda like an explosion with no “Ka-Boom”… I was excited to hear the news yesterday at Microsoft Teched that Expression Studio 4 had officially launched. MSDN subscribers could log in and download the full release. So, I logged into my MSDN account and started downloading Expression Studio 4 Premium thinking that I was only minutes away from trying out SketchFlow 4. To my dismay, I launched Blend 4 and noticed it did not say SketchFlow on the splash screen. So, I went to New Project and the template was not available. After some digging around on the net, I learned my premium MSDN subscription did not include SketchFlow and I would need to purchase the Ultimate Edition. Below is a excerpt directly from Microsoft: Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Ultimate? A: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend® 4 + SketchFlow, Expression Encoder 4 Pro and Expression Design 4. Expression Blend 4 includes SketchFlow in Expression Studio 4 Ultimate product only. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Premium? A: Expression Studio 4 Premium is comprised of 4 products, Expression Web 4, Microsoft Expression Blend 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. Expression Studio 4 Premium is not available for retail purchase. Q: What products are included in the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional? A: Expression Studio 4 Web Professional is comprised of 3 products, Expression Web 4, Expression Encoder 4 and Expression Design 4. As you can see, we got screwed on this deal and plenty of people are complaining: Kiran Says: 6.07.2010 at 5:07 PM No SketchFlow for Expression Studio 4 Premium? What a bumper for Microsoft Partners!! Martin Says: 6.07.2010 at 6:18 PM Why does Expression Professional Subscription not include upgrades and new releases of Expression Studio. Good question hey. I bought my subscription 5 days ago thinking I would get what i purchased but no Expression upgrades or new releases for me, what a waste of money. I think I am not the only long term user of this software that feels disgruntled. Sorry john just had to tell someone. shaggygi Says: 6.07.2010 at 7:31 PM SketchFlow NOT included in Studio 4? WTF! I repeat.... WT...Freaking.... F! This is totally unacceptable. My development team purchased VS 2010 Premium w/ MSDN with the impression by Adam Kinney, Scott Guthrie, etc. that this would be included in the Premium package or some sort of free upgrade. I understand this is a Marketing thing, but come on! I believe, at very least, this should have been explained in detail before this release. John Papa... as a rep to give feedback to the team... Please please and please.... tell powers-at-be to fix this problem. Sorry for the rant. Besides this issue, I believe it is a very good product:) Thanks Vaclav Elias Says: 6.08.2010 at 4:30 AM Well, I am also not happy that SketchFlow is only for the chosen ones :-) It is very nice product. Actually, kind of foundation for web development so they could really support any MSDN subscribers.. :-( I am hoping that Microsoft will make this right for all of us with MSDN premier subscriptions. In the meantime,  you can check out the 5 day training series available here.

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 - 2 -- #1038

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace in general: R.I.P. GooNews From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits Max Paulousky expanded on the Looping selector for some customization allowing him to display width/height metric measurement selectors... great job, Max! WP7 – How to Create a Simple Checked Listbox In Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has the code for a nicely-working checked Listbox for WP7 on his blog... the post is the code... WP7Contrib: Network Connectivity Push Model Ollie Riches had a post last week that I'm just catching up to... about the 'push model' for network connectivity they produced in WP7 Contrib. Using the Camera in Windows Phone 7 Jesse Liberty has a bunch of posts up... I'm just going to bite the bullet and catch up! ... this 'From Scratch post 24 is all about the camera in your WP7 dev travails... and he makes it look so darned easy :) Linq and Fluent Programming Jesse Liberty's next post is 'From Scratch 25 and is all about Linq and Fluent Programming which started with a discussion at Codemash with Bill Wagner... wanna get a handle on fluent programming? ... check this out. Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming Another item you might want to get your head around is Reactive Programming, or Rx... Jesse Liberty has a great post up discussing this, as his 'From Scratch post 26... good external links, and lots of commentary as well. Rx–Reactive Programming for Windows Phone Jesse Liberty's 'From Scratch 27 follows the previous on about Rx by taking the Rx show to the WP7 development arena. Want a solid Rx example... here ya go! Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects Finally catching up with Jesse Liberty (for now), I find this 'From Scratch number 28 which is again on Rx and WP7 dev, expanding on the example from the previous post by harnessing the power of Rx Localizing Silverlight applications Medusa M has a nice post up at dotnetslackers on localization in Silverlight. If you haven't had to do localization before, it can get to be a pain... understanding an article like this will get you part of the way to being pain-free. Silverlight TV 59: What Goes Into Baking Silverlight? Very cool presentation for those of you interested in the bits ... John Papa's Silverlight TV number 59 is up and he's chatting with Andy Rivas about the process followed getting the bits to us. How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post is on sending HTML Email via SMTP from Lightswitch, and then follows that up with sending Email via Outlook automation. ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend After some good user feedback, Joost van Schaik decided to make some modifications to his WP7 app, and got involved in a Page Title collapse animation driven from the ViewModel. Check out the nice write-up, video, external links, and source... all good! 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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  • How to change cpufreq settings in Kubuntu

    - by Mr Woody
    I have been using Kubuntu, and I would like to change the cpufreq settings. My understanding is that there is no applet for that, and I would have to do it with a script. So I run a command like this: sudo cpufreq-set -g userspace -c 0 -d 800Mhz -u 1200Mhz and when I type cpufreq-info, I get cpufrequtils 007: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009 Report errors and bugs to [email protected], please. analyzing CPU 0: driver: acpi-cpufreq CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0 maximum transition latency: 10.0 us. hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.50 GHz available frequency steps: 2.50 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 800 MHz available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 1.20 GHz. The governor "userspace" may decide which speed to use within this range. current CPU frequency is 1.20 GHz. cpufreq stats: 2.50 GHz:70.06%, 2.50 GHz:0.97%, 2.00 GHz:4.85%, 1.60 GHz:0.35%, 1.20 GHz:2.89%, 800 MHz:20.88% (193873) analyzing CPU 1: driver: acpi-cpufreq CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 1 maximum transition latency: 10.0 us. hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.50 GHz available frequency steps: 2.50 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 800 MHz available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance current policy: frequency should be within 2.00 GHz and 2.00 GHz. The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use within this range. current CPU frequency is 2.00 GHz. cpufreq stats: 2.50 GHz:83.43%, 2.50 GHz:1.03%, 2.00 GHz:4.28%, 1.60 GHz:0.01%, 1.20 GHz:1.74%, 800 MHz:9.50% (3208) which shows that everything worked well (on cpu 0). The problem is that if I run cpufreq-info again after few minutes I get cpufrequtils 007: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009 Report errors and bugs to [email protected], please. analyzing CPU 0: driver: acpi-cpufreq CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0 maximum transition latency: 10.0 us. hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.50 GHz available frequency steps: 2.50 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 800 MHz available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 800 MHz. The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use within this range. current CPU frequency is 800 MHz. cpufreq stats: 2.50 GHz:69.73%, 2.50 GHz:0.97%, 2.00 GHz:4.83%, 1.60 GHz:0.35%, 1.20 GHz:2.92%, 800 MHz:21.20% (193880) analyzing CPU 1: driver: acpi-cpufreq CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1 CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 1 maximum transition latency: 10.0 us. hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.50 GHz available frequency steps: 2.50 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.20 GHz, 800 MHz available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 800 MHz. The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use within this range. current CPU frequency is 800 MHz. cpufreq stats: 2.50 GHz:82.94%, 2.50 GHz:1.03%, 2.00 GHz:4.33%, 1.60 GHz:0.01%, 1.20 GHz:1.73%, 800 MHz:9.96% (3215) so it looks like some other process changed the settings. Does anyone know how to fix this? I also tried many different settings, but I get similar behavior.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 23, 2010 -- #818

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Jeremy Likness, Mark Tucker, Christian Schormann, Page Brooks, Brad Abrams(-2-), Jeff Wilcox, Unnir, Bea Stollnitz, John Papa and Adam Kinney, and Bill Reiss(-2-). Shoutouts: Ashish Shetty posted his material from his MIX10 presentation: Stepping outside the browser with Silverlight 4 Not Silverlight, but dang useful, Karl Shifflett posted a Visual Studio 2010 XAML Editor IntelliSense Presenter Extension Yavor Georgiev posted his MIX10 material: Two samples from today's MIX talk From SilverlightCream.com: GroupBox Sketching Control for WPF applications Using Blend Max Paulousky creates a GroupBox control for SketchFlow for WPF. He includes a link to an example of doing the same for Silverlight. Sequential Asynchronous Workflows in Silverlight using Coroutines Jeremy Likness' latest post begann with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 resulting in the use of Wintellect's PowerThreading library (downloadable), and Coroutines. Windows Phone 7 UI Templates Mark Tucker has been putting a lot of thought into WP7 apps and produced 5 templates for building apps, downloadable in PowerPoint format. He's also looking to discuss this concept. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part I Christian Schormann has a great tutorial up about Expression Blend 4 and path layout ... this is lots of great info, and it's only part 1! Custom Splash Screen for Windows Phone Page Brooks makes very quick work of showing how to add a splash screen to your WP7 app... very nice, Page! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing Data from Entity Framework Brad Abrams next post in the series is is on pulling your data from wherever it lives, and uses a DomainService to shape it for your Silverlight app. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client Brad Abrams then discusses consuming that data in a Silverlight app. Not much code involvement at all.. great ROI :) Building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 applications on a .NET 3.5 build machine Jeff Wilcox talks about building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4B both on a .NET 3.5 machine. He then adds in the Toolkit, and even WCF RIA Services. Expression Blend 4 - XAML generation tweaks Unnir demonstrates a few changes to Expression Blend 4 that produce more compact XAML. He's also asking for other examples you'd like to see tightened up. How can I sort a hierarchy? Bea Stollnitz posts plausible solutions to sorting data items at each level of a hierarchical UI, with descriptions of why they don't work, followed by the real deal... Silverlight and WPF. Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4) John Papa and Adam Kinney have posted a huge body of work to get us up-to-speed on Silverlight 4 -- a WhitePaper, hands-on labs, and an 8-unit course with 25 accompanying videos... geez... Silverlight game development on Windows Phone 7 Bill Reiss has a post up discussing game development on WP7 in general and then discusses his SilverSprite library, with a link to it. XNA or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 game development? Bill Reiss next discusses the advantage of using Silverlight or XNA for your WP7 game development, and who better to discuss both? 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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  • Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

    - by Marc Schluper
    The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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  • How do you handle authentication across domains?

    - by William Ratcliff
    I'm trying to save users of our services from having to have multiple accounts/passwords. I'm in a large organization and there's one group that handles part of user authentication for users who are from outside the facility (primarily for administrative functions). They store a secure cookie to establish a session and communicate only via HTTPS via the browser. Sessions expire either through: 1) explicit logout of the user 2) Inactivity 3) Browser closes My team is trying to write a web application to help users analyze data that they've taken (or are currently taking) while at our facility. We need to determine if a user is 1) authenticated 2) Some identifier for that user so we can store state for them (what analysis they are working on, etc.) So, the problem is how do you authenticate across domains (the authentication server for the other application lives in a border region between public and private--we will live in the public region). We have come up with some scenarios and I'd like advice about what is best practice, or if there is one we haven't considered. Let's start with the case where the user is authenticated with the authentication server. 1) The authentication server leaves a public cookie in the browser with their primary key for a user. If this is deemed sensitive, they encrypt it on their server and we have the key to decrypt it on our server. When the user visits our site, we check for this public cookie. We extract the user_id and use a public api for the authentication server to request if the user is logged in. If they are, they send us a response with: response={ userid :we can then map this to our own user ids. If necessary, we can request additional information such as email-address/display name once (to notify them if long running jobs are done, or to share results with other people, like with google_docs). account_is_active:Make sure that the account is still valid session_is_active: Is their session still active? If we query this for a valid user, this will have a side effect that we will reset the last_time_session_activated value and thus prolong their session with the authentication server last_time_session_activated: let us know how much time they have left ip_address_session_started_from:make sure the person at our site is coming from the same ip as they started the session at } Given this response, we either accept them as authenticated and move on with our app, or redirect them to the login page for the authentication server (question: if we give an encrypted portion of the response (signed by us) with the page to redirect them to, do we open any gaping security holes in the authentication server)? The flaw that we've found with this is that if the user visits evilsite.com and they look at the session cookie and send a query to the public api of the authentication server, they can keep the session alive and if our original user leaves the machine without logging out, then the next user will be able to access their session (this was possible before, but having the session alive eternally makes this worse). 2) The authentication server redirects all requests made to our domain to us and we send responses back through them to the user. Essentially, they act as a proxy. The advantage of this is that we can handshake with the authentication server, so it's safe to be trusted with the email address/name of the user and they don't have to reenter it So, if the user tries to go to: authentication_site/mysite_page1 they are redirected to mysite. Which would you choose, or is there a better way? The goal is to minimize the "Yet Another Password/Yet another username" problem... Thanks!!!!

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  • Guest (and occasional co-host) on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast

    - by Jon Galloway
    I was a recent guest on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast talking about the latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Azure releases. Download / Listen: Yet Another Podcast #75–Jon Galloway on ASP.NET/ MVC/ Azure Co-hosted shows: Jesse's been inviting me to co-host shows and I told him I'd show up when I was available. It's a nice change to be a drive-by co-host on a show (compared with the work that goes into organizing / editing / typing show notes for Herding Code shows). My main focus is on Herding Code, but it's nice to pop in and talk to Jesse's excellent guests when it works out. Some shows I've co-hosted over the past year: Yet Another Podcast #76–Glenn Block on Node.js & Technology in China Yet Another Podcast  #73 - Adam Kinney on developing for Windows 8 with HTML5 Yet Another Podcast #64 - John Papa & Javascript Yet Another Podcast #60 - Steve Sanderson and John Papa on Knockout.js Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond And some more on the way that haven't been released yet. Some of these I'm pretty quiet, on others I get wacky and hassle the guests because, hey, not my podcast so not my problem. Show notes from the ASP.NET / MVC / Azure show: What was just released Visual Studio 2012 Web Developer features ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strongly Typed data controls Data access via command methods Similar Binding syntax to ASP.NET MVC Some context: Damian Edwards and WebFormsMVP Two questions from Jesse: Q: Are you making this harder or more complicated for Web Forms developers? Short answer: Nothing's removed, it's just a new option History of SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource Q: If I'm using some MVC patterns, why not just move to MVC? Short answer: This works really well in hybrid applications, doesn't require a rewrite Allows sharing models, validation, other code between Web Forms and MVC ASP.NET MVC Adaptive Rendering (oh, also, this is in Web Forms 4.5 as well) Display Modes Mobile project template using jQuery Mobile OAuth login to allow Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. login Jon (and friends') MVC 4 book on the way: Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 Windows 8 development Jesse and Jon announce they're working on a new book: Pro Windows 8 Development with XAML and C# Jon and Jesse agree that it's nice to be able to write Windows 8 applications using the same skills they picked up for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone development. Compare / contrast ASP.NET MVC and Windows 8 development Q: Does ASP.NET and HTML5 development overlap? Jon thinks they overlap in the MVC world because you're writing HTML views without controls Jon describes how his web development career moved from a preoccupation with server code to a focus on user interaction, which occurs in the browser Jon mentions his NDC Oslo presentation on Learning To Love HTML as Beautiful Code Q: How do you apply C# / XAML or HTML5 skills to Windows 8 development? Q: If I'm a XAML programmer, what's the learning curve on getting up to speed on ASP.NET MVC? Jon describes the difference in application lifecycle and state management Jon says it's nice that web development is really interactive compared to application development Q: Can you learn MVC by reading a book? Or is it a lot bigger than that? What is Azure, and why would I use it? Jon describes the traditional Azure platform mode and how Azure Web Sites fits in Q: Why wouldn't Jesse host his blog on Azure Web Sites? Domain names on Azure Web Sites File hosting options Q: Is Azure just another host? How is it different from any of the other shared hosting options? A: Azure gives you the ability to scale up or down whenever you want A: Other services are available if or when you want them

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  • links for 2011-01-13

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Webcast: Oracle WebCenter Suite: Giving Users a Modern Experience Speakers: Vince Casarez (VP Enterprise 2.0 Product Management, Oracle),  Erin Smith (Consulting Practice Manager – Portals, Oracle), Robert Wessa (Consulting Technical Director – Enterprise 2.0 Infrastructure, Oracle)  (tags: oracle otn webcenter webcast enterprise2.0) Oracle & StickyMinds.com Webcast: Load Testing Techniques for Enterprise Applications Mughees Minhas, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Server Technologies, answers your questions about the latest techniques for effectively and efficiently testing enterprise application performance. Thursday, January 20, 2011. 10am PT / 1pm ET. (tags: oracle otn stickymings webcast) Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group (BACSIG) Jan 20, 5:30pm - 8:00pm PT. Presentations: Coherence 3.6 Clustering Features (Rob Lee), Efficient Management and Update of Coherence Clusters to Reduce Down Time ( Rao Bhethanabotla), How To Build a Coherence Practice (Christer Fahlgren). (tags: oracle, otn coherence bacsig) Podcast Show Notes: William Ulrich and Neal McWhorter on Business Architecture (ArchBeat) A four-part interview with the authors of  "Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation"  (tags: oracle otn podcast businessarchitecture) John Brunswick: Overlapping Social Networks in your Enterprise? Strategies to Understand and Govern "Overall it is important to consider if tacit knowledge being captured by the social systems is able to be retained and somehow summarized into an overall organizational directory." - John Brunswick (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 socialnetworking) Coherence - How to develop a custom push replication publisher (Middlewarepedia) Cosmin Todur describes "a way of developing a custom push replication publisher that publishes data to a database via JDBC."  (tags: oracle coherence grid) Aino Andriessen: Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) for application development "Logging is a very important aspect of application development as it offers run-time access to the behaviour and data of the application. It’s important for debugging purposes but also to investigate exception situations on production." -- Aino Andriessen (tags: oracle odl java jdeveloper weblogic) Security issues when upgrading a Web Catalog from 10g to 11g Oracle BI By Bakboord "I blogged about upgrading from Oracle BI EE 10g to Oracle BI EE 11g R1 earlier. Although this is a very straight forward process, you could end up with some security issues." -- Daan Bakboord (tags: oracle businessintelligence obiee) Angelo Santagata: SOA Composite Sensors : Good Practice "A good best practice is that for any composites you create, consider publishing a composite sensor value using a primary key of some sort , e.g. orderId, that way if you need to manipulate/query composites you can easily look up the instanceId using the sensorid." - Angelo Santagata (tags: oracle soa sca) Javier Ductor: WebCenter Spaces 11g PS2 Task Flow Customization "Previously, I wrote about Spaces Template Customization. In order to adapt Spaces to customers prototype, it was necessary to change template and skin, as well as the members task flow. In this entry, I describe how to customize this task flow." - Javier Ductor (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 webcenter) RonBatra's blog: Cloud Computing Series: VI: Industry Directions "When someone says their 'Product/Solution is in the Cloud,' ask them basic questions to seperate the spin from the reality. I would start with 'tell me what that means' and see which way the conversation goes." - Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra (tags: oracle otn oracleace cloud) First JSRs Proposed for Java EE 7 (The Java Source) With the approval of Java SE 7 and Java SE 8 JSRs last month, attention is now shifting towards the Java EE platform. (tags: oracle java jsr javaee)

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  • Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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  • Silverlight Cream for February 04, 2011 -- #1040

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Mike Wolf, Matt Casto, Levente Mihály, Roy Dallal, Mark Monster, Andrea Boschin, and Oren Gal. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight" Matt Casto WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging" Mike Wolf Shoutouts: Al Pascual announced a get-together if you're going to be in Phoenix on February 10 (next Thursday)... I just can't tell what time it is from the page: Phoenix Dev Meet-Up From SilverlightCream.com: Ten Pet Peeves of WP7 Applications Check out Shawn Wildermuth's Top 10 annoyances when trying out any new app on the WP7... if you're a dev, you might want to keep these in mind. Silverlight TV 60: Checking Out the Zero Gravity Game, Now on Windows Phone 7 John Papa has Silverlight TV number 60 up and this one features Phoenix' own Ryan Plemons discussing the game Zero Gravity and some of the things he had to do to take the game to WP7 ... and the presentation looks as good from here as it did inside the studio :) The Full Stack: Entity Framework To Phone, The Server Side Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway have Part 6 of their full-stack podcast up ... this is their exploration of MVC3, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WP7... pair programming indeed! Life Cycle: Page State Management Jesse Liberty also has episode 29 (can you believe that??) of his Windows Phone From Scratch series up ... he's continuing his previous LifeCycle discussion with Page State Management this time. Windows Phone 7 Runtime Debugging Mike Wolf is one of those guys that when he blogs, we should all pay attention, and this post is no exception... he has contributed a run-time diagnostics logger to the WP7Contrib project ... wow... too cool! Accept and Cancel Buttons Behavior in Silverlight Matt Casto has his blog back up and has a behavior up some intuitive UX on ChildWindows by being able to bind to a default or cancel button and have those events activated when the user hits Enter or Escape... very cool, Matt! A classic memory game: Part 3 - Porting the game to Windows Phone 7 Levente Mihály has Part 3 of his tutorial series up at SilverlightShow, and this go-around is porting his 'memory game' to WP7... and this is pretty all-encompassing... Blend for the UI, Performance, and Tombstoning... plus all the source. Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 1 Roy Dallal completely describes how he used a couple easily-downloadable tools to find the root cause of his memory problems with is Silvleright app. Lots of good investigative information. How to cancel the closing of your Silverlight application (in-browser and out-of-browser) Mark Monster revisits a two-year old post of his on cancelling the closing of a Silverlight app... and he's bringing that concept of warning the user the he's about to exit into the OOB situation as well. Windows Phone 7 - Part #3: Understanding navigation Also continuing his WP7 tutorial series on SilverlightShow, Andrea Boschin has part 3 up which is all about Navigation and preserving state... he also has a video on the page to help demonstrate the GoBack method. Multiple page printing in Silverlight 4 Oren Gal built a Silverlight app for last years' ESRI dev summit, and decided to upgrade it this year with functionality such as save/restore, selecting favorite sessions, and printing. 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 30, 2010 -- #825

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Tim Greenfield, Tim Heuer, ondrejsv, XAML Ninja, Nikhil Kothari, Sergey Barskiy, Shawn Oster, smartyP, Christian Schormann(-2-), and John Papa And Glenn Block. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso produced a RefCard for DZone: Getting Started with Silverlight and Expression Blend Way to go Victor... it looks great! Gavin Wignall announced Metia launch FourSquare and Bing maps mash up – called Near.me Cheryl Simmons talks about VS2010 and the design surface: Changing Templates with the Silverlight Designer (and seeing the changes immediately) Michael S. Scherotter posted that New York Times Silverlight Kit Updated for Windows Phone 7 Series Jaime Rodriguez posted about 2 free chapters in his new book (with Yochay Kiriaty): A Journey Into Silverlight On Windows Phone -Via Learning WIndows PHone Programming Did you know there was "MSDN Radio"?? Tim Heuer posted follow-up answers to this morning's show: MSDN Radio follow-up answers: Prism for Silverlight, DomainServices and relationships Michael Klucher posted a great set of links for WP7 game development this morning: Great Game Development Tutorials for Windows Phone Zhiming Xue has 3 pages of synopsis and links for everything Windows Phone at MIX. This is the 1st, but at the top of the pages are links to the other two: Windows Phone 7 Content From MIX10 – Part I From SilverlightCream.com: Using WriteableBitmap to Simplify Animations with Clones Jeremy Likness takes a break from his LOB posts to demonstrate a page flip animation using WriteableBitmap to simplify the animation using clones. SAX-like Xml parsing Want some experience or fun with Rx? Tim Greenfield has a post up on building an observable XmlReader. nstalling Silverlight applications without the browser involved Last night I blogged Mike Taulty's take on the "Silent Install" for an OOB app, tonight, I'm posting Tim Heuer's insight on the topic. How to: Create computed/custom properties for sample data in Blend/Sketchflow ondrejsv posted an example of digging into the files that control the sample data for Blend to get what you really want. PathListBox Adventures – radial layout Check out the radial layout XAML Ninja did using the PathListBox ... and all code available. RIA Services and Validation Nikhil Kothari has a great (duh!) post up that follows his Silverlight TV on the same subject: RIA Services and validation... lots of good external links also. Windows Phone 7 Application with OData Sergey Barskiy did an OData to WP7 app by using the feed from MIX10. You can see a list of sessions, and click on one to see details. Getting Blur And DropShadow to work in the Windows Phone Emulator Shawn Oster responds to some forum questions about Blur and DropShadow effects not showing up in the WP7 emulator, and gives the code trick we have to do for now. Metro Icons for Windows Phone 7 We all got the other icon set for WP7 from MSDN, but smartyP pulled the Metro Icons from the PPT deck of the MIX10 presentations... good job! Fonts in SketchFlow Christian Schormann talks about fonts in Sketchflow, where they live on your machine, and how you can use them. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part III Christian Schormann also has Part III of his epic tutorial up on Path Layout and Blend. This one is on dynamic resizing layouts, and he has links back to the other two if you missed them... or you can find them with a search at SilverlightCream... :) Simple ViewModel Locator for MVVM: The Patients Have Left the Asylum John Papa And Glenn Block teamed up to solve the View First model only without the maintenance involved with the ViewModel locator by using MEF. It only took these guys and hour... sigh... :) 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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  • Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

    - by user801960
    Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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  • Podcast Show Notes: Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up - Part 1

    - by Bob Rhubart
    OK, I know last week I promised you a program featuring Oracle ACE Directors Mike van Alst (IT-Eye) and Jordan Braunstein (TUSC) and The Definitive Guide to SOA: Oracle Service Bus author Jeff Davies. But things happen. In this case, what happened was Collaborate 10 in Las Vegas. Prior to the event I asked Oracle ACE Director and OAUG board member Floyd Teter to see if he could round up a couple of people at the event for an impromtu interview over Skype (I was here in Cleveland) to get their impressions of the event. Listen to Part 1 Floyd, armed with his brand new iPad, went above and beyond the call of duty. At the appointed hour, which turned out to be about hour after the close of Collaborate 10,  Floyd had gathered nine other people to join him in a meeting room somewhere in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Here’s the entire roster: Floyd Teter - Project Manager at Jet Propulsion Lab, OAUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Mark Rittman - EMEA Technical Director and Co-Founder, Rittman Mead,  ODTUG Board Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Chet Justice - OBI Consultant at BI Wizards Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile Elke Phelps - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana, OAUG SIG Chair Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book | Oracle ACE Profile Paul Jackson - Oracle Applications DBA at Humana Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Book Srini Chavali - Enterprise Database & Tools Leader at Cummins, Inc Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Dave Ferguson – President, Oracle Applications Users Group LinkedIn | OAUG Profile John King - Owner, King Training Resources Website | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Gavyn Whyte - Project Portfolio Manager at iFactory Consulting Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix John Nicholson - Channels & Alliances at Greenlight Technologies Website | LinkedIn Big thanks to Floyd for assembling the panelists and handling the on-scene MC/hosting duties.  Listen to Part 1 On a technical note, this discussion was conducted over Skype, using Floyd’s iPad, placed in the middle of the table.  During the call the audio was fantastic – the iPad did a remarkable job. Sadly, the Technology Gods were not smiling on me that day. The audio set-up that I tested successfully before the call failed to deliver when we first connected – I could hear the folks in Vegas, but they couldn’t hear me. A frantic, last-minute adjustment appeared to have fixed that problem, and the audio in my headphones from both sides of the conversation was loud and clear.  It wasn’t until I listened to the playback that I realized that something was wrong. So the audio for Vegas side of the discussion has about the same fidelity as a cell phone. It’s listenable, but disappointing when compared to what it sounded like during the discussion. Still, this was a one shot deal, and the roster of panelists and the resulting conversation was too good and too much fun to scrap just because of an unfortunate technical glitch.   Part 2 of this Collaborate 10 Wrap-Up will run next week. After that, it’s back on track with the previously scheduled program. So stay tuned: RSS del.icio.us Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,collborate 10,c10,oracle ace program,archbeat,arch2arch,oaug,odtug,las vegas

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  • Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

    - by user462779
    Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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