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  • What's a good way to write batch scripts in C#?

    - by Scott Bilas
    I would like to write simple scripts in C#. Stuff I would normally use .bat or 4NT .btm files for. Copying files, parsing text, asking user input, and so on. Fairly simple but doing this stuff right in a batch file is really hard (no exceptions for example). I'm familiar with command line "scripting" wrappers like AxScript so that gets me part of the way there. What I'm missing is the easy file-manipulation framework. I want to be able to do cd(".."), copy(srcFile, destFile) type functionality. Tools I have tried: NANT, which we use in our build process. Not a good scripting tool. Insanely verbose XML syntax and to add a simple function you must write an extension assembly. Can't do it inline. PowerShell. Looks great, but I just haven't been able to switch over to this as my primary shell. Too many differences from 4NT. Whatever I do needs to run from an ordinary command prompt and not require a special shell to run it through. Can PowerShell be used as a script executor? Perl/Python/Ruby. Really hate learning an entirely new language and framework just to do batch file operations. Haven't been able to dedicate the time I need to do this. Plus, we're a 99% .NET shop for our toolchain and I really want to leverage our existing experience and codebase. Are there frameworks out there that are trying to solve this problem of "make a batch file in C#" that you have used? I want the power of C#/.NET with the immediate-mode type functionality of a typical cmd.exe shell language. Am I alone in wanting something like this?

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  • How can I create a rules engine without using eval() or exec()?

    - by Angela
    I have a simple rules/conditions table in my database which is used to generate alerts for one of our systems. I want to create a rules engine or a domain specific language. A simple rule stored in this table would be..(omitting the relationships here) if temp > 40 send email Please note there would be many more such rules. A script runs once daily to evaluate these rules and perform the necessary actions. At the beginning, there was only one rule, so we had the script in place to only support that rule. However we now need to make it more scalable to support different conditions/rules. I have looked into rules engines , but I hope to achieve this in some simple pythonic way. At the moment, I have only come up with eval/exec and I know that is not the most recommended approach. So, what would be the best way to accomplish this?? ( The rules are stored as data in database so each object like "temperature", condition like "/=..etc" , value like "40,50..etc" and action like "email, sms, etc.." are stored in the database, i retrieve this to form the condition...if temp 50 send email, that was my idea to then use exec or eval on them to make it live code..but not sure if this is the right approach )

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  • Elegent methods for caching search results from RESTful service?

    - by Paul
    I have a RESTful web service which I access from the browser using JavaScript. As an example, say that this web service returns a list of all the Message resources assigned to me when I send a GET request to /messages/me. For performance reasons, I'd like to cache this response so that I don't have to re-fetch it every time I visit my Manage Messages web page. The cached response would expire after 5 minutes. If a Message resource is created "behind my back", say by the system admin, it's possible that I won't know about it for up to 5 minutes, until the cached search response expires and is re-fetched. This is acceptable, because it creates no confusion for me. However if I create a new Message resource which I know should be part of the search response, it becomes confusing when it doesn't appear on my Manage Messages page immediately. In general, when I knowingly create/delete/update a resource that invalidates a cached search response, I need that cached response to be expired/flushed immediately. The core problem which I can't figure out: I see no simple way of connecting the task of creating/deleting/updating a resource with the task of expiring the appropriate cached responses. In this example it seems simple, I could manually expire the cached search response whenever I create/delete/update a(ny) Message resource. But in a more complex system, keeping track of which search responses to expire under what circumstances will get clumsy quickly. If someone could suggest a simple solution or some clarifying thoughts, I'd appreciate it.

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  • 2 basic but interesting questions about .NET

    - by b-gen-jack-o-neill
    Hi, when I first saw C#, I thought this must be some joke. I was starting with programming in C. But in C# you could just drag and drop objects, and just write event code to them. It was so simple. Now, I still like C the most, becouse I am very attracted to the basic low level operations, and C is just next level of assembler, with few basic routines, so I like it very much. Even more becouse I write little apps for microcontrollers. But yeasterday I wrote very simple control program for my microcontroller based LED cube in asm, and I needed some way to simply create animation sequences to the Cube. So, I remembered C#. I have practically NO C# skills, but still I created simple program to make animation sequences in about hour with GUI, just with help of google and help of the embeded function descriptions in C#. So, to get to the point, is there some other reason then top speed, to use any other language than C#? I mean, it is so effective. I know that Java is a bit of similiar, but I expect C# to be more Windows effective since its directly from Microsoft. The second question is, what is the advantage of compiling into CIL, and than run by CLR, than directly compile it into machine code? I know that portability is one, but since C# is mainly for Windows, wouldn´t it be more powerfull to just compile it directly? Thanks.

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  • Advance Query with Join

    - by user1462589
    I'm trying to convert a product table that contains all the detail of the product into separate tables in SQL. I've got everything done except for duplicated descriptor details. The problem I am having all the products have size/color/style/other that many other products contain. I want to only have one size or color descriptor for all the items and reuse the "ID" for all the product which I believe is a Parent key to the Product ID which is a ...Foreign Key. The only problem is that every descriptor would have multiple Foreign Keys assigned to it. So I was thinking on the fly just have it skip figuring out a Foreign Parent key for each descriptor and just check to see if that descriptor exist and if it does use its Key for the descriptor. Data Table PI Colo Sz OTHER 1 | Blue | 5 | Vintage 2 | Blue | 6 | Vintage 3 | Blac | 5 | Simple 4 | Blac | 6 | Simple =================================== Its destination table is this =================================== DI Description 1 | Blue 2 | Blac 3 | 5 4 | 6 6 | Vintage 7 | Simple ============================= Select Data.Table Unique.Data.Table.Colo Unique.Data.Table.Sz Unique.Data.Table.Other ======================================= Then the dual part of the questions after we create all the descriptors how to do a new query and assign the product ID to the descriptors. PI| DI 1 | 1 1 | 3 1 | 4 2 | 1 2 | 3 2 | 4 By figuring out how to do this I should be able to duplicate this pattern for all 300 + columns in the product. Some of these fields are 60+ characters large so its going to save a ton of space. Do I use a Array?

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  • Elegant ways to print out a bunch of instance attributes in python 2.6?

    - by wds
    First some background. I'm parsing a simple file format, and wish to re-use the results in python code later, so I made a very simple class hierarchy and wrote the parser to construct objects from the original records in the text files I'm working from. At the same time I'd like to load the data into a legacy database, the loader files for which take a simple tab-separated format. The most straightforward way would be to just do something like: print "%s\t%s\t....".format(record.id, record.attr1, len(record.attr1), ...) Because there are so many columns to print out though, I thought I'd use the Template class to make it a bit easier to see what's what, i.e.: templ = Template("$id\t$attr1\t$attr1_len\t...") And I figured I could just use the record in place of the map used by a substitute call, with some additional keywords for derived values: print templ.substitute(record, attr1_len=len(record.attr1), ...) Unfortunately this fails, complaining that the record instance does not have an attribute __getitem__. So my question is twofold: do I need to implement __getitem__ and if so how? is there a more elegant way for something like this where you just need to output a bunch of attributes you already know the name for?

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  • Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

    - by Jon Galloway
    ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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  • jQuery Time Entry with Time Navigation Keys

    - by Rick Strahl
    So, how do you display time values in your Web applications? Displaying date AND time values in applications is lot less standardized than date display only. While date input has become fairly universal with various date picker controls available, time entry continues to be a bit of a non-standardized. In my own applications I tend to use the jQuery UI DatePicker control for date entries and it works well for that. Here's an example: The date entry portion is well defined and it makes perfect sense to have a calendar pop up so you can pick a date from a rich UI when necessary. However, time values are much less obvious when it comes to displaying a UI or even just making time entries more useful. There are a slew of time picker controls available but other than adding some visual glitz, they are not really making time entry any easier. Part of the reason for this is that time entry is usually pretty simple. Clicking on a dropdown of any sort and selecting a value from a long scrolling list tends to take more user interaction than just typing 5 characters (7 if am/pm is used). Keystrokes can make Time Entry easier Time entry maybe pretty simple, but I find that adding a few hotkeys to handle date navigation can make it much easier. Specifically it'd be nice to have keys to: Jump to the current time (Now) Increase/decrease minutes Increase/decrease hours The timeKeys jQuery PlugIn Some time ago I created a small plugin to handle this scenario. It's non-visual other than tooltip that pops up when you press ? to display the hotkeys that are available: Try it Online The keys loosely follow the ancient Quicken convention of using the first and last letters of what you're increasing decreasing (ie. H to decrease, R to increase hours and + and - for the base unit or minutes here). All navigation happens via the keystrokes shown above, so it's all non-visual, which I think is the most efficient way to deal with dates. To hook up the plug-in, start with the textbox:<input type="text" id="txtTime" name="txtTime" value="12:05 pm" title="press ? for time options" /> Note the title which might be useful to alert people using the field that additional functionality is available. To hook up the plugin code is as simple as:$("#txtTime").timeKeys(); You essentially tie the plugin to any text box control. OptionsThe syntax for timeKeys allows for an options map parameter:$(selector).timeKeys(options); Options are passed as a parameter map object which can have the following properties: timeFormatYou can pass in a format string that allows you to format the date. The default is "hh:mm t" which is US time format that shows a 12 hour clock with am/pm. Alternately you can pass in "HH:mm" which uses 24 hour time. HH, hh, mm and t are translated in the format string - you can arrange the format as you see fit. callbackYou can also specify a callback function that is called when the date value has been set. This allows you to either re-format the date or perform post processing (such as displaying highlight if it's after a certain hour for example). Here's another example that uses both options:$("#txtTime").timeKeys({ timeFormat: "HH:mm", callback: function (time) { showStatus("new time is: " + time.toString() + " " + $(this).val() ); } }); The plugin code itself is fairly simple. It hooks the keydown event and checks for the various keys that affect time navigation which is straight forward. The bulk of the code however deals with parsing the time value and formatting the output using a Time class that implements parsing, formatting and time navigation methods. Here's the code for the timeKeys jQuery plug-in:/// <reference path="jquery.js" /> /// <reference path="ww.jquery.js" /> (function ($) { $.fn.timeKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to time fields /// + Add minute - subtract minute /// H Subtract Hour R Add houR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// timeFormat: "hh:mm t" by default HH:mm alternate /// callback: callback handler after time assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { timeFormat: "hh:mm t", callback: null } $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var time = new Time($el.val()); //alert($(this).val() + " " + time.toString() + " " + time.date.toString()); switch (e.keyCode) { case 78: // [N]ow time = new Time(new Date()); break; case 109: case 189: // - time.addMinutes(-1); break; case 107: case 187: // + time.addMinutes(1); break; case 72: //H time.addHours(-1); break; case 82: //R time.addHours(1); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $(this).tooltip("<b>N</b> Now<br/><b>+</b> add minute<br /><b>-</b> subtract minute<br /><b>H</b> Subtract Hour<br /><b>R</b> add hour", 4000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(time.toString(opt.timeFormat)); if (opt.callback) { // call async and set context in this element setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0), time) }, 1); } return false; }); } Time = function (time, format) { /// <summary> /// Time object that can parse and format /// a time values. /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="object"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// Time format string: /// HH:mm (23:01) /// hh:mm t (11:01 pm) /// </param> /// <example> /// var time = new Time( new Date()); /// time.addHours(5); /// time.addMinutes(10); /// var s = time.toString(); /// /// var time2 = new Time(s); // parse with constructor /// var t = time2.parse("10:15 pm"); // parse with .parse() method /// alert( t.hours + " " + t.mins + " " + t.ampm + " " + t.hours25) ///</example> var _I = this; this.date = new Date(); this.timeFormat = "hh:mm t"; if (format) this.timeFormat = format; this.parse = function (time) { /// <summary> /// Parses time value from a Date object, or string in format of: /// 12:12pm or 23:01 /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="any"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> if (!time) return null; // Date if (time.getDate) { var t = {}; var d = time; t.hours24 = d.getHours(); t.mins = d.getMinutes(); t.ampm = "am"; if (t.hours24 > 11) { t.ampm = "pm"; if (t.hours24 > 12) t.hours = t.hours24 - 12; } time = t; } if (typeof (time) == "string") { var parts = time.split(":"); if (parts < 2) return null; var time = {}; time.hours = parts[0] * 1; time.hours24 = time.hours; time.mins = parts[1].toLowerCase(); if (time.mins.indexOf("am") > -1) { time.ampm = "am"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("am", ""); if (time.hours == 12) time.hours24 = 0; } else if (time.mins.indexOf("pm") > -1) { time.ampm = "pm"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("pm", ""); if (time.hours < 12) time.hours24 = time.hours + 12; } time.mins = time.mins * 1; } _I.date.setMinutes(time.mins); _I.date.setHours(time.hours24); return time; }; this.addMinutes = function (mins) { /// <summary> /// adds minutes to the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="mins" type="number"> /// number of minutes to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setMinutes(_I.date.getMinutes() + mins); } this.addHours = function (hours) { /// <summary> /// adds hours the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="hours" type="number"> /// number of hours to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setHours(_I.date.getHours() + hours); } this.getTime = function () { /// <summary> /// returns a time structure from the currently /// stored time value. /// Properties: hours, hours24, mins, ampm /// </summary> return new Time(new Date()); h } this.toString = function (format) { /// <summary> /// returns a short time string for the internal date /// formats: 12:12 pm or 23:12 /// </summary> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// optional format string for date /// HH:mm, hh:mm t /// </param> if (!format) format = _I.timeFormat; var hours = _I.date.getHours(); if (format.indexOf("t") > -1) { if (hours > 11) format = format.replace("t", "pm") else format = format.replace("t", "am") } if (format.indexOf("HH") > -1) format = format.replace("HH", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); if (format.indexOf("hh") > -1) { if (hours > 12) hours -= 12; if (hours == 0) hours = 12; format = format.replace("hh", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); } if (format.indexOf("mm") > -1) format = format.replace("mm", _I.date.getMinutes().toString().padL(2, "0")); return format; } // construction if (time) this.time = this.parse(time); } String.prototype.padL = function (width, pad) { if (!width || width < 1) return this; if (!pad) pad = " "; var length = width - this.length if (length < 1) return this.substr(0, width); return (String.repeat(pad, length) + this).substr(0, width); } String.repeat = function (chr, count) { var str = ""; for (var x = 0; x < count; x++) { str += chr }; return str; } })(jQuery); The plugin consists of the actual plugin and the Time class which handles parsing and formatting of the time value via the .parse() and .toString() methods. Code like this always ends up taking up more effort than the actual logic unfortunately. There are libraries out there that can handle this like datejs or even ww.jquery.js (which is what I use) but to keep the code self contained for this post the plugin doesn't rely on external code. There's one optional exception: The code as is has one dependency on ww.jquery.js  for the tooltip plugin that provides the small popup for all the hotkeys available. You can replace that code with some other mechanism to display hotkeys or simply remove it since that behavior is optional. While we're at it: A jQuery dateKeys plugIn Although date entry tends to be much better served with drop down calendars to pick dates from, often it's also easier to pick dates using a few simple hotkeys. Navigation that uses + - for days and M and H for MontH navigation, Y and R for YeaR navigation are a quick way to enter dates without having to resort to using a mouse and clicking around to what you want to find. Note that this plugin does have a dependency on ww.jquery.js for the date formatting functionality.$.fn.dateKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to date 'fields' /// + Add day - subtract day /// M Subtract Month H Add montH /// Y Subtract Year R Add yeaR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy" by default "MMM dd, yyyy /// callback: callback handler after date assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy", callback: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var d = new Date($el.val()); if (!d) d = new Date(1900, 0, 1, 1, 1); var month = d.getMonth(); var year = d.getFullYear(); var day = d.getDate(); switch (e.keyCode) { case 84: // [T]oday d = new Date(); break; case 109: case 189: d = new Date(year, month, day - 1); break; case 107: case 187: d = new Date(year, month, day + 1); break; case 77: //M d = new Date(year, month - 1, day); break; case 72: //H d = new Date(year, month + 1, day); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $el.tooltip("<b>T</b> Today<br/><b>+</b> add day<br /><b>-</b> subtract day<br /><b>M</b> subtract Month<br /><b>H</b> add montH<br/><b>Y</b> subtract Year<br/><b>R</b> add yeaR", 5000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(d.formatDate(opt.dateFormat)); if (opt.callback) // call async setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0),d); }, 10); return false; }); } The logic for this plugin is similar to the timeKeys plugin, but it's a little simpler as it tries to directly parse the date value from a string via new Date(inputString). As mentioned it also uses a helper function from ww.jquery.js to format dates which removes the logic to perform date formatting manually which again reduces the size of the code. And the Key is… I've been using both of these plugins in combination with the jQuery UI datepicker for datetime values and I've found that I rarely actually pop up the date picker any more. It's just so much more efficient to use the hotkeys to navigate dates. It's still nice to have the picker around though - it provides the expected behavior for date entry. For time values however I can't justify the UI overhead of a picker that doesn't make it any easier to pick a time. Most people know how to type in a time value and if they want shortcuts keystrokes easily beat out any pop up UI. Hopefully you'll find this as useful as I have found it for my code. Resources Online Sample Download Sample Project © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

    - by Rick Strahl
    A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Scripting with the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance

    - by Geoff Ongley
    The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 appliance has a user friendly and easy to understand graphical web based interface we call the "BUI" or "Browser User Interface".This interface is very useful for many tasks, but in some cases a script (or workflow) may be more appropriate, such as:Repetitive tasksTasks which work on (or obtain information about) a large number of shares or usersTasks which are triggered by an alert threshold (workflows)Tasks where you want a only very basic input, but a consistent output (workflows)The appliance scripting language is based on ECMAscript 3 (close to javascript). I'm not going to cover ECMAscript 3 in great depth (I'm far from an expert here), but I would like to show you some neat things you can do with the appliance, to get you started based on what I have found from my own playing around.I'm making the assumption you have some sort of programming background, and understand variables, arrays, functions to some extent - but of course if something is not clear, please let me know so I can fix it up or clarify it.Variable Declarations and ArraysVariablesECMAScript is a dynamically and weakly typed language. If you don't know what that means, google is your friend - but at a high level it means we can just declare variables with no specific type and on the fly.For example, I can declare a variable and use it straight away in the middle of my code, for example:projects=list();Which makes projects an array of values that are returned from the list(); function (which is usable in most contexts). With this kind of variable, I can do things like:projects.length (this property on array tells you how many objects are in it, good for for loops etc). Alternatively, I could say:projects=3;and now projects is just a simple number.Should we declare variables like this so loosely? In my opinion, the answer is no - I feel it is a better practice to declare variables you are going to use, before you use them - and given them an initial value. You can do so as follows:var myVariable=0;To demonstrate the ability to just randomly assign and change the type of variables, you can create a simple script at the cli as follows (bold for input):fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("Number of projects is: %d\n",projects.length);("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: %d\n",projects);("." to run)> .Number of projects is: 7Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: 152You can also confirm this behaviour by checking the typeof variable we are dealing with:fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> .var projects is of type objectvar projects is of type numberArraysSo you likely noticed that we have already touched on arrays, as the list(); (in the shares context) stored an array into the 'projects' variable.But what if you want to declare your own array? Easy! This is very similar to Java and other languages, we just instantiate a brand new "Array" object using the keyword new:var myArray = new Array();will create an array called "myArray".A quick example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> testArray = new Array();("." to run)> testArray[0]="This";("." to run)> testArray[1]="is";("." to run)> testArray[2]="just";("." to run)> testArray[3]="a";("." to run)> testArray[4]="test";("." to run)> for (i=0; i < testArray.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    printf("Array element %d is %s\n",i,testArray[i]);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Array element 0 is ThisArray element 1 is isArray element 2 is justArray element 3 is aArray element 4 is testWorking With LoopsFor LoopFor loops are very similar to those you will see in C, java and several other languages. One of the key differences here is, as you were made aware earlier, we can be a bit more sloppy with our variable declarations.The general way you would likely use a for loop is as follows:for (variable; test-case; modifier for variable){}For example, you may wish to declare a variable i as 0; and a MAX_ITERATIONS variable to determine how many times this loop should repeat:var i=0;var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;And then, use this variable to be tested against some case existing (has i reached MAX_ITERATIONS? - if not, increment i using i++);for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++){ // some work to do}So lets run something like this on the appliance:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var i=0;("." to run)> var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;("." to run)> for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    printf("The number is %d\n",i);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .The number is 0The number is 1The number is 2The number is 3The number is 4The number is 5The number is 6The number is 7The number is 8The number is 9While LoopWhile loops again are very similar to other languages, we loop "while" a condition is met. For example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    if (counter==10) ("." to run)>    { ("." to run)>            isTen=true;   ("." to run)>    } ("." to run)>    printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)>    counter++;    ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Counter is 10Loop has ended and Counter is 11So what do we notice here? Something has actually gone wrong - counter will technically be 11 once the loop completes... Why is this?Well, if we have a loop like this, where the 'while' condition that will end the loop may be set based on some other condition(s) existing (such as the counter has reached 10) - we must ensure that we  terminate this iteration of the loop when the condition is met - otherwise the rest of the code will be followed which may not be desirable. In other words, like in other languages, we will only ever check the loop condition once we are ready to perform the next iteration, so any other code after we set "isTen" to be true, will still be executed as we can see it was above.We can avoid this by adding a break into our loop once we know we have set the condition - this will stop the rest of the logic being processed in this iteration (and as such, counter will not be incremented). So lets try that again:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    if (counter==10) ("." to run)>    { ("." to run)>            isTen=true;   ("." to run)>            break;("." to run)>    } ("." to run)>    printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)>    counter++;    ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n", counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Loop has ended and Counter is 10Much better!Methods to Obtain and Manipulate DataGet MethodThe get method allows you to get simple properties from an object, for example a quota from a user. The syntax is fairly simple:var myVariable=get('property');An example of where you may wish to use this, is when you are getting a bunch of information about a user (such as quota information when in a shares context):var users=list();for(k=0; k < users.length; k++){     user=users[k];     run('select ' + user);     var username=get('name');     var usage=get('usage');     var quota=get('quota');...Which you can then use to your advantage - to print or manipulate infomation (you could change a user's information with a set method, based on the information returned from the get method). The set method is explained next.Set MethodThe set method can be used in a simple manner, similar to get. The syntax for set is:set('property','value'); // where value is a string, if it was a number, you don't need quotesFor example, we could set the quota on a share as follows (first observing the initial value):fishy10:shares default/test-geoff> script("." to run)> var currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> set('quota','30G');("." to run)> run('commit');("." to run)> currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> .Current Quota is: 0Current Quota is: 32212254720This shows us using both the get and set methods as can be used in scripts, of course when only setting an individual share, the above is overkill - it would be much easier to set it manually at the cli using 'set quota=3G' and then 'commit'.List MethodThe list method can be very powerful, especially in more complex scripts which iterate over large amounts of data and manipulate it if so desired. The general way you will use list is as follows:var myVar=list();Which will make "myVar" an array, containing all the objects in the relevant context (this could be a list of users, shares, projects, etc). You can then gather or manipulate data very easily.We could list all the shares and mountpoints in a given project for example:fishy10:shares another-project> script("." to run)> var shares=list();("." to run)> for (i=0; i < shares.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    run('select ' + shares[i]);("." to run)>    var mountpoint=get('mountpoint');("." to run)>    printf("Share %s discovered, has mountpoint %s\n",shares[i],mountpoint);("." to run)>    run('done');("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Share and-another discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/and-anotherShare another-share discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/another-shareShare bob discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-projectShare more-shares-for-all discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/more-shares-for-allShare yep discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/yepWriting More Complex and Re-Usable CodeFunctionsThe best way to be able to write more complex code is to use functions to split up repeatable or reusable sections of your code. This also makes your more complex code easier to read and understand for other programmers.We write functions as follows:function functionName(variable1,variable2,...,variableN){}For example, we could have a function that takes a project name as input, and lists shares for that project (assuming we're already in the 'project' context - context is important!):function getShares(proj){        run('select ' + proj);        shares=list();        printf("Project: %s\n", proj);        for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)        {                printf("Discovered share: %s\n",shares[i]);        }        run('done'); // exit selected project}Commenting your CodeLike any other language, a large part of making it readable and understandable is to comment it. You can use the same comment style as in C and Java amongst other languages.In other words, sngle line comments use://at the beginning of the comment.Multi line comments use:/*at the beginning, and:*/ at the end.For example, here we will use both:fishy10:> script("." to run)> // This is a test comment("." to run)> printf("doing some work...\n");("." to run)> /* This is a multi-line("." to run)> comment which I will span across("." to run)> three lines in total */("." to run)> printf("doing some more work...\n");("." to run)> .doing some work...doing some more work...Your comments do not have to be on their own, they can begin (particularly with single line comments this is handy) at the end of a statement, for examplevar projects=list(); // The variable projects is an array containing all projects on the system.Try and Catch StatementsYou may be used to using try and catch statements in other languages, and they can (and should) be utilised in your code to catch expected or unexpected error conditions, that you do NOT wish to stop your code from executing (if you do not catch these errors, your script will exit!):try{  // do some work}catch(err) // Catch any error that could occur{ // do something here under the error condition}For example, you may wish to only execute some code if a context can be reached. If you can't perform certain actions under certain circumstances, that may be perfectly acceptable.For example if you want to test a condition that only makes sense when looking at a SMB/NFS share, but does not make sense when you hit an iscsi or FC LUN, you don't want to stop all processing of other shares you may not have covered yet.For example we may wish to obtain quota information on all shares for all users on a share (but this makes no sense for a LUN):function getShareQuota(shar) // Get quota for each user of this share{        run('select ' + shar);        printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shar);        try        {                run('users');                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","----");                                users=list();                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                {                        user=users[k];                        getUserQuota(user);                }                run('done'); // exit user context        }        catch(err)        {                printf("    SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar);        }        run('done'); // done with this share}Running Scripts Remotely over SSHAs you have likely noticed, writing and running scripts for all but the simplest jobs directly on the appliance is not going to be a lot of fun.There's a couple of choices on what you can do here:Create scripts on a remote system and run them over sshCreate scripts, wrapping them in workflow code, so they are stored on the appliance and can be triggered under certain circumstances (like a threshold being reached)We'll cover the first one here, and then cover workflows later on (as these are for the most part just scripts with some wrapper information around them).Creating a SSH Public/Private SSH Key PairLog on to your handy Solaris box (You wouldn't be using any other OS, right? :P) and use ssh-keygen to create a pair of ssh keys. I'm storing this separate to my normal key:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024Generating public/private rsa key pair.Enter file in which to save the key (/export/home/geoff/.ssh/id_rsa): /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsaEnter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.Your public key has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub.The key fingerprint is:7f:3d:53:f0:2a:5e:8b:2d:94:2a:55:77:66:5c:9b:14 geoff@lightningInstalling the Public Key on the ApplianceOn your Solaris host, observe the public key:[geoff@lightning ~] cat .ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc= geoff@lightningNow, copy and paste everything after "ssh-rsa" and before "user@hostname" - in this case, geoff@lightning. That is, this bit:AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc=Logon to your appliance and get into the preferences -> keys area for this user (root):[geoff@lightning ~] ssh [email protected]: Last login: Mon Dec  6 17:13:28 2010 from 192.168.0.2fishy10:> configuration usersfishy10:configuration users> select rootfishy10:configuration users root> preferences fishy10:configuration users root preferences> keysOR do it all in one hit:fishy10:> configuration users select root preferences keysNow, we create a new public key that will be accepted for this user and set the type to RSA:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> createfishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set type=RSASet the key itself using the string copied previously (between ssh-rsa and user@host), and set the key ensuring you put double quotes around it (eg. set key="<key>"):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set key="AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc="Now set the comment for this key (do not use spaces):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set comment="LightningRSAKey" Commit the new key:fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> commitVerify the key is there:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> lsKeys:NAME     MODIFIED              TYPE   COMMENT                                  key-000  2010-10-25 20:56:42   RSA    cycloneRSAKey                           key-001  2010-12-6 17:44:53    RSA    LightningRSAKey                         As you can see, we now have my new key, and a previous key I have created on this appliance.Running your Script over SSH from a Remote SystemHere I have created a basic test script, and saved it as test.ecma3:[geoff@lightning ~] cat test.ecma3 script// This is a test script, By Geoff Ongley 2010.printf("Testing script remotely over ssh\n");.Now, we can run this script remotely with our keyless login:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh -i .ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < test.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Testing script remotely over sshPutting it Together - An Example Completed Quota Gathering ScriptSo now we have a lot of the basics to creating a script, let us do something useful, like, find out how much every user is using, on every share on the system (you will recognise some of the code from my previous examples): script/************************************** Quick and Dirty Quota Check script ** Written By Geoff Ongley            ** 25 October 2010                    **************************************/function getUserQuota(usr){        run('select ' + usr);        var username=get('name');        var usage=get('usage');        var quota=get('quota');        var usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes        var quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above        var quota_percent=0        if (quota > 0)        {                quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1);        }        printf("    %20s        %8.2f           %8.2f           %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent);        run('done'); // done with this selected user}function getShareQuota(shar){        //printf("DEBUG: selecting share %s\n", shar);        run('select ' + shar);        printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shar);        try        {                run('users');                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","--------");                                users=list();                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                {                        user=users[k];                        getUserQuota(user);                }                run('done'); // exit user context        }        catch(err)        {                printf("    SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar);        }        run('done'); // done with this share}function getShares(proj){        //printf("DEBUG: selecting project %s\n",proj);        run('select ' + proj);        shares=list();        printf("Project: %s\n", proj);        for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)        {                share=shares[j];                getShareQuota(share);        }        run('done'); // exit selected project}function getProjects(){        run('cd /');        run('shares');        projects=list();                for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++)        {                var project=projects[i];                getShares(project);        }        run('done'); // exit context for all projects}getProjects();.Which can be run as follows, and will print information like this:[geoff@lightning ~/FISHWORKS_SCRIPTS] ssh -i ~/.ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < get_quota_utilisation.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Project: another-project  SHARE: and-another                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%                   Billy            0.10            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%            testing-user            0.05            0.00        0%  SHARE: another-share                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.49        9%            testing-user            0.05            0.02        249%                   Billy            0.10            0.29        33%  SHARE: bob                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%  SHARE: more-shares-for-all                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                   Billy            0.10            0.00        0%            testing-user            0.05            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%  SHARE: yep                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                   Billy            0.10            0.01        999%            testing-user            0.05            0.49        9%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%Project: default  SHARE: Test-LUN    SKIPPING Test-LUN - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users  SHARE: test-geoff                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%                    root            3.18           10.00        31%                    uucp            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.59            0.49        119%^CKilled by signal 2.Creating a WorkflowWorkflows are scripts that we store on the appliance, and can have the script execute either on request (even from the BUI), or on an event such as a threshold being met.Workflow BasicsA workflow allows you to create a simple process that can be executed either via the BUI interface interactively, or by an alert being raised (for some threshold being reached, for example).The basics parameters you will have to set for your "workflow object" (notice you're creating a variable, that embodies ECMAScript) are as follows (parameters is optional):name: A name for this workflowdescription: A Description for the workflowparameters: A set of input parameters (useful when you need user input to execute the workflow)execute: The code, the script itself to execute, which will be function (parameters)With parameters, you can specify things like this (slightly modified sample taken from the System Administration Guide):          ...parameters:        variableParam1:         {                             label: 'Name of Share',                             type: 'String'                  },                  variableParam2                  {                             label: 'Share Size',                             type: 'size'                  },execute: ....};  Note the commas separating the sections of name, parameters, execute, and so on. This is important!Also - there is plenty of properties you can set on the parameters for your workflow, these are described in the Sun ZFS Storage System Administration Guide.Creating a Basic Workflow from a Basic ScriptTo make a basic script into a basic workflow, you need to wrap the following around your script to create a 'workflow' object:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function() {// (basic script goes here, minus the "script" at the beginning, and "." at the end)}};However, it appears (at least in my experience to date) that the workflow object may only be happy with one function in the execute parameter - either that or I'm doing something wrong. As far as I can tell, after execute: you should only have a basic one function context like so:execute: function(){}To deal with this, and to give an example similar to our script earlier, I have created another simple quota check, to show the same basic functionality, but in a workflow format:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function () {        run('cd /');        run('shares');        projects=list();                for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++)        {                run('select ' + projects[i]);                shares=list('filesystem');                printf("Project: %s\n", projects[i]);                for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)                {                        run('select ' +shares[j]);                        try                        {                                run('users');                                printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shares[j]);                                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","-------");                                users=list();                                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                                {                                        run('select ' + users[k]);                                        username=get('name');                                        usage=get('usage');                                        quota=get('quota');                                        usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes                                        quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above                                        quota_percent=0                                        if (quota > 0)                                        {                                                quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1);                                        }                                        printf("    %20s        %8.2f   %8.2f   %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent);                                        run('done');                                }                                run('done'); // exit user context                        }                        catch(err)                        {                        //      printf("    %s is a LUN, Not looking for users\n", shares[j]);                        }                        run('done'); // exit selected share context                }                run('done'); // exit project context        }        }};SummaryThe Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance offers lots of different and interesting features to Sun/Oracle customers, including the world renowned Analytics. Hopefully the above will help you to think of new creative things you could be doing by taking advantage of one of the other neat features, the internal scripting engine!Some references are below to help you continue learning more, I'll update this post as I do the same! Enjoy...More information on ECMAScript 3A complete reference to ECMAScript 3 which will help you learn more of the details you may be interested in, can be found here:http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-ARCH/ECMA-262,%203rd%20edition,%20December%201999.pdfMore Information on Administering the Sun ZFS Storage 7000The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 System Administration guide can be a useful reference point, and can be found here:http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/186238602/2010_Q3_2_ADMIN.pdf

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 23, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 23, 2011Popular ReleasesVisual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775Developer Team Article System Management: DTASM v1.3: ?? ??? ???? 3 ????? ???? ???? ????? ??? : - ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? . - ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? , ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??? . - ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? .SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...SharePoint 2010 Education Demo Project: Release SharePoint SP1 for Education Solutions: This release includes updates to the Content Packs for SharePoint SP1. All Content Packs have been updated to install successfully under SharePoint SP1SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportBugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. 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(Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. 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It helps to reproduce bugs and can be used with other logging systems.Ideopuzzle: A puzzle gameImageShack-Uploader: This project demonstrates how to upload files automated to imageshack.us and other image hosters with C#.Insert Acronym Tags: Lets you insert <acronym> and <abbr> tags into your blog entry more easily.Insert Quick Link: Allows you to paste a link into the Writer window and have the a window similar to the one in Writer where you can change what text is to appear, open in new window, etc.Insert Video Plugin: Allows you to insert a video into a blog entry from a multitude of different sitesIoCWrap: Provides a wrapper to the various IoC container implementations so that it is possible to switch to a different provider without changing any application code.kaveepoj: sharepoint projectKinect Quiz Engine: Fun quiz game for the Kinect.Klaverjas: Test application for testing different new technologies in .NET (WCF, DataServices, C# stuff, Entity...etc.)Man In The Middle: A cyberpunk themed action with puzzle and strategy elements. 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Instead of recreating functionality from memory or worse, copying from older projects, I'd like to have a central location to maintain this common code. Parseq: Parseq is a Parser Combinator library written in C# (version 2.0).PowerShell Network Adapter Configuration module: PowerShell Network Adapter Configuration module is a PowerShell module which provides functions for managing network adapters using WMI.public traffic tracker: This is a university project for a .net course. We develop a public traffic tracker applications for Windows Phone 7 devices, that can give information about the actual positions of the nearest vehicle on a given line. The speciality is that we use only the GPS information of the users' WP7 devices, so this is a completely software solution without any hardware investment. The disatvantage is that for the real operation we would need a lot of active WP7 user.puyo: puyoRadioTroll: Projeto web Radio TrollRead Feed Community: Read Feed CommunityReviewer: Reviewer.dk - Dansk spil og anmeldelsessite.Rollout Sharepoint Solutions - ROSS: ROSS performs the following actions: - Delete sitecollection and restart services - 'Get Latest Version' from SourceSafe - Rebuild Solution - Install all wsp solutions - Create SiteCollections - Check for build en provisioning errors - Send email to developers if errors occurredSchool Management: school managementSQL File Executer: This project is a class library written in c# which is used for executing *.sql files in remote server. Simply one dll file. You include it in your web project, add using statement at the top of your page, pass the parameters inside. Rest, it will do.Startup Manager: Startup Manager launches all startup programs at a managed rate therefore meaning that your computer doesn't crash everytime it starts up and you can use it immediately.stetic: ...Test Infrastructure Guidance: The purpose of this project is to provide guidance to testers in using TFS effectively as an ALM solution. TFS is much more than a simple code repository. Used with Visual Studio it can form a powerful testing solution and remove a lot of pain in dealing with test infrastructure overhead.Tête-à-tête: Tete-a-tete is an address book with a built-in function to send electronic mail over the Internet.Tipeysh! - Add-in that helps you creating C/C++ header files on a single click: Are you also feel miserable when you need to create a new header file in your Visual Studio C/C++ project? Repeatedly choosing "new header file", then writing the annoying (but needed) "#ifndef" section, then writing the class name with it's "private", "protected" and "public" access modifiers... too much clicks and typewriting! Well, there is a solution: Tipeysh! is a simple, easy to use, very handy and configurable Visual Studio Add-In, compatible for both the 2005 and 2008 versions. Once ...UMN Dashboard Project: academic projUsersMOSS: UsersMOSS est une petite application permettant de consulter sur un serveur MOSS les sites web (SPWeb) les users (SPUser), et les groupes (SPGroup). Cette application utilise le modèle objet de MOSS pour inspecter le contenu des objets d'un serveur MOSS. Cette application est loin d'être professionnelle, ou même terminée, mais elle me rend très souvent service. Surtout ne l'utilisez pas sur un serveur de production car le gestion du GC n'est pas faite, ce qui peut provoquer des plantages de v...UtilityLibrary.Win32: UtilityLibrary.Win32UW iLearn: The iLearn activity inference platform is a suite of desktop and mobile tools for logging, modeling, and classifying sensor data for mobile devices. It was created at the University of Washington.VsDocGen: Dynamic javascript documentation generation directly from xml comment documented source code.Windows Live Spaces Photo Album plugin: This is going to be a plugin for Windows Live Writer that will allow you to browse a Windows Live Space Photo Album.Windows Live Writer Plugin for Amazon Books using CueCat: This Windows Live Writer Plugin is for users who use WLW and wish to use their CueCat to scan books. ItemLookups are run against Amazon via its AWS and book image, title, author, and publisher is returned. This project was first created by Scott Hanselman on MSDN's Coding4Fun! X7: X7 makes it easier for win7user to clean the system. You'll no longer have to delete useless stuff in your win7. It's developed in bat.xDT - Commander: Using this application, the user can assign shortcuts (short texts) for various links/URLs. These short texts will be typed into a Textbox to then launch/go to the target (similar to the "Run" program in Windows).

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  • iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe

    In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. If youre seeing this series for the first time, check out Part 1: Hello World. A note on methodologyin the prior post there was some feedback about lines of code not being a very good metric for this exercise.  I dont really disagree, theres a lot more to this than lines of code but I believe that is a relevant metric, even if its not the ultimate one.  And theres no perfect answer here.  So I am going to continue to report the number of lines of code that I, as a developer would need to write in these apps as a data point, and Ill leave it up to the reader to determine how that fits in with overall complexity, etc.  The first example was so basic that I think it was difficult to talk about in real terms.  I think that as these apps get more complex, the subjective differences in concept count and will be more important.  MoveMe The MoveMe app is the main end-to-end app writing example in the iPhone SDK, called Creating an iPhone Application.  This application demonstrates a few concepts, including handling touch input, how to do animations, and how to do some basic transforms. The behavior of the application is pretty simple.  User touches the button: The button does a throb type animation where it scales up and then back down briefly. User drags the button: After a touch begins, moving the touch point will drag the button around with the touch. User lets go of the button: The button animates back to its original position, but does a few small bounces as it reaches its original point, which makes the app fun and gives it an extra bit of interactivity. Now, how would I write an app that meets this spec for Windows Phone 7 Series, and how hard would it be?  Lets find out!     Implementing the UI Okay, lets build the UI for this application.  In the HelloWorld example, we did all the UI design in Visual Studio and/or by hand in XAML.  In this example, were going to use the Expression Blend 4 Beta. You might be wondering when to use Visual Studio, when to use Blend, and when to do XAML by hand.  Different people will have different takes on this, but heres mine: XAML by hand simple UI that doesnt contain animations, gradients, etc., and or UI that I want to really optimize and craft when I know exactly what I want to do. Visual Studio Basic UI layout, property setting, data binding, etc. Blend Any serious design work needs to be done in Blend, including animations, handling states and transitions, styling and templating, editing resources. As in Part 1, go ahead and fire up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (yes, soon it will take longer to say the name of our products than to start them up!), and create a new Windows Phone Application.  As in Part 1, clear out the XAML from the designer.  An easy way to do this is to just: Click on the design surface Hit Control+A Hit Delete Theres a little bit left over (the Grid.RowDefinitions element), just go ahead and delete that element so were starting with a clean state of only one outer Grid element. To use Blend, we need to save this project.  See, when you create a project with Visual Studio Express, it doesnt commit it to the disk (well, in a place where you can find it, at least) until you actually save the project.  This is handy if youre doing some fooling around, because it doesnt clutter your disk with WindowsPhoneApplication23-like directories.  But its also kind of dangerous, since when you close VS, if you dont save the projectits all gone.  Yes, this has bitten me since I was saving files and didnt remember that, so be careful to save the project/solution via Save All, at least once. So, save and note the location on disk.  Start Expression Blend 4 Beta, and chose File > Open Project/Solution, and load your project.  You should see just about the same thing you saw over in VS: a blank, black designer surface. Now, thinking about this application, we dont really need a button, even though it looks like one.  We never click it.  So were just going to create a visual and use that.  This is also true in the iPhone example above, where the visual is actually not a button either but a jpg image with a nice gradient and round edges.  Well do something simple here that looks pretty good. In Blend, look in the tool pane on the left for the icon that looks like the below (the highlighted one on the left), and hold it down to get the popout menu, and choose Border:    Okay, now draw out a box in the middle of the design surface of about 300x100.  The Properties Pane to the left should show the properties for this item. First, lets make it more visible by giving it a border brush.  Set the BorderBrush to white by clicking BorderBrush and dragging the color selector all the way to the upper right in the palette.  Then, down a bit farther, make the BorderThickness 4 all the way around, and the CornerRadius set to 6. In the Layout section, do the following to Width, Height, Horizontal and Vertical Alignment, and Margin (all 4 margin values): Youll see the outline now is in the middle of the design surface.  Now lets give it a background color.  Above BorderBrush select Background, and click the third tab over: Gradient Brush.  Youll see a gradient slider at the bottom, and if you click the markers, you can edit the gradient stops individually (or add more).  In this case, you can select something you like, but wheres what I chose: Left stop: #BFACCFE2 (I just picked a spot on the palette and set opacity to 75%, no magic here, feel free to fiddle these or just enter these numbers into the hex area and be done with it) Right stop: #FF3E738F Okay, looks pretty good.  Finally set the name of the element in the Name field at the top of the Properties pane to welcome. Now lets add some text.  Just hit T and itll select the TextBlock tool automatically: Now draw out some are inside our welcome visual and type Welcome!, then click on the design surface (to exit text entry mode) and hit V to go back into selection mode (or the top item in the tool pane that looks like a mouse pointer).  Click on the text again to select it in the tool pane.  Just like the border, we want to center this.  So set HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Center, and clear the Margins: Thats it for the UI.  Heres how it looks, on the design surface: Not bad!  Okay, now the fun part Adding Animations Using Blend to build animations is a lot of fun, and its easy.  In XAML, I can not only declare elements and visuals, but also I can declare animations that will affect those visuals.  These are called Storyboards. To recap, well be doing two animations: The throb animation when the element is touched The center animation when the element is released after being dragged. The throb animation is just a scale transform, so well do that first.  In the Objects and Timeline Pane (left side, bottom half), click the little + icon to add a new Storyboard called touchStoryboard: The timeline view will appear.  In there, click a bit to the right of 0 to create a keyframe at .2 seconds: Now, click on our welcome element (the Border, not the TextBlock in it), and scroll to the bottom of the Properties Pane.  Open up Transform, click the third tab ("Scale), and set X and Y to 1.2: This all of this says that, at .2 seconds, I want the X and Y size of this element to scale to 1.2. In fact you can see this happen.  Push the Play arrow in the timeline view, and youll see the animation run! Lets make two tweaks.  First, we want the animation to automatically reverse so it scales up then back down nicely. Click in the dropdown that says touchStoryboard in Objects and Timeline, then in the Properties pane check Auto Reverse: Now run it again, and youll see it go both ways. Lets even make it nicer by adding an easing function. First, click on the Render Transform item in the Objects tree, then, in the Property Pane, youll see a bunch of easing functions to choose from.  Feel free to play with this, then seeing how each runs.  I chose Circle In, but some other ones are fun.  Try them out!  Elastic In is kind of fun, but well stick with Circle In.  Thats it for that animation. Now, we also want an animation to move the Border back to its original position when the user ends the touch gesture.  This is exactly the same process as above, but just targeting a different transform property. Create a new animation called releaseStoryboard Select a timeline point at 1.2 seconds. Click on the welcome Border element again Scroll to the Transforms panel at the bottom of the Properties Pane Choose the first tab (Translate), which may already be selected Set both X and Y values to 0.0 (we do this just to make the values stick, because the value is already 0 and we need Blend to know we want to save that value) Click on RenderTransform in the Objects tree In the properties pane, choose Bounce Out Set Bounces to 6, and Bounciness to 4 (feel free to play with these as well) Okay, were done. Note, if you want to test this Storyboard, you have to do something a little tricky because the final value is the same as the initial value, so playing it does nothing.  If you want to play with it, do the following: Next to the selection dropdown, hit the little "x (Close Storyboard) Go to the Translate Transform value for welcome Set X,Y to 50, 200, respectively (or whatever) Select releaseStoryboard again from the dropdown Hit play, see it run Go into the object tree and select RenderTransform to change the easing function. When youre done, hit the Close Storyboard x again and set the values in Transform/Translate back to 0 Wiring Up the Animations Okay, now go back to Visual Studio.  Youll get a prompt due to the modification of MainPage.xaml.  Hit Yes. In the designer, click on the welcome Border element.  In the Property Browser, hit the Events button, then double click each of ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, ManipulationCompleted.  Youll need to flip back to the designer from code, after each double click. Its code time.  Here we go. Here, three event handlers have been created for us: welcome_ManipulationStarted: This will execute when a manipulation begins.  Think of it as MouseDown. welcome_ManipulationDelta: This executes each time a manipulation changes.  Think MouseMove. welcome_ManipulationCompleted: This will  execute when the manipulation ends. Think MouseUp. Now, in ManipuliationStarted, we want to kick off the throb animation that we called touchAnimation.  Thats easy: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationStarted(object sender, ManipulationStartedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: touchStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .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; } Likewise, when the manipulation completes, we want to re-center the welcome visual with our bounce animation: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: releaseStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .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 there is actually a way to kick off these animations from Blend directly via something called Triggers, but I think its clearer to show whats going on like this.  A Trigger basically allows you to say When this event fires, trigger this Storyboard, so its the exact same logical process as above, but without the code. But how do we get the object to move?  Well, for that we really dont want an animation because we want it to respond immediately to user input. We do this by directly modifying the transform to match the offset for the manipulation, and then well let the animation bring it back to zero when the manipulation completes.  The manipulation events do a great job of keeping track of all the stuff that you usually had to do yourself when doing drags: where you started from, how far youve moved, etc. So we can easily modify the position as below: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e) 2: { 3: CompositeTransform transform = (CompositeTransform)welcome.RenderTransform; 4:   5: transform.TranslateX = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.X; 6: transform.TranslateY = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.Y; 7: } .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; } Thats it! Go ahead and run the app in the emulator.  I suggest running without the debugger, its a little faster (CTRL+F5).  If youve got a machine that supports DirectX 10, youll see nice smooth GPU accelerated graphics, which also what it looks like on the phone, running at about 60 frames per second.  If your machine does not support DX10 (like the laptop Im writing this on!), it wont be quite a smooth so youll have to take my word for it! Comparing Against the iPhone This is an example where the flexibility and power of XAML meets the tooling of Visual Studio and Blend, and the whole experience really shines.  So, for several things that are declarative and 100% toolable with the Windows Phone 7 Series, this example does them with code on the iPhone.  In parens is the lines of code that I count to do these operations. PlacardView.m: 19 total LOC Creating the view that hosts the button-like image and the text Drawing the image that is the background of the button Drawing the Welcome text over the image (I think you could technically do this step and/or the prior one using Interface Builder) MoveMeView.m:  63 total LOC Constructing and running the scale (throb) animation (25) Constructing the path describing the animation back to center plus bounce effect (38) Beyond the code count, yy experience with doing this kind of thing in code is that its VERY time intensive.  When I was a developer back on Windows Forms, doing GDI+ drawing, we did this stuff a lot, and it took forever!  You write some code and even once you get it basically working, you see its not quite right, you go back, tweak the interval, or the math a bit, run it again, etc.  You can take a look at the iPhone code here to judge for yourself.  Scroll down to animatePlacardViewToCenter toward the bottom.  I dont think this code is terribly complicated, but its not what Id call simple and its not at all simple to get right. And then theres a few other lines of code running around for setting up the ViewController and the Views, about 15 lines between MoveMeAppDelegate, PlacardView, and MoveMeView, plus the assorted decls in the h files. Adding those up, I conservatively get something like 100 lines of code (19+63+15+decls) on iPhone that I have to write, by hand, to make this project work. The lines of code that I wrote in the examples above is 5 lines of code on Windows Phone 7 Series. In terms of incremental concept counts beyond the HelloWorld app, heres a shot at that: iPhone: Drawing Images Drawing Text Handling touch events Creating animations Scaling animations Building a path and animating along that Windows Phone 7 Series: Laying out UI in Blend Creating & testing basic animations in Blend Handling touch events Invoking animations from code This was actually the first example I tried converting, even before I did the HelloWorld, and I was pretty surprised.  Some of this is luck that this app happens to match up with the Windows Phone 7 Series platform just perfectly.  In terms of time, I wrote the above application, from scratch, in about 10 minutes.  I dont know how long it would take a very skilled iPhone developer to write MoveMe on that iPhone from scratch, but if I was to write it on Silverlight in the same way (e.g. all via code), I think it would likely take me at least an hour or two to get it all working right, maybe more if I ended up picking the wrong strategy or couldnt get the math right, etc. Making Some Tweaks Silverlight contains a feature called Projections to do a variety of 3D-like effects with a 2D surface. So lets play with that a bit. Go back to Blend and select the welcome Border in the object tree.  In its properties, scroll down to the bottom, open Transform, and see Projection at the bottom.  Set X,Y,Z to 90.  Youll see the element kind of disappear, replaced by a thin blue line. Now Create a new animation called startupStoryboard. Set its key time to .5 seconds in the timeline view Set the projection values above to 0 for X, Y, and Z. Save Go back to Visual Studio, and in the constructor, add the following bold code (lines 7-9 to the constructor: 1: public MainPage() 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4:   5: SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait; 6:   7: this.Loaded += (s, e) => 8: { 9: startupStoryboard.Begin(); 10: }; 11: } .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; } If the code above looks funny, its using something called a lambda in C#, which is an inline anonymous method.  Its just a handy shorthand for creating a handler like the manipulation ones above. So with this youll get a nice 3D looking fly in effect when the app starts up.  Here it is, in flight: Pretty cool!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Mono Winforms Mac OS X Relpacement for WebBrowser

    - by Tristan
    I'm one step away from having my Windows .Net application working on Mac OS X, and the last thing I need to figure out is the WebBrowser control. I need to display a webpage and not much more with winforms but haven't been able to find any examples or information on how I can replace the WebBrowser control on Mac OS X Has anyone already found a solution for a web control replacement using winforms on mac os x, and can point me to some source code or talk me through it?

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  • How do I convert an INT into HH:mm:ss using SSRS 2005

    - by user293249
    Ok I need to display total talk time of an agent that is coming into SRSS 2005 from SQL 2005 as an INT. For the life of me I cannot figure out what combination of expression editing or format editing I need to use. For the detail portion I can use: =DATEADD("s", SUM(Fields!Talk_Time.Value), CDate("00:00")) And it will return: 1/1/0001 12:00:14 AM Now I can use =LEFT(DATEADD("s", SUM(Fields!Talk_Time.Value), CDate("00:00")),8) Which will return: 12:00:14 But really what I need is: 00:00:14 Please help!

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  • SVN on Team Foundation Server - Delphi 2010

    - by BahaiResearch.com
    We're looking to upgrade to Delphi 2010 and have Team Foundation Server as our source Control. Is there a plug in for TFS that allows clients to talk to it via SVN? I noticed that CodePlex, Microsoft's open source web service, supports TFS and SVN so am hoping that there is a SVN plug in for TFS. Ian

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  • Objective C for beginners

    - by Golfgod130
    I was just asked to talk about Objective C to a bunch of High School student for 20 minutes. They have no experience with programming at all. What topics should I cover? Should I define vocab such as Method, Class, Variable? Or should I do something else? Any comments are helpful!

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  • Non-flash / No-plugin Video chat?

    - by matty
    We are developing a social website and looking to implement video/audio chat for users (people a user is friends with). Most of the talk from the tech team was to use flash. But I don't want users to install anything. Can video/audio/conferencing be done purely in AJAX? Either develop it from scratch or use open source frameworks if any?

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  • Can't enter to webadmin in godaddy mssql

    - by gon009
    I just pay for the deluxe plan in godaddy for my website but I have a problem, I created the database in mssql and when I click to webadmin ,it redirects me to: http://mssql.myname.com/silentlogon.aspx with the message: This webpage is not available. But if I create a mysql database everything is ok, idk what I am doing wrong , I know I cant contact GoDaddy but the line is busy or when I talk to them they don't understand. Thanks four your time and help :)

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  • Can I use HTML5 Now to create a website

    - by Steve
    After all the latest news and talk about HTML5, I would like to know whether I can use HTML5 to create a website as of now. I mean, some features are supported by few browsers, while few features are not yet supported. So is it possible to create a full-fledged website at the current state?

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  • JQuery/JS Markdown plugin?

    - by Rosarch
    I'm writing a chat app, and I'd like to add some simple functionality where users use markup to affect text formatting, like bold or italics. I'm envisioning this would be like how it is done on Google Talk or StackOverflow. Does JQuery have any plugins to do this?

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  • Caliburn and prism samples

    - by Simon
    Are there any sample applications avaliable that make use of both caliburn and prism? I know there are blogs that talk about it but I would like to wade into some code and see how it all fits together. http://caliburn.codeplex.com http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/

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  • What's your take on the programming language Go?

    - by fbrereto
    I've just been told about a new programming language, Go, developed at Google by such notables as Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. Does anyone have any experience with it so far? What are your thoughts about how viable small- and large-scale applications could be developed with it? Relevant links (thanks to Lance Roberts; feel free to update these as necessary): Ars-Technica PC World Google Open Source Blog Tech Talk Video Go Mailing List

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