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Hoe to convert a JSON array of paths to images stored on a server into a javaScript array to display them? Using AJAX

- by MichaelF

I need for html file/ ajax code to take the JSON message and store the PATHS as a javaScript array. Then my buildImage function can display the first image in the array. I'm new to AJAX and believe my misunderstanding lies within the converting of the JSON to Javascript. I'm confused also about if my code creates a JSON array or object or either. I might need also to download a library to my app to understand JSON? Below is a PHP file loading the paths of the images. I believe json ecode is converting the PHP Array in a Json message. <?php include("mysqlconnect.php"); $select_query = "SELECT `ImagesPath` FROM `offerstbl` ORDER by `ImagesId` DESC"; $sql = mysql_query($select_query) or die(mysql_error()); $data = array(); while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql,MYSQL_BOTH)){ $data[] = $row['ImagesPath']; } echo $images = json_encode($data); ?> Below is the script in is going to be loaded on an Cordova app. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/cascading.css"> <script> function importJson(str) { // console.log(typeof xmlhttp.responseText); if (str=="") { document.getElementById("content").innerHTML=""; return; } if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); } else { // code for IE6, IE5 xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() { if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) { //var images = JSON.parse(xmlhttp.responseText); document.getElementById("content").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText; } } xmlhttp.open("GET","http://server/content.php"); xmlhttp.send(); } function buildImage(src) { var img = document.createElement('img') img.src = src alert("1"); document.getElementById('content').appendChild(img); } for (var i = 0; i < images.length; i++) { buildImage(images[i]); } </script> </head> <body onload= "importJson();"> <div class="contents" id="content" ></div> <img src="img/logo.png" height="10px" width="10px" onload= "buildImage();"> </body>

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Spring OpenSessionInViewFilter with @Transactional annotation

- by Gautam

This is regarding Spring OpenSessionInViewFilter using with @Transactional annotation at service layer. i went through so many stack overflow post on this but still confused about whether i should use OpenSessionInViewFilter or not to avoid LazyInitializationException It would be great help if somebody help me find out answer to below queries. Is it bad practice to use OpenSessionInViewFilter in application having complex schema. using this filter can cause N+1 problem if we are using OpenSessionInViewFilter does it mean @Transactional not required? Below is my Spring config file <context:component-scan base-package="com.test"/> <context:annotation-config/> <bean id="messageSource" class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource"> <property name="basename" value="resources/messages" /> <property name="defaultEncoding" value="UTF-8" /> </bean> <bean id="propertyConfigurer" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer" p:location="/WEB-INF/jdbc.properties" /> <bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close" p:driverClassName="${jdbc.driverClassName}" p:url="${jdbc.databaseurl}" p:username="${jdbc.username}" p:password="${jdbc.password}" /> <bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean"> <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" /> <property name="configLocation"> <value>classpath:hibernate.cfg.xml</value> </property> <property name="configurationClass"> <value>org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration</value> </property> <property name="hibernateProperties"> <props> <prop key="hibernate.dialect">${jdbc.dialect}</prop> <prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>  </props> </property> </bean> <tx:annotation-driven /> <bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager"> <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory" /> </bean>

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Java array of arry [matrix] of an integer partition with fixed term

- by user335209

Hello, for my study purpose I need to build an array of array filled with the partitions of an integer with fixed term. That is given an integer, suppose 10 and given the fixed number of terms, suppose 5 I need to populate an array like this 10 0 0 0 0 9 0 0 0 1 8 0 0 0 2 7 0 0 0 3 ............ 9 0 0 1 0 8 0 0 1 1 ............. 7 0 1 1 0 6 0 1 1 1 ............ ........... 0 6 1 1 1 ............. 0 0 0 0 10 am pretty new to Java and am getting confused with all the for loops. Right now my code can do the partition of the integer but unfortunately it is not with fixed term public class Partition { private static int[] riga; private static void printPartition(int[] p, int n) { for (int i= 0; i < n; i++) System.out.print(p[i]+" "); System.out.println(); } private static void partition(int[] p, int n, int m, int i) { if (n == 0) printPartition(p, i); else for (int k= m; k > 0; k--) { p[i]= k; partition(p, n-k, n-k, i+1); } } public static void main(String[] args) { riga = new int[6]; for(int i = 0; i<riga.length; i++){ riga[i] = 0; } partition(riga, 6, 1, 0); } } the output I get it from is like this: 1 5 1 4 1 1 3 2 1 3 1 1 1 2 3 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 what i'm actually trying to understand how to proceed is to have it with a fixed terms which would be the columns of my array. So, am stuck with trying to get a way to make it less dynamic. Any help?

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How to use jQuery to generate 2 new associated objects in a nested form?

- by mind.blank

I have a model called Pair, which has_many :questions, and each Question has_one :answer. I've been following this railscast on creating nested forms, however I want to generate both a Question field and it's Answer field when clicking on an "Add Question" link. After following the railscast this is what I have: ..javascripts/common.js.coffee: window.remove_fields = (link)-> $(link).closest(".question_remove").remove() window.add_fields = (link, association, content)-> new_id = new Date().getTime() regexp = new RegExp("new_" + association, "g") $(link).before(content.replace(regexp, new_id)) application_helper.rb: def link_to_add_fields(name, f, association) new_object = f.object.class.reflect_on_association(association).klass.new fields = f.simple_fields_for(association, new_object, :child_index => "new_#{association}") do |builder| render(association.to_s.singularize + "_fields", :f => builder) end link_to_function(name, "window.add_fields(this, \"#{association}\", \"#{escape_javascript(fields)}\")", class: "btn btn-inverse") end views/pairs/_form.html.erb: <%= simple_form_for(@pair) do |f| %> <div class="row"> <div class="well span4"> <%= f.input :sys_heading, label: "System Heading", placeholder: "required", input_html: { class: "span4" } %> <%= f.input :heading, label: "User Heading", input_html: { class: "span4" } %> <%= f.input :instructions, as: :text, input_html: { class: "span4 input_text" } %> </div> </div> <%= f.simple_fields_for :questions do |builder| %> <%= render 'question_fields', f: builder %> <% end %> <%= link_to_add_fields "<i class='icon-plus icon-white'></i> Add Another Question".html_safe, f, :questions %> <%= f.button :submit, "Save Pair", class: "btn btn-success" %> <% end %> _question_fields.html.erb partial: <div class="question_remove"> <div class="row"> <div class="well span4"> <%= f.input :text, label: "Question", input_html: { class: "span4" }, placeholder: "your question...?" %> <%= f.simple_fields_for :answer do |builder| %> <%= render 'answer_fields', f: builder %> <% end %> </div> </div> </div> _answer_fields.html.erb partial: <%= f.input :text, label: "Answer", input_html: { class: "span4" }, placeholder: "your answer" %> <%= link_to_function "remove", "remove_fields(this)", class: "float-right" %> I'm especially confused by the reflect_on_association part, for example how does calling .new there create an association? I usually need to use .build Also for a has_one I use .build_answer rather than answers.build - so what does this mean for the jQuery part?

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"Undefined reference to"

- by user1332364

I know that there are a lot of questions somewhat related to this one, but they answers are a bit hard for me to make sense of. I'm receiving the following error for a few different lines of code: C:\Users\Jeff\AppData\Local\Temp\ccAixtmT.o:football.cpp:(.text+0x6f0): undefined reference to `Player::set_values(int, std::string, float)' From these blocks of code: class Player { int playerNum; string playerPos; float playerRank; public: void set_values(int, string, float); float get_rank(){ return playerRank; }; bool operator == (const Player &p1/*, const Player &p2*/) const { if(&p1.playerNum == &playerNum && &p1.playerPos == &playerPos && &p1.playerRank == &playerRank) return true; else return false; }; }; And this being the main function referencing the subclass: int main() { ifstream infile; infile.open ("input.txt", ifstream::in); int numTeams; string command; while(!infile.fail() && !infile.eof()){ infile >> numTeams; string name; Player p; int playNum; string playPos; float playRank; Player all[11]; float ranks[11]; Team allTeams[numTeams]; for(int i=0; i<numTeams; i++){ infile >> name; for(int j=0; j<11; j++){ infile >> playNum; infile >> playPos; infile >> playRank; if(playPos == "QB") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank*2.0)); else if(playPos == "RB") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank*1.5)); else if(playPos == "WR") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank/1.8)); else if(playPos == "TE") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank*1.1)); else if(playPos == "GD") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank/2.0)); else if(playPos == "TC") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank/2.2)); else if(playPos == "CR") p.set_values(playNum, playPos, (playRank/1.2)); all[j] = p; allTeams[i].set_values(all, name); } } infile >> command; if (command == "play"){ int t1; int t2; infile >> t1; infile >> t2; play(allTeams[t1], allTeams[t2]); } else { int t1; int p1; int t2; int p2; swap(allTeams[t1], allTeams[t1].get_player(p1), allTeams[t2], allTeams[t2].get_player(p2)); } } }

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Should the argument be passed by reference in this .net example?

- by Hamish Grubijan

I have used Java, C++, .Net. (in that order). When asked about by-value vs. by-ref on interviews, I have always done well on that question ... perhaps because nobody went in-depth on it. Now I know that I do not see the whole picture. I was looking at this section of code written by someone else: XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); AppendX(doc); // Real name of the function is different AppendY(doc); // ditto When I saw this code, I thought: wait a minute, should not I use a ref in front of doc variable (and modify AppendX/Y accordingly? it works as written, but made me question whether I actually understand the ref keyword in C#. As I thought about this more, I recalled early Java days (college intro language). A friend of mine looked at some code I have written and he had a mental block - he kept asking me which things are passed in by reference and when by value. My ignorant response was something like: Dude, there is only one kind of arg passing in Java and I forgot which one it is :). Chill, do not over-think and just code. Java still does not have a ref does it? Yet, Java hackers seem to be productive. Anyhow, coding in C++ exposed me to this whole by reference business, and now I am confused. Should ref be used in the example above? I am guessing that when ref is applied to value types: primitives, enums, structures (is there anything else in this list?) it makes a big difference. And ... when applied to objects it does not because it is all by reference. If things were so simple, then why would not the compiler restrict the usage of ref keyword to a subset of types. When it comes to objects, does ref serve as a comment sort of? Well, I do remember that there can be problems with null and ref is also useful for initializing multiple elements within a method (since you cannot return multiple things with the same easy as you would do in Python). Thanks.

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Yii Many_Many Relationship and Form

- by Thorpe Obazee

// Post model return array( 'categories' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Category', 'posts_categories(post_id, category_id)') ); I already have the setup of tables posts id, title, content categories id, name posts_categories post_id, category_i The problem I have is that I am getting an error when creating this form: <?php $form=$this->beginWidget('CActiveForm', array( 'id'=>'post-form', 'enableAjaxValidation'=>false, )); ?> <p class="note">Fields with <span class="required">*</span> are required.</p> <?php echo $form->errorSummary($model); ?> <div class="row"> <?php echo $form->labelEx($model,'title'); ?> <?php echo $form->textField($model,'title',array('size'=>60,'maxlength'=>255)); ?> <?php echo $form->error($model,'title'); ?> </div> <div class="row"> <?php echo $form->labelEx($model,'uri'); ?> <?php echo $form->textField($model,'uri',array('size'=>60,'maxlength'=>255)); ?> <?php echo $form->error($model,'uri'); ?> </div> <div class="row"> <?php echo $form->labelEx($model,'content'); ?> <?php echo $form->textArea($model,'content',array('rows'=>6, 'cols'=>50)); ?> <?php echo $form->error($model,'content'); ?> </div> <div class="row"> <?php // echo $form->labelEx($model,'content'); ?> <?php echo CHtml::activeDropDownList($model,'category_id', CHtml::listData(Category::model()->findAll(), 'id', 'name')); ?> <?php // echo $form->error($model,'content'); ?> </div> <div class="row buttons"> <?php echo CHtml::submitButton($model->isNewRecord ? 'Create' : 'Save'); ?> </div> <?php $this->endWidget(); ?> The error is: Property "Post.category_id" is not defined. I am quite confused. What should I be doing to correct this?

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Translating a C# WCF app into Visual Basic

- by MikeG

I'm trying to write a simple/small Windows Communication Foundation service application in Visual Basic (but I am very novice in VB) and all the good examples I've found on the net are written in C#. So far I've gotten my WCF service application working but now I'm trying to add callback functionality and the program has gotten more complicated. In the C# example code I understand how everything works but I am having trouble translating into VB the portion of code that uses a delegate. Can someone please show the VB equivalent? Here is the C# code sample I'm using for reference: namespace WCFCallbacks { using System; using System.ServiceModel; [ServiceContract(CallbackContract = typeof(IMessageCallback))] public interface IMessage { [OperationContract] void AddMessage(string message); [OperationContract] bool Subscribe(); [OperationContract] bool Unsubscribe(); } interface IMessageCallback { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void OnMessageAdded(string message, DateTime timestamp); } } namespace WCFCallbacks { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ServiceModel; public class MessageService : IMessage { private static readonly List<IMessageCallback> subscribers = new List<IMessageCallback>(); //The code in this AddMessage method is what I'd like to see re-written in VB... public void AddMessage(string message) { subscribers.ForEach(delegate(IMessageCallback callback) { if (((ICommunicationObject)callback).State == CommunicationState.Opened) { callback.OnMessageAdded(message, DateTime.Now); } else { subscribers.Remove(callback); } }); } public bool Subscribe() { try { IMessageCallback callback = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IMessageCallback>(); if (!subscribers.Contains(callback)) subscribers.Add(callback); return true; } catch { return false; } } public bool Unsubscribe() { try { IMessageCallback callback = OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<IMessageCallback>(); if (!subscribers.Contains(callback)) subscribers.Remove(callback); return true; } catch { return false; } } } } I was thinking I could do something like this but I don't know how to pass the message string from AddMessage to DoSomething... Dim subscribers As New List(Of IMessageCallback) Public Sub AddMessage(ByVal message As String) Implements IMessage.AddMessage Dim action As Action(Of IMessageCallback) action = AddressOf DoSomething subscribers.ForEach(action) 'Or this instead of the above three lines: 'subscribers.ForEach(AddressOf DoSomething) End Sub Public Sub DoSomething(ByVal callback As IMessageCallback) 'I am also confused by: '((ICommunicationObject)callback).State 'Is that casting the callback object as type ICommunicationObject? 'How is that done in VB? End Sub

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Figuring out QuadCurveTo's parameters

- by Fev

Could you guys help me figuring out QuadCurveTo's 4 parameters , I tried to find information on http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/scene/shape/QuadCurveTo.html, but it's hard for me to understand without picture , I search on google about 'Quadratic Bezier' but it shows me more than 2 coordinates, I'm confused and blind now. I know those 4 parameters draw 2 lines to control the path , but how we know/count exactly which coordinates the object will throught by only knowing those 2 path-controller. Are there some formulas? import javafx.animation.PathTransition; import javafx.animation.PathTransition.OrientationType; import javafx.application.Application; import static javafx.application.Application.launch; import javafx.scene.Group; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.paint.Color; import javafx.scene.shape.MoveTo; import javafx.scene.shape.Path; import javafx.scene.shape.QuadCurveTo; import javafx.scene.shape.Rectangle; import javafx.stage.Stage; import javafx.util.Duration; public class _6 extends Application { public Rectangle r; @Override public void start(final Stage stage) { r = new Rectangle(50, 80, 80, 90); r.setFill(javafx.scene.paint.Color.ORANGE); r.setStrokeWidth(5); r.setStroke(Color.ANTIQUEWHITE); Path path = new Path(); path.getElements().add(new MoveTo(100.0f, 400.0f)); path.getElements().add(new QuadCurveTo(150.0f, 60.0f, 100.0f, 20.0f)); PathTransition pt = new PathTransition(Duration.millis(1000), path); pt.setDuration(Duration.millis(10000)); pt.setNode(r); pt.setPath(path); pt.setOrientation(OrientationType.ORTHOGONAL_TO_TANGENT); pt.setCycleCount(4000); pt.setAutoReverse(true); pt.play(); stage.setScene(new Scene(new Group(r), 500, 700)); stage.show(); } public static void main(String[] args) { launch(args); } } You can find those coordinates on this new QuadCurveTo(150.0f, 60.0f, 100.0f, 20.0f) line, and below is the picture of Quadratic Bezier

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IntentService android download and return file to Activity

- by Andrew G

I have a fairly tricky situation that I'm trying to determine the best design for. The basics are this: I'm designing a messaging system with a similar interface to email. When a user clicks a message that has an attachment, an activity is spawned that shows the text of that message along with a paper clip signaling that there is an additional attachment. At this point, I begin preloading the attachment so that when the user clicks on it - it loads more quickly. currently, when the user clicks the attachment, it prompts with a loading dialog until the download is complete at which point it loads a separate attachment viewer activity, passing in the bmp byte array. I don't ever want to save attachments to persistent storage. The difficulty I have is in supporting rotation as well as home button presses etc. The download is currently done with a thread and handler setup. Instead of this, I'd like the flow to be the following: User loads message as before, preloading begins of attachment as before (invisible to user). When the user clicks on the attachment link, the attachment viewer activity is spawned right away. If the download was done, the image is displayed. If not, a dialog is shown in THIS activity until it is done and can be displayed. Note that ideally the download never restarts or else I've wasted cycles on the preload. Obviously I need some persistent background process that is able to keep downloading and is able to call back to arbitrarily bonded Activities. It seems like the IntentService almost fits my needs as it does its work in a background thread and has the Service (non UI) lifecycle. However, will it work for my other needs? I notice that common implementations for what I want to do get a Messenger from the caller Activity so that a Message object can be sent back to a Handler in the caller's thread. This is all well and good but what happens in my case when the caller Activity is Stopped or Destroyed and the currently active Activity (the attachment viewer) is showing? Is there some way to dynamically bind a new Activity to a running IntentService so that I can send a Message back to the new Activity? The other question is on the Message object. Can I send arbitrarily large data back in this package? For instance, rather than send back that "The file was downloaded", I need to send back the byte array of the downloaded file itself since I never want to write it to disk (and yes this needs to be the case). Any advice on achieving the behavior I want is greatly appreciated. I've not been working with Android for that long and I often get confused with how to best handle asynchronous processes over the course of the Activity lifecycle especially when it comes to orientation changes and home button presses...

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customizing item renderer

- by BretzelPretzel

i would like the label and message to be on the left of the icon....i would also like the icon to be right-aligned what is the best way to do this? I'm confused by some of the tutorials i'm seeing for custom item renderers since they never explain how to format the renderer mxml, so i haven't figured that out yet although i suspect that's what i need to be doing <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <s:View xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" xmlns:components="components.*" creationComplete="imagelistings.send()" title="{data.title}"> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.collections.ArrayCollection; import mx.events.FlexEvent; import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent; import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent; import spark.events.IndexChangeEvent; import valueObjects.imagelistingclass; [Bindable] private var listings:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection(); protected function toursService_resultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void { var listingarray:ArrayCollection=event.result.Chapter1.entry; var entry:imagelistingclass; for each(var plate:Object in listingarray) { entry=new imagelistingclass(); entry.image=plate.image; entry.location=plate.location; entry.html=plate.html; listings.addItem(entry); } } ]]> </fx:Script> <fx:Declarations> <s:HTTPService id="imagelistings" result="toursService_resultHandler(event)" url="assets/chapter1info.xml"/> </fx:Declarations> <s:List id="theList" left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="0" alternatingItemColors="#000000" contentBackgroundColor="#404040" dataProvider="{listings}" horizontalScrollPolicy="off" > <s:itemRenderer> <fx:Component> <s:IconItemRenderer color="#FFFFFF" fontSize="30" iconField="location" labelField="" iconFillMode="scale" iconScaleMode="letterbox" iconHeight="125" messageField="image"> </s:IconItemRenderer> </fx:Component> </s:itemRenderer> </s:List>

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PHP_AUTH_USER only known in certain frames

- by Rob

Getting very confused by PHP_AUTH_USER. Within my web pages I have .htaccess files in every directory, controlling who can (and cant) see certain folders. In order to further customise the pages I was hoping to use PHP_AUTH_USER within the PHP code, i.e. tailor page contents based on the user. This only seems to work partially. The code snippets below hopefully demonstrate my problems. The main index.php creates a framed page with a menu structure in the top left hand corners, some irrelvant stuff in top right and then the tailor made contents in bottom frame. In top left the user is correctly shown, but in the bottom frame PHP_AUTH_USER doesnt seem to be set anymore (it returns empty and when printing all $HTTP_SERVER_VARS its not listed). Script.php is in a different path, but they all have .htaccess files in them and all other contents is displayed correctly. Why does it not know about PHP_AUTH_USER there? Running version php version 5.2.12 on chrome. index.php <FRAMESET ROWS="35%, *"> <FRAMESET COLS="25%, *"> <FRAME SRC="Menu.php"> <FRAME SRC="Something.php"> </FRAMESET> <FRAME SRC="../OtherPath/Script.php?large=1" name="outputlisting"> </FRAMESET> </FRAMESET> Menu.php <ul> <li>Reporting <ul> <li>Link1 <a href="../OtherPath/Script.php" target="outputlisting">All</a>, <a href="../OtherPath/Script.php?large=1" target="outputlisting">Big</a> </ul> <?php echo 'IP Address: ' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . '<br />'; echo 'User: ' . $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']; ?> Script.php <?php echo 'User: ' . $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']; ?>

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Constructors from extended class in Java

- by Crystal

I'm having some trouble with a hw assignment. In one assignment, we had to create a Person class. Mine was: public class Person { String firstName; String lastName; String telephone; String email; public Person() { firstName = ""; lastName = ""; telephone = ""; email = ""; } public Person(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String telephone, String email) { this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.telephone = telephone; this.email = email; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getTelephone() { return telephone; } public void setTelephone(String telephone) { this.telephone = telephone; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } public boolean equals(Object otherObject) { // a quick test to see if the objects are identical if (this == otherObject) { return true; } // must return false if the explicit parameter is null if (otherObject == null) { return false; } if (!(otherObject instanceof Person)) { return false; } Person other = (Person) otherObject; return firstName.equals(other.firstName) && lastName.equals(other.lastName) && telephone.equals(other.telephone) && email.equals(other.email); } public int hashCode() { return 7 * firstName.hashCode() + 11 * lastName.hashCode() + 13 * telephone.hashCode() + 15 * email.hashCode(); } public String toString() { return getClass().getName() + "[firstName = " + firstName + '\n' + "lastName = " + lastName + '\n' + "telephone = " + telephone + '\n' + "email = " + email + "]"; } } Now we have to extend that class and use that class in our constructor. The function protoype is: public CarLoan(Person client, double vehiclePrice, double downPayment, double salesTax, double interestRate, CAR_LOAN_TERMS length) I'm confused on how I use the Person constructor from the superclass. I cannot necessarily do super(client); in my constructor which is what the book did with some primitive types in their example. Not sure what the correct thing to do is... Any thoughts? Thanks!

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I just learned about C++ functions; can I use if statements on function return values?

- by Sagistic

What I am confused on is about the isNumPalindrome() function. It returns a boolean value of either true or false. How am I suppose to use that so I can display if it's a palindrome or not. For ex. if (isNumPalindrome == true) cout << "Your number is a palindrome"; else cout << "your number is not a palindrome."; #include "stdafx.h" int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { return 0; } #include <iostream> #include <cmath> using namespace std; int askNumber(); bool isNumPalindrome(); int num, pwr; int main() { askNumber(); return 0; } bool isNumPalindrome() { int pwr = 0; if (num < 10) return true; else { while (num / static_cast<int>(pow(10.0, pwr)) >=10) pwr++; while (num >=10) { int tenTopwr = static_cast<int>(pow(10.0, pwr)); if ((num / tenTopwr) != (num% 10)) return false; else { num = num % tenTopwr; num = num / 10; pwr = pwr-2; } } return true; } } int askNumber() { cout << "Enter an integer in order to determine if it is a palindrome: " ; cin >> num; cout << endl; if(isNumPalindrome(num)) { cout << "It is a palindrome." ; cout << endl; } else { cout << "It is not a palindrome." ; cout << endl; } return num; }

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How to Upgrade Your Netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like more features and flash in Windows on your netbook? Here’s how you can easily upgrade your netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium the easy way. Most new netbooks today ship with Windows 7 Starter, which is the cheapest edition of Windows 7. It is fine for many computing tasks, and will run all your favorite programs great, but it lacks many customization, multimedia, and business features found in higher editions. Here we’ll show you how you can quickly upgrade your netbook to more full-featured edition of Windows 7 using Windows Anytime Upgrade. Also, if you want to upgrade your laptop or desktop to another edition of Windows 7, say Professional, you can follow these same steps to upgrade it, too. Please note: This is only for computers already running Windows 7. If your netbook is running XP or Vista, you will have to run a traditional upgrade to install Windows 7. Upgrade Advisor First, let’s make sure your netbook can support the extra features, such as Aero Glass, in Windows 7 Home Premium. Most modern netbooks that ship with Windows 7 Starter can run the advanced features in Windows 7 Home Premium, but let’s check just in case. Download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor (link below), and install as normal. Once it’s installed, run it and click Start Check. Make sure you’re connected to the internet before you run the check, or otherwise you may see this error message. If you see it, click Ok and then connect to the internet and start the check again. It will now scan all of your programs and hardware to make sure they’re compatible with Windows 7. Since you’re already running Windows 7 Starter, it will also tell you if your computer will support the features in other editions of Windows 7. After a few moments, the Upgrade Advisor will show you want it found. Here we see that our netbook, a Samsung N150, can be upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate. We also see that we had one issue, but this was because a driver we had installed was not recognized. Click “See all system requirements” to see what your netbook can do with the new edition. This shows you which of the requirements, including support for Windows Aero, your netbook meets. Here our netbook supports Aero, so we’re ready to go upgrade. For more, check out our article on how to make sure your computer can run Windows 7 with Upgrade Advisor. Upgrade with Anytime Upgrade Now, we’re ready to upgrade our netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium. Enter “Anytime Upgrade” in the Start menu search,and select Windows Anytime Upgrade. Windows Anytime Upgrade lets you upgrade using product key you already have or one you purchase during the upgrade process. And, it installs without any downloads or Windows disks, so it works great even for netbooks without DVD drives. Anytime Upgrades are cheaper than a standard upgrade, and for a limited time, select retailers in the US are offering Anytime Upgrades to Windows 7 Home Premium for only $49.99 if purchased with a new netbook. If you already have a netbook running Windows 7 Starter, you can either purchase an Anytime Upgrade package at a retail store or purchase a key online during the upgrade process for $79.95. Or, if you have a standard Windows 7 product key (full or upgrade), you can use it in Anytime upgrade. This is especially nice if you can purchase Windows 7 cheaper through your school, university, or office. Purchase an upgrade online To purchase an upgrade online, click “Go online to choose the edition of Windows 7 that’s best for you”. Here you can see a comparison of the features of each edition of Windows 7. Note that you can upgrade to either Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate. We chose home Premium because it has most of the features that home users want, including Media Center and Aero Glass effects. Also note that the price of each upgrade is cheaper than the respective upgrade from Windows XP or Vista. Click buy under the edition you want. Enter your billing information, then your payment information. Once you confirm your purchase, you will directly be taken to the Upgrade screen. Make sure to save your receipt, as you will need the product key if you ever need to reinstall Windows on your computer. Upgrade with an existing product key If you purchased an Anytime Upgrade kit from a retailer, or already have a Full or Upgrade key for another edition of Windows 7, choose “Enter an upgrade key”. Enter your product key, and click Next. If you purchased an Anytime Upgrade kit, the product key will be located on the inside of the case on a yellow sticker. The key will be verified as a valid key, and Anytime Upgrade will automatically choose the correct edition of Windows 7 based on your product key. Click Next when this is finished. Continuing the Upgrade process Whether you entered a key or purchased a key online, the process is the same from here on. Click “I accept” to accept the license agreement. Now, you’re ready to install your upgrade. Make sure to save all open files and close any programs, and then click Upgrade. The upgrade only takes about 10 minutes in our experience but your mileage may vary. Any available Microsoft updates, including ones for Office, Security Essentials, and other products, will be installed before the upgrade takes place. After a couple minutes, your computer will automatically reboot and finish the installation. It will then reboot once more, and your computer will be ready to use! Welcome to your new edition of Windows 7! Here’s a before and after shot of our desktop. When you do an Anytime Upgrade, all of your programs, files, and settings will be just as they were before you upgraded. The only change we noticed was that our pinned taskbar icons were slightly rearranged to the default order of Internet Explorer, Explorer, and Media Player. Here’s a shot of our desktop before the upgrade. Notice that all of our pinned programs and desktop icons are still there, as well as our taskbar customization (we are using small icons on the taskbar instead of the default large icons). Before, with the Windows 7 Starter background and the Aero Basic theme: And after, with Aero Glass and the more colorful default Windows 7 background. All of the features of Windows 7 Home Premium are now ready to use. The Aero theme was activate by default, but you can now customize your netbook theme, background, and more with the Personalization pane. To open it, right-click on your desktop and select Personalize. You can also now use Windows Media Center, and can play-back DVD movies using an external drive. One of our favorite tools, the Snipping Tool, is also now available for easy screenshots and clips. Activating you new edition of Windows 7 You will still need to activate your new edition of Windows 7. To do this right away, open the start menu, right-click on Computer, and select Properties. Scroll to the bottom, and click “Activate Windows Now”. Make sure you’re connected to the internet, and then select “Activate Windows online now”. Activation may take a few minutes, depending on your internet connection speed. When it is done, the Activation wizard will let you know that Windows is activated and genuine. Your upgrade is all finished! Conclusion Windows Anytime Upgrade makes it easy, and somewhat cheaper, to upgrade to another edition of Windows 7. It’s useful for desktop and laptop owners who want to upgrade to Professional or Ultimate, but many more netbook owners will want to upgrade from Starter to Home Premium or another edition. Links Download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Windows Team Blog: Anytime Upgrade Special with new PC purchase Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium EditionAnother Blog You Should Subscribe ToMysticgeek Blog: Turn Vista Home Premium Into Ultimate (Part 3) – Shadow CopyUpgrade Ubuntu from Breezy to DapperHow to Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to RTM (Final Release) TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar Manage Photos Across Different Social Sites With Dropico Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday

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Entity Association Mapping with Code First Part 1 : Mapping Complex Types

- by mortezam

Last week the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code First has been released by data team at Microsoft. Entity Framework Code-First provides a pretty powerful code-centric way to work with the databases. When it comes to associations, it brings ultimate flexibility. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach and am planning to explain association mapping with code first in a series of blog posts and this one is dedicated to Complex Types. If you are new to Code First approach, you can find a great walkthrough here. In order to build a solid foundation for our discussion, we will start by learning about some of the core concepts around the relationship mapping. What is Mapping?Mapping is the act of determining how objects and their relationships are persisted in permanent data storage, in our case, relational databases. What is Relationship mapping?A mapping that describes how to persist a relationship (association, aggregation, or composition) between two or more objects. Types of RelationshipsThere are two categories of object relationships that we need to be concerned with when mapping associations. The first category is based on multiplicity and it includes three types: One-to-one relationships: This is a relationship where the maximums of each of its multiplicities is one. One-to-many relationships: Also known as a many-to-one relationship, this occurs when the maximum of one multiplicity is one and the other is greater than one. Many-to-many relationships: This is a relationship where the maximum of both multiplicities is greater than one. The second category is based on directionality and it contains two types: Uni-directional relationships: when an object knows about the object(s) it is related to but the other object(s) do not know of the original object. To put this in EF terminology, when a navigation property exists only on one of the association ends and not on the both. Bi-directional relationships: When the objects on both end of the relationship know of each other (i.e. a navigation property defined on both ends). How Object Relationships Are Implemented in POCO domain models?When the multiplicity is one (e.g. 0..1 or 1) the relationship is implemented by defining a navigation property that reference the other object (e.g. an Address property on User class). When the multiplicity is many (e.g. 0..*, 1..*) the relationship is implemented via an ICollection of the type of other object. How Relational Database Relationships Are Implemented? Relationships in relational databases are maintained through the use of Foreign Keys. A foreign key is a data attribute(s) that appears in one table and must be the primary key or other candidate key in another table. With a one-to-one relationship the foreign key needs to be implemented by one of the tables. To implement a one-to-many relationship we implement a foreign key from the “one table” to the “many table”. We could also choose to implement a one-to-many relationship via an associative table (aka Join table), effectively making it a many-to-many relationship. Introducing the ModelNow, let's review the model that we are going to use in order to implement Complex Type with Code First. It's a simple object model which consist of two classes: User and Address. Each user could have one billing address. The Address information of a User is modeled as a separate class as you can see in the UML model below: In object-modeling terms, this association is a kind of aggregation—a part-of relationship. Aggregation is a strong form of association; it has some additional semantics with regard to the lifecycle of objects. In this case, we have an even stronger form, composition, where the lifecycle of the part is fully dependent upon the lifecycle of the whole. Fine-grained domain models The motivation behind this design was to achieve Fine-grained domain models. In crude terms, fine-grained means “more classes than tables”. For example, a user may have both a billing address and a home address. In the database, you may have a single User table with the columns BillingStreet, BillingCity, and BillingPostalCode along with HomeStreet, HomeCity, and HomePostalCode. There are good reasons to use this somewhat denormalized relational model (performance, for one). In our object model, we can use the same approach, representing the two addresses as six string-valued properties of the User class. But it’s much better to model this using an Address class, where User has the BillingAddress and HomeAddress properties. This object model achieves improved cohesion and greater code reuse and is more understandable. Complex Types: Splitting a Table Across Multiple Types Back to our model, there is no difference between this composition and other weaker styles of association when it comes to the actual C# implementation. But in the context of ORM, there is a big difference: A composed class is often a candidate Complex Type. But C# has no concept of composition—a class or property can’t be marked as a composition. The only difference is the object identifier: a complex type has no individual identity (i.e. no AddressId defined on Address class) which make sense because when it comes to the database everything is going to be saved into one single table. How to implement a Complex Types with Code First Code First has a concept of Complex Type Discovery that works based on a set of Conventions. The convention is that if Code First discovers a class where a primary key cannot be inferred, and no primary key is registered through Data Annotations or the fluent API, then the type will be automatically registered as a complex type. Complex type detection also requires that the type does not have properties that reference entity types (i.e. all the properties must be scalar types) and is not referenced from a collection property on another type. Here is the implementation: public class User{ public int UserId { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string Username { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; }} public class Address { public string Street { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string PostalCode { get; set; } }public class EntityMappingContext : DbContext { public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; } } With code first, this is all of the code we need to write to create a complex type, we do not need to configure any additional database schema mapping information through Data Annotations or the fluent API. Database SchemaThe mapping result for this object model is as follows: Limitations of this mappingThere are two important limitations to classes mapped as Complex Types: Shared references is not possible: The Address Complex Type doesn’t have its own database identity (primary key) and so can’t be referred to by any object other than the containing instance of User (e.g. a Shipping class that also needs to reference the same User Address). No elegant way to represent a null reference There is no elegant way to represent a null reference to an Address. When reading from database, EF Code First always initialize Address object even if values in all mapped columns of the complex type are null. This means that if you store a complex type object with all null property values, EF Code First returns a initialized complex type when the owning entity object is retrieved from the database. SummaryIn this post we learned about fine-grained domain models which complex type is just one example of it. Fine-grained is fully supported by EF Code First and is known as the most important requirement for a rich domain model. Complex type is usually the simplest way to represent one-to-one relationships and because the lifecycle is almost always dependent in such a case, it’s either an aggregation or a composition in UML. In the next posts we will revisit the same domain model and will learn about other ways to map a one-to-one association that does not have the limitations of the complex types. References ADO.NET team blog Mapping Objects to Relational Databases Java Persistence with Hibernate

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Dual Boot issues with Windows 7 and Ubuntu

- by Michael

I'm finding myself in a rather unique situation. I've read through just about every resource I can find about this and while things have helped me understand some background, I haven't yet been able to find a solution. So I'm asking here. I originally had just a Windows 7 64-bit OS installation on my desktop. Learning that I couldn't do anything with Apache, PHP and MySql from within a 64-bit system, I did some research and found out that I could use Ubuntu. I've installed the latest version: 11.04. I created a CD to install Ubuntu from and the install went just fine. I installed it side-by-side with Windows 7. I can boot into Ubuntu just fine through the dual-boot option. When I reboot to load Windows though, the Grub2 list shows Windows 7 (loader) and when I select this option the Windows System Recovery loads instead of the actual OS. I haven't made it past there because I didn't know what to do. I just shut the computer down and rebooted into Ubuntu. I've been working for the last hour and a half to try to figure out how to boot into the Windows 7 OS and I haven't got a clue. While I'm somewhat proficient with Windows 7, I'm totally new to Ubuntu, so if you do know what needs to happen, please keep it simple enough that I'll be able to understand. Thanks for all your help in advance. Here's the results after using the Boot Info Script: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in partition #5 for cbh. => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif and looks on the same drive in partition #5 for cbh. sda1: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Mounting failed: fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy sda2: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Mounting failed: fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy sda3: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Mounting failed: fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy sdb1: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD sdb2: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: sdb3: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /boot/BCD sdb4: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sdb5: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu 11.04 Boot files/dirs: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sdb6: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: pdc_bdadcfbdif1: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD pdc_bdadcfbdif2: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe pdc_bdadcfbdif3: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: Boot sector type: Unknown Boot sector info: Mounting failed: fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy mount: unknown filesystem type '' =========================== Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda ___________________ _____________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start End Size Id System /dev/sda1 * 2,048 206,847 204,800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 206,911 1,440,372,735 1,440,165,825 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 1,440,372,736 1,464,856,575 24,483,840 7 HPFS/NTFS Drive: sdb ___________________ _____________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start End Size Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2,048 206,847 204,800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb2 206,911 1,342,554,688 1,342,347,778 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb3 1,930,344,448 1,953,521,663 23,177,216 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb4 1,342,556,158 1,930,344,447 587,788,290 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 1,342,556,160 1,896,806,399 554,250,240 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 1,896,808,448 1,930,344,447 33,536,000 82 Linux swap / Solaris Drive: pdc_bdadcfbdif ___________________ _____________________________________________________ Disk /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif: 750.0 GB, 749999947776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91182 cylinders, total 1464843648 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start End Size Id System /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif1 * 2,048 206,847 204,800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif2 206,911 1,440,372,735 1,440,165,825 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif3 1,440,372,736 1,464,856,575 24,483,840 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif3 ends after the last sector of /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif blkid -c /dev/null: ____________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif1 888E54CC8E54B482 ntfs SYSTEM /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif2 C2766BF6766BEA1D ntfs OS /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif: PTTYPE="dos" /dev/sda1 888E54CC8E54B482 ntfs SYSTEM /dev/sda2 C2766BF6766BEA1D ntfs OS /dev/sda3 BE6CA31D6CA2CF87 ntfs HP_RECOVERY /dev/sda promise_fasttrack_raid_member /dev/sdb1 20B65685B6565B7C ntfs SYSTEM /dev/sdb2 B4467A314679F508 ntfs HP /dev/sdb3 6E10B7A410B77227 ntfs FACTORY_IMAGE /dev/sdb4: PTTYPE="dos" /dev/sdb5 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c ext4 /dev/sdb6 1df35749-a887-45ff-a3de-edd52239847d swap /dev/sdb: PTTYPE="dos" error: /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif3: No such file or directory error: /dev/sdc: No medium found error: /dev/sdd: No medium found error: /dev/sde: No medium found error: /dev/sdf: No medium found error: /dev/sdg: No medium found ============================ "mount | grep ^/dev output: =========================== Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sdb5 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) =========================== sdb5/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm fi terminal_output gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### if [ ${recordfail} != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-8-generic-pae' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic-pae root=UUID=266f9801-cf4f-4acc- affa-2092be035f0c ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic-pae } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-8-generic-pae (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c echo 'Loading Linux 2.6.38-8-generic-pae ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic-pae root=UUID=266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c ro single echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic-pae } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sdb1)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 20B65685B6565B7C chainloader +1 } menuentry "Windows Recovery Environment (loader) (on /dev/sdb3)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(/dev/sdb,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6E10B7A410B77227 drivemap -s (hd0) ${root} chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### =============================== sdb5/etc/fstab: =============================== # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier # for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name # devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sdb5 during installation UUID=266f9801-cf4f-4acc-affa-2092be035f0c / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sdb6 during installation UUID=1df35749-a887-45ff-a3de-edd52239847d none swap sw 0 0 =================== sdb5: Location of files loaded by Grub: =================== 900.1GB: boot/grub/core.img 825.0GB: boot/grub/grub.cfg 688.7GB: boot/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-generic-pae 688.0GB: boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-8-generic-pae 688.7GB: initrd.img 688.0GB: vmlinuz =========================== Unknown MBRs/Boot Sectors/etc ======================= Unknown BootLoader on pdc_bdadcfbdif3 =======Devices which don't seem to have a corresponding hard drive============== sdc sdd sde sdf sdg =============================== StdErr Messages: =============================== ERROR: dos: partition address past end of RAID device hexdump: /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif3: No such file or directory hexdump: /dev/mapper/pdc_bdadcfbdif3: No such file or directory ERROR: dos: partition address past end of RAID device

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MVP Summit 2011 summary and thoughts: The “I hope I don’t cross a line and lose my MVP status” post

- by George Clingerman

I've been wanting to write this post summarizing my thoughts about the MVP summit but have been dragging my feet since it's a very difficult one to write. However seeing Andy (http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx) and Catalin (http://www.catalinzima.com/2011/03/mvp-summit-2011/) and Chris (http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx) post about it has encouraged me to finally take the plunge. I'm going to have to write carefully though because I'm going to be dancing around a ton of NDA mine fields as well as having to walk the tight-rope of not sending the wrong message or having people read too much into what I'm saying. I want to note that most of what I'm about to say is just based on my observations, they're not thoughts that Microsoft has asked me to pass along and they're not things I heard Microsoft say. It's just me sharing what I think after going to the MVP summit. Let's start off with a short imaginary question and answer session. Has the App Hub forums and XBLIG management been rather poor by Microsoft? Yes. Do I think we're going to see changes to that overnight? No. Will it continue to look bad from the outside? Somewhat. Confusing right? Well that's kind of how things are right now. Lots of confusion. XNA is doing AWESOME. Like, really, really awesome. As a result of that awesomeness, XNA is on three major platforms: Xbox 360, WP7 and PC. This means that internally Microsoft is really excited and invested in the technology. That's fantastic for XNA and really should show you the future the framework has. It's here to stay. So why are Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers feeling so much pain? The ironic thing is that pain is being caused by the success of XNA. When XNA was just a small thing, there was more freedom and more focus. It was just us and them. We were an only child. Now our family has grown and everyone has and wants some time with XNA. This gets XNA pulled in all directions and as it moves onto new platforms, it plays catch up trying to get those platforms up to speed to where Xbox LIVE Indie Games has grown. Forums, documentation, educational content. They all need to be there because Xbox LIVE Indie Games has all of that and more. Along with the catch up in features/documentation/awesomeness there's the catch up that the people on the team have to play. New platforms and new areas of development mean new players and those new guys don't have the history of being around from the beginning. This leads to a lack of understanding at times just how important some things are because they seem so small and insignificant (Rich Text defaulting for new forum profiles would be one things that jumps to mind). If you're not aware that the forums have become more than just a basic Q&A, if you're not aware that they're a central hub to a very active community, then you don't understand why that small change should be prioritized over something else. New people have to get caught up and figure out how to make a framework and central forum site work for everyone it's now serving. So yeah, a lot of our pain this last year has been simply that XNA is doing well and XBLIG is doing well so the focus was shifted to catch other things up. It hurts when a parent seems to not have any time for you and they're spending some much time with your new baby brother. Growing pains. All families and in our case our product family experience it to some degree. I think as WP7 matures we'll see the team figuring out how to give everyone the right amount of attention. While we're talking about some of our growing pains, it is also important to note (although not really an excuse) that the Xbox LIVE Arcade developers complain about many of the same things that we do. If you paid attention to talks and information coming out of GDC 2011, most of the the XBLA guys were saying things that sounded eerily similar to what the XBLIG developers are saying (Scott Nichols from GayGamer.net noticed http://twitter.com/#!/NaviFairyGG/status/43540379206811650). Does this mean we should just accept the status quo since we're being treated exactly the same? No way. However it DOES show that the way we're being treated is no indication of the stability and future of the platform, it's just Microsoft dropping the communication ball on two playing fields. We're not alone and we're not even being treated worse. Not great, but also in a weird way a very good sign. Now on to a few tidbits I think I CAN share from the summit (I'm really crossing my fingers I'm not stepping over some NDA line I shouldn't be). First, I discovered that the XBLIG user base is bigger than I personally had originally estimated. I won't give the exact numbers (although we did beg Microsoft to release some of these numbers so maybe someday?) but it was much larger than my original guestimates and I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe some of you guys had the right number when you were guessing, but I know that mine was much too low. And even MORE importantly the number of users/shoppers is growing at a steady pace as well. Our market is growing! That was fantastic news and really something that I had to share. On to the community manager discussion. It was mentioned. I was mentioned. I blushed. Nothing more to report there than the blush in my cheeks was a light crimson color. If I ever see a job description posted for that position I have a resume waiting in the wings. I can't deny that I think that would be my dream job... ...so after I finished blushing, the MVPs did make it very, very clear that the communication has to improve. Community manager or not the single biggest pain point with the Xbox LIVE Indie Game community has been a lack of communication. I have seen dramatic improvement in the team responding to MVPs and I'm even seeing more communication from them on the forums so I'm hoping that's a long term change. I really think they understood the issue, the problem remains how to open that communication channel in a way that was sustainable. I think they'll get it figured out and hopefully that's sooner rather than later. During the summit, you may have seen me tweeting about how I was "that guy" (http://twitter.com/#!/clingermangw/status/42740432471470081). You also may have noticed that Andy and Catalin both mentioned me in their summit write ups. I may have come on a bit strong while I was there...went a little out of character for myself. I've been agitated for a while with the way things have been and I've been listening to you guys and hearing you guys be agitated. I'm also watching some really awesome indie game developers looking elsewhere and leaving the platform. Some of them we might not have been able to keep even with changes, but others are only leaving because of perceptions and lack of communication from Microsoft. And that pisses me off. And I let Microsoft know that I was pissed off. You made your list and I took that list and verbalized it. I verbalized the hell out of it. [It was actually mentioned that I'm a lot nicer on the forums and in email than I am in person...I felt bad about that, but I couldn't stay silent]. Hopefully it did something guys, I really did try hard to get the message across. Along with my agitation, I also brought some pride. I mentioned several things in person to the team that I was particularly proud of. From people in the community that are doing an awesome job, to the re-launch of XboxIndies that was going on that week and even gamers like Steven Hurdle (http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/) who have purchased one XBLIG every day for over 100 days now. The community is freaking rocking it and I made sure to highlight that. So in conclusion, I'd just like to say hang in there (you know, like that picture of the cat). If you've been worried about investing in Xbox LIVE Indie Games because you think it's on shaky ground. It's not. Dream Build Play being about the Xbox 360 should have helped a little to point that out. The team is really scrambling around trying to figure things out and make improvements all around. There’s quite a few new gals and guys and it's going to take them time to catch up and there are a lot of constantly shifting priorities. We all have one toy, one team and we're fighting for time with it. It's also time for the community to continue spreading our wings and going out on our own more often. The Indie Game Winter Uprising was a fantastic example of that. We took things into our own hands and it got noticed and Microsoft got behind it. They do every time we stand up and do something (look at how many Microsoft employees tweeted, wrote about the re-launch of XboxIndies.com or the support I've gotten from them for my weekly XNA Notes). XNA is here to stay, it's time for us to stop being scared of that and figure out how to make our own games the successes they should be. There's definitely a list of things that need to be fixed, things that should be improved and I think we should definitely keep vocal about that with Microsoft. Keep it short, focused and prioritized. There's also a lot of things we can do ourselves while we're waiting on them to fix and change things. Lots of ways we can compensate for particular weaknesses in the channel. The kind of stuff that we can step up and do ourselves. Do it on our own, you know, the way Indies always do. And I'm really looking forward to watching us do just that.

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Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1–Step by step guide

- by Liam Westley

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed. Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade. Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive. You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition. It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8. You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it. You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU). Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one. I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it. Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD. It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option. Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view. It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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Passing multiple simple POST Values to ASP.NET Web API

- by Rick Strahl

A few weeks backs I posted a blog post about what does and doesn't work with ASP.NET Web API when it comes to POSTing data to a Web API controller. One of the features that doesn't work out of the box - somewhat unexpectedly - is the ability to map POST form variables to simple parameters of a Web API method. For example imagine you have this form and you want to post this data to a Web API end point like this via AJAX: <form> Name: <input type="name" name="name" value="Rick" /> Value: <input type="value" name="value" value="12" /> Entered: <input type="entered" name="entered" value="12/01/2011" /> <input type="button" id="btnSend" value="Send" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnSend").click( function() { $.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); }); </script> or you might do this more explicitly by creating a simple client map and specifying the POST values directly by hand:$.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", { name: "Rick", value: 1, entered: "12/01/2012" }, $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); On the wire this generates a simple POST request with Url Encoded values in the content:POST /AspNetWebApi/samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1 Accept: application/json Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest Referer: http://localhost/AspNetWebApi/FormPostTest.html Content-Length: 41 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cachename=Rick&value=12&entered=12%2F10%2F2011 Seems simple enough, right? We are basically posting 3 form variables and 1 query string value to the server. Unfortunately Web API can't handle request out of the box. If I create a method like this:[HttpPost] public string PostMultipleSimpleValues(string name, int value, DateTime entered, string action = null) { return string.Format("Name: {0}, Value: {1}, Date: {2}, Action: {3}", name, value, entered, action); }You'll find that you get an HTTP 404 error and { "Message": "No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI…"} Yes, it's possible to pass multiple POST parameters of course, but Web API expects you to use Model Binding for this - mapping the post parameters to a strongly typed .NET object, not to single parameters. Alternately you can also accept a FormDataCollection parameter on your API method to get a name value collection of all POSTed values. If you're using JSON only, using the dynamic JObject/JValue objects might also work. ModelBinding is fine in many use cases, but can quickly become overkill if you only need to pass a couple of simple parameters to many methods. Especially in applications with many, many AJAX callbacks the 'parameter mapping type' per method signature can lead to serious class pollution in a project very quickly. Simple POST variables are also commonly used in AJAX applications to pass data to the server, even in many complex public APIs. So this is not an uncommon use case, and - maybe more so a behavior that I would have expected Web API to support natively. The question "Why aren't my POST parameters mapping to Web API method parameters" is already a frequent one… So this is something that I think is fairly important, but unfortunately missing in the base Web API installation. Creating a Custom Parameter Binder Luckily Web API is greatly extensible and there's a way to create a custom Parameter Binding to provide this functionality! Although this solution took me a long while to find and then only with the help of some folks Microsoft (thanks Hong Mei!!!), it's not difficult to hook up in your own projects. It requires one small class and a GlobalConfiguration hookup. Web API parameter bindings allow you to intercept processing of individual parameters - they deal with mapping parameters to the signature as well as converting the parameters to the actual values that are returned. Here's the implementation of the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding class:public class SimplePostVariableParameterBinding : HttpParameterBinding { private const string MultipleBodyParameters = "MultipleBodyParameters"; public SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) : base(descriptor) { } /// <summary> /// Check for simple binding parameters in POST data. Bind POST /// data as well as query string data /// </summary> public override Task ExecuteBindingAsync(ModelMetadataProvider metadataProvider, HttpActionContext actionContext, CancellationToken cancellationToken) { // Body can only be read once, so read and cache it NameValueCollection col = TryReadBody(actionContext.Request); string stringValue = null; if (col != null) stringValue = col[Descriptor.ParameterName]; // try reading query string if we have no POST/PUT match if (stringValue == null) { var query = actionContext.Request.GetQueryNameValuePairs(); if (query != null) { var matches = query.Where(kv => kv.Key.ToLower() == Descriptor.ParameterName.ToLower()); if (matches.Count() > 0) stringValue = matches.First().Value; } } object value = StringToType(stringValue); // Set the binding result here SetValue(actionContext, value); // now, we can return a completed task with no result TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid> tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid>(); tcs.SetResult(default(AsyncVoid)); return tcs.Task; } private object StringToType(string stringValue) { object value = null; if (stringValue == null) value = null; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(string)) value = stringValue; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(int)) value = int.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int32)) value = Int32.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int64)) value = Int64.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(decimal)) value = decimal.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(double)) value = double.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(DateTime)) value = DateTime.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(bool)) { value = false; if (stringValue == "true" || stringValue == "on" || stringValue == "1") value = true; } else value = stringValue; return value; } /// <summary> /// Read and cache the request body /// </summary> /// <param name="request"></param> /// <returns></returns> private NameValueCollection TryReadBody(HttpRequestMessage request) { object result = null; // try to read out of cache first if (!request.Properties.TryGetValue(MultipleBodyParameters, out result)) { // parsing the string like firstname=Hongmei&lastname=Ge result = request.Content.ReadAsFormDataAsync().Result; request.Properties.Add(MultipleBodyParameters, result); } return result as NameValueCollection; } private struct AsyncVoid { } } The ExecuteBindingAsync method is fired for each parameter that is mapped and sent for conversion. This custom binding is fired only if the incoming parameter is a simple type (that gets defined later when I hook up the binding), so this binding never fires on complex types or if the first type is not a simple type. For the first parameter of a request the Binding first reads the request body into a NameValueCollection and caches that in the request.Properties collection. The request body can only be read once, so the first parameter request reads it and then caches it. Subsequent parameters then use the cached POST value collection. Once the form collection is available the value of the parameter is read, and the value is translated into the target type requested by the Descriptor. SetValue writes out the value to be mapped. Once you have the ParameterBinding in place, the binding has to be assigned. This is done along with all other Web API configuration tasks at application startup in global.asax's Application_Start:GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.ParameterBindingRules .Insert(0, (HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) => { var supportedMethods = descriptor.ActionDescriptor.SupportedHttpMethods; // Only apply this binder on POST and PUT operations if (supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Post) || supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Put)) { var supportedTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string), typeof(int), typeof(decimal), typeof(double), typeof(bool), typeof(DateTime) }; if (supportedTypes.Where(typ => typ == descriptor.ParameterType).Count() > 0) return new SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(descriptor); } // let the default bindings do their work return null; }); The ParameterBindingRules.Insert method takes a delegate that checks which type of requests it should handle. The logic here checks whether the request is POST or PUT and whether the parameter type is a simple type that is supported. Web API calls this delegate once for each method signature it tries to map and the delegate returns null to indicate it's not handling this parameter, or it returns a new parameter binding instance - in this case the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding. Once the parameter binding and this hook up code is in place, you can now pass simple POST values to methods with simple parameters. The examples I showed above should now work in addition to the standard bindings. Summary Clearly this is not easy to discover. I spent quite a bit of time digging through the Web API source trying to figure this out on my own without much luck. It took Hong Mei at Micrsoft to provide a base example as I asked around so I can't take credit for this solution :-). But once you know where to look, Web API is brilliantly extensible to make it relatively easy to customize the parameter behavior. I'm very stoked that this got resolved - in the last two months I've had two customers with projects that decided not to use Web API in AJAX heavy SPA applications because this POST variable mapping wasn't available. This might actually change their mind to still switch back and take advantage of the many great features in Web API. I too frequently use plain POST variables for communicating with server AJAX handlers and while I could have worked around this (with untyped JObject or the Form collection mostly), having proper POST to parameter mapping makes things much easier. I said this in my last post on POST data and say it again here: I think POST to method parameter mapping should have been shipped in the box with Web API, because without knowing about this limitation the expectation is that simple POST variables map to parameters just like query string values do. I hope Microsoft considers including this type of functionality natively in the next version of Web API natively or at least as a built-in HttpParameterBinding that can be just added. This is especially true, since this binding doesn't affect existing bindings. Resources SimplePostVariableParameterBinding Source on GitHub Global.asax hookup source Mapping URL Encoded Post Values in ASP.NET Web API© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api AJAX 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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ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

- by David Allan

In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict. 2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1. 2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase. The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios.

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Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

- by James Michael Hare

Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. 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.NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

- by Rick Strahl

With the betas for .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8 shipping many people will be installing .NET 4.5 and hacking away on it. There are a number of great enhancements that are fairly transparent, but it's important to understand what .NET 4.5 actually is in terms of the CLR running on your machine. When .NET 4.5 is installed it effectively replaces .NET 4.0 on the machine. .NET 4.0 gets overwritten by a new version of .NET 4.5 which - according to Microsoft - is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. While 100% backwards compatible sounds great, we all know that 100% is a hard number to hit, and even the aforementioned blog post at the Microsoft site acknowledges this. But there's so much more than backwards compatibility that makes this awkward at best and confusing at worst. What does ‘Replacement’ mean? When you install .NET 4.5 your .NET 4.0 assemblies in the \Windows\.NET Framework\V4.0.30319 are overwritten with a new set of assemblies. You end up with overwritten assemblies as well as a bunch of new ones (like the new System.Net.Http assemblies for example). The following screen shot demonstrates system.dll on my test machine (left) running .NET 4.5 on the right and my production laptop running stock .NET 4.0 (right): Clearly they are different files with a difference in file sizes (interesting that the 4.5 version is actually smaller). That’s not all. If you actually query the runtime version when .NET 4.5 is installed with with Environment.Version you still get: 4.0.30319 If you open the properties of System.dll assembly in .NET 4.5 you'll also see: Notice that the file version is also left at 4.0.xxx. There are differences in build numbers: .NET 4.0 shows 261 and the current .NET 4.5 beta build is 17379. I suppose you can use assume a build number greater than 17000 is .NET 4.5, but that's pretty hokey to say the least. There’s no easy or obvious way to tell whether you are running on 4.0 or 4.5 – to the application they appear to be the same runtime version. And that is what Microsoft intends here. .NET 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade. Compile to 4.5 run on 4.0 – not quite! You can compile an application for .NET 4.5 and run it on the 4.0 runtime – that is until you hit a new feature that doesn’t exist on 4.0. At which point the app bombs at runtime. Say you write some code that is mostly .NET 4.0, but only has a few of the new features of .NET 4.5 like aync/await buried deep in the bowels of the application where it only fires occasionally. .NET will happily start your application and run everything 4.0 fine, until it hits that 4.5 code – and then crash unceremoniously at runtime. Oh joy! You can .NET 4.0 applications on .NET 4.5 of course and that should work without much fanfare. Different than .NET 3.0/3.5 Note that this in-place replacement is very different from the side by side installs of .NET 2.0 and 3.0/3.5 which all ran on the 2.0 version of the CLR. The two 3.x versions were basically library enhancements on top of the core .NET 2.0 runtime. Both versions ran under the .NET 2.0 runtime which wasn’t changed (other than for security patches and bug fixes) for the whole 3.x cycle. The 4.5 update instead completely replaces the .NET 4.0 runtime and leaves the actual version number set at v4.0.30319. When you build a new project with Visual Studio 2011, you can still target .NET 4.0 or you can target .NET 4.5. But you are in effect referencing the same set of assemblies for both regardless which version you use. What's different is the compiler used to compile and link your code so compiling with .NET 4.0 gives you just the subset of the functionality that is available in .NET 4.0, but when you use the 4.5 compiler you get the full functionality of what’s actually available in the assemblies and extra libraries. It doesn’t look like you will be able to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop .NET 4.5 applications. Good news – Bad news Microsoft is trying hard to experiment with every possible permutation of releasing new versions of the .NET framework apparently. No two updates have been the same. Clearly updating to a full new version of .NET (ie. .NET 2.0, 4.0 and at some point 5.0 runtimes) has its own set of challenges, but doing an in-place update of the runtime and then not even providing a good way to tell which version is installed is pretty whacky even by Microsoft’s standards. Especially given that .NET 4.5 includes a fairly significant update with all the aysnc functionality baked into the runtime. Most of the IO APIs have been updated to support task based async operation which significantly affects many existing APIs. To make things worse .NET 4.5 will be the initial version of .NET that ships with Windows 8 so it will be with us for a long time to come unless Microsoft finally decides to push .NET versions onto Windows machines as part of system upgrades (which currently doesn’t happen). This is the same story we had when Vista launched with .NET 3.0 which was a minor version that quickly was replaced by 3.5 which was more long lived and practical. People had enough problems dealing with the confusing versioning of the 3.x versions which ran on .NET 2.0. I can’t count the amount support calls and questions I’ve fielded because people couldn’t find a .NET 3.5 entry in the IIS version dialog. The same is likely to happen with .NET 4.5. It’s all well and good when we know that .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement, but administrators and IT folks not intimately familiar with .NET are unlikely to understand this nuance and end up thoroughly confused which version is installed. It’s hard for me to see any upside to an in-place update and I haven’t really seen a good explanation of why this approach was decided on. Sure if the version stays the same existing assembly bindings don’t break so applications can stay running through an update. I suppose this is useful for some component vendors and strongly signed assemblies in corporate environments. But seriously, if you are going to throw .NET 4.5 into the mix, who won’t be recompiling all code and thoroughly test that code to work on .NET 4.5? A recompile requirement doesn’t seem that serious in light of a major version upgrade. Resources http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2011/09/26/compatibility-of-net-framework-4-5.aspx http://www.devproconnections.com/article/net-framework/net-framework-45-versioning-faces-problems-141160© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET 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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What's up with LDoms: Part 4 - Virtual Networking Explained

- by Stefan Hinker

I'm back from my summer break (and some pressing business that kept me away from this), ready to continue with Oracle VM Server for SPARC ;-) In this article, we'll have a closer look at virtual networking. Basic connectivity as we've seen it in the first, simple example, is easy enough. But there are numerous options for the virtual switches and virtual network ports, which we will discuss in more detail now. In this section, we will concentrate on virtual networking - the capabilities of virtual switches and virtual network ports - only. Other options involving hardware assignment or redundancy will be covered in separate sections later on. There are two basic components involved in virtual networking for LDoms: Virtual switches and virtual network devices. The virtual switch should be seen just like a real ethernet switch. It "runs" in the service domain and moves ethernet packets back and forth. A virtual network device is plumbed in the guest domain. It corresponds to a physical network device in the real world. There, you'd be plugging a cable into the network port, and plug the other end of that cable into a switch. In the virtual world, you do the same: You create a virtual network device for your guest and connect it to a virtual switch in a service domain. The result works just like in the physical world, the network device sends and receives ethernet packets, and the switch does all those things ethernet switches tend to do. If you look at the reference manual of Oracle VM Server for SPARC, there are numerous options for virtual switches and network devices. Don't be confused, it's rather straight forward, really. Let's start with the simple case, and work our way to some more sophisticated options later on. In many cases, you'll want to have several guests that communicate with the outside world on the same ethernet segment. In the real world, you'd connect each of these systems to the same ethernet switch. So, let's do the same thing in the virtual world: root@sun # ldm add-vsw net-dev=nxge2 admin-vsw primary root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net admin-vsw mars root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net admin-vsw venus We've just created a virtual switch called "admin-vsw" and connected it to the physical device nxge2. In the physical world, we'd have powered up our ethernet switch and installed a cable between it and our big enterprise datacenter switch. We then created a virtual network interface for each one of the two guest systems "mars" and "venus" and connected both to that virtual switch. They can now communicate with each other and with any system reachable via nxge2. If primary were running Solaris 10, communication with the guests would not be possible. This is different with Solaris 11, please see the Admin Guide for details. Note that I've given both the vswitch and the vnet devices some sensible names, something I always recommend. Unless told otherwise, the LDoms Manager software will automatically assign MAC addresses to all network elements that need one. It will also make sure that these MAC addresses are unique and reuse MAC addresses to play nice with all those friendly DHCP servers out there. However, if we want to do this manually, we can also do that. (One reason might be firewall rules that work on MAC addresses.) So let's give mars a manually assigned MAC address: root@sun # ldm set-vnet mac-addr=0:14:4f:f9:c4:13 admin-net mars Within the guest, these virtual network devices have their own device driver. In Solaris 10, they'd appear as "vnet0". Solaris 11 would apply it's usual vanity naming scheme. We can configure these interfaces just like any normal interface, give it an IP-address and configure sophisticated routing rules, just like on bare metal. In many cases, using Jumbo Frames helps increase throughput performance. By default, these interfaces will run with the standard ethernet MTU of 1500 bytes. To change this, it is usually sufficient to set the desired MTU for the virtual switch. This will automatically set the same MTU for all vnet devices attached to that switch. Let's change the MTU size of our admin-vsw from the example above: root@sun # ldm set-vsw mtu=9000 admin-vsw primary Note that that you can set the MTU to any value between 1500 and 16000. Of course, whatever you set needs to be supported by the physical network, too. Another very common area of network configuration is VLAN tagging. This can be a little confusing - my advise here is to be very clear on what you want, and perhaps draw a little diagram the first few times. As always, keeping a configuration simple will help avoid errors of all kind. Nevertheless, VLAN tagging is very usefull to consolidate different networks onto one physical cable. And as such, this concept needs to be carried over into the virtual world. Enough of the introduction, here's a little diagram to help in explaining how VLANs work in LDoms: Let's remember that any VLANs not explicitly tagged have the default VLAN ID of 1. In this example, we have a vswitch connected to a physical network that carries untagged traffic (VLAN ID 1) as well as VLANs 11, 22, 33 and 44. There might also be other VLANs on the wire, but the vswitch will ignore all those packets. We also have two vnet devices, one for mars and one for venus. Venus will see traffic from VLANs 33 and 44 only. For VLAN 44, venus will need to configure a tagged interface "vnet44000". For VLAN 33, the vswitch will untag all incoming traffic for venus, so that venus will see this as "normal" or untagged ethernet traffic. This is very useful to simplify guest configuration and also allows venus to perform Jumpstart or AI installations over this network even if the Jumpstart or AI server is connected via VLAN 33. Mars, on the other hand, has full access to untagged traffic from the outside world, and also to VLANs 11,22 and 33, but not 44. On the command line, we'd do this like this: root@sun # ldm add-vsw net-dev=nxge2 pvid=1 vid=11,22,33,44 admin-vsw primary root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net pvid=1 vid=11,22,33 admin-vsw mars root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net pvid=33 vid=44 admin-vsw venus Finally, I'd like to point to a neat little option that will make your live easier in all those cases where configurations tend to change over the live of a guest system. It's the "id=<somenumber>" option available for both vswitches and vnet devices. Normally, Solaris in the guest would enumerate network devices sequentially. However, it has ways of remembering this initial numbering. This is good in the physical world. In the virtual world, whenever you unbind (aka power off and disassemble) a guest system, remove and/or add network devices and bind the system again, chances are this numbering will change. Configuration confusion will follow suit. To avoid this, nail down the initial numbering by assigning each vnet device it's device-id explicitly: root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net id=1 admin-vsw venus Please consult the Admin Guide for details on this, and how to decipher these network ids from Solaris running in the guest. Thanks for reading this far. Links for further reading are essentially only the Admin Guide and Reference Manual and can be found above. I hope this is useful and, as always, I welcome any comments.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 09, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 09, 2010New Projects.NET Transactional File Manager: Transactional File Manager is a .NET API that supports including file system operations such as file copy, move, delete in a transaction. It's an i...3D World Studio Content Pipeline for Windows Phone 7: This is a port of PhotonicGames' project: http://xna3dws.codeplex.com/releases/view/42994 for the Windows Phone 7 tools (XNA 4.0 CTP).Advanced Script Editor for 3D Rad: Advanced Script Editor makes it easier for 3D Rad coders to write scripts. Developed in C#, it features a functions list, a favourites list, object...Ajax ASP.Net Forum: A fast & lightweight open source free forum developed in ASP.Net 3.5, AJAX, CSS, SQL & Javascript Cache (filter-sort-move through table records at ...Axon: Axon is the home automation system that I will be running in my home. It will be a collection of different technologies and projects, often experim...BigBallz: Projeto de site de Bolões para campeonatos diversos. A princípio pensado para copa do mundo de futebol de 2010BigfootMVC: MVC Framework for DotNetNukeBigfootSQL: A StringBuilder for SQL. BigfootSQL was built with simplicity in mind. It assumes that you are comfortable writing SQL but dislike effort required ...Bxf (Basic XAML Framework): Basic Xaml Framework (Bxf) is a simple, streamlined set of UI components designed to demonstrate the minimum framework functionality required to ma...elZerf - elektronische Zeiterfassung: elektronisches Zeiterfassungsystem im Rahmen der Seminararbeit im Modul Web-Anwendungsprogrammierung.IntoFactories.Net - Samples: Project to host samples created by members of the IntoFactories.NET Team blog.Lanchonete: Sistema para controle de lanchonetes. Medieval Dynasties: Medieval Dynasties is a game written in C# 3.5 and XNA 3.1 at the moment. It is inspired by Crusader Kings, Total War and Civilization.PMMsg: A project to replace the standard messaging client on the Windows Mobile platform. Mainly geared towards Windows Mobile 6.5.3 VGA devices. Also an...PunkPong: PunkPong is an open source "Pong" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard or mouse. This cross-platform a...Renegade Legion Fighter Calculator: In working on assigning fighters to squadrons, flights, and groups for a campaign, I was struck by the sheer amount of calculations I had to make. ...Sharpotify - Spotify .Net Library: Sharpotify is a Spotify library in C#. It is based in Jotify and SharPot projects. It is not a libspotify wrapper, It is a full .Net Spotify protoc...Silverlight load on demand with MEF: With MEF, a Silverlight control can be split in several packages(xap files). Each package can contain one or more pages and it will download on dem...SOLID by example: Source code examples to undestood solid design principles. Most of them were taken from http://www.lostechies.com/SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services RS.EXE Supporting Forms Authentication: A version of RS.EXE that you can use with Forms Authentication in Native Mode. Use the following arguments to specify credentials (just like Basic ...Stripper: Stripper Remove Diacritics and other unwanted caracter to fabric a more standardized file naming.study: studyUncoverPIC: UncoverPIC is a Silverlight Game strongly inspired to the famous Arcade Game "GalsPanic" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gals_Panic ). It was dev...Unity3D Untitled MMO: Unity3D Untitled MMO FrameworkUnnamedShop: UnnamedShopXBStudio.asp.net.automation: A Unit Testing Automation library for asp.netXBStudio.Web: XBStudio Web ApplicationNew Releases3D World Studio Content Pipeline for Windows Phone 7: Initial Release (0.1): This is the first release of the project, with plenty of hackery and kludges to go around, but it mostly works! Let me know if you hit any bugs.Acies: Acies - Alpha Build 0.0.10: Alpha release. Requires Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249-4560-...Advanced Script Editor for 3D Rad: Advanced Script Editor - Version 2.6: Despite various previous releases on the 3D Rad forum, this is the first release on CodePlex.Ajax ASP.Net Forum: First Release: First Release prior to CodePlex Publish (send to admins)So, it doesn't all finish VERSION: 0.1.2 FEATURES Main Home Where all the Forums (called ...Artist Follower for Microsoft Access: Artist Follower 0.5.1: Artists Follower changes: Just one form to manage artists and links!!!Artist Follower for Microsoft Access: Artists Follower 0.5.0: This is the first release of Artist Follower.ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider - MvcSiteMapProvider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0.0 CTP1: This is a community technology preview of MvcSiteMapProvider version 2.0. 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B1 Changes: - Got Adapt...FsObserver: FsObserver 2.0: This is basically the same as FsObserver 1.0 but the "-help" documentation has been cleaned up somewhat and the code has been refactored so that it...GPdotNET - Genetic Programming Tool: GPdotNETv1.0: GPdotNET v.1.0 - more details on http.bhrnjica.wordpress.com/gpdotnetHERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 8: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 8imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.3: myImdb 0.9.3imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.4: myImdb 0.9.4jccc .NET smart framework: jccc .NET smart framework version 1.2010.06.07: jccc .NET smart framework version 1.2010.06.07 added oracle databases supportLongBar: LongBar 2.1 Build 313: - Fixed library and updates to work with updated live services - Options: You can disable shadow nowMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.17.59623: Fixed FileFactory provider. Improvied postpone policies. Added network request limiter.MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1: Installer for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta1.1. It can now convert files with spaces in the path or filename. I have also created filter for the SaveFil...MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1 Source Code: Source Code for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1.mesoBoard: mesoBoard - 0.9.1 beta: Fixed file download permissions Released under the New BSD License.MPCLI: Alpha Release (0.1.0.0): This release has core functionality and is considered a potential candidate for a feature complete release of this library. However, suggestions fo...N2 CMS: 2.0: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps professional developers build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes (1.5 -...NHTrace: NHTrace-47571: NHTrace-47571NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.125: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...NSoup: NSoup 0.2: NSoup 0.2 corresponds to jsoup version 1.1.1. List of changes can be viewed here.Opalis Community Releases: Integration Pack for Data Manipulation: The Integration Pack for Data Manipulation enables you to perform a wider variety of data manipulation tasks as well as aggregate data into common ...Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool: PAL v2.0 Beta 1: Fixed Counter Sorting: Fixed a minor bug where duplicate counter expression paths were not being removed. Analysis Added: Added LogicalDisk Read/...RoTwee: RoTwee (12.0.0.0): Trial version. 17925 Make it possible to change window sizeSharpotify - Spotify .Net Library: Sharpotify.Library 1.0: Sharpotify Library: Stable release. You can connect with spotify, search, browse (tracks, albums, artists), get a music stream, create and edit you...Silverlight load on demand with MEF: mal.Web.Silverlight.MEF 1.0.0.0: mal.Web.Silverlight.MEF 1.0.0.0sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7e (without Maps): + Added: color value expansion bar for hmap (right click to select color scheme) + Added: more complex hmap editing, uses now 4 point bounding rect...SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services RS.EXE Supporting Forms Authentication: Initial release: Enjoy!Stripper: Stripper 0.1.1 (CLi): Stripper Remove Diacritics and other unwanted caracters to fabric a more standardized file naming. Especially French caracter and maybe other lang...Unity3D Untitled MMO: v1: versionUrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer 2.01a: New version with some minors bugs corrected.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30608.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30608.1: Automatic drop of latest buildWatermarker.NET: 0.1.3811: A newer version with some improvements. I release this as a .zip archive, because settings are added here, so there will be .exe and .config files.Yet Another GPS: Alfa Release: Alfa working releaseMost Popular ProjectsDozer Enterprise Library for .NETEmployee Management SystemWiiMote PhysicsVisualStudio 2010 JavaScript OutliningSpider CompilerConcurrent CacheOil Slick Live FeedsCSUFVGDC Summer JamWinGetSiteMap Utility for DNN Blog ModuleMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRawrNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleAndrew's XNA HelpersBlogEngine.NETStyleCopCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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