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  • Searching for the last logon of users in Active Directory

    - by Robert May
    I needed to clean out a bunch of old accounts at Veracity Solutions, and wanted to delete those that hadn’t used their account in more than a year. I found that AD has a property on objects called the lastLogonTimestamp.  However, this value isn’t exposed to you in any useful fashion.  Sure, you can pull up ADSI Edit and and eventually get to it there, but it’s painful. I spent some time searching, and discovered that there’s not much out there to help, so I thought a blog post showing exactly how to get at this information would be in order. Basically, what you end up doing is using System.DirectoryServices to search for accounts and then filtering those for users, doing some conversion and such to make it happen.  Basically, the end result of this is that you get a list of users with their logon information and you can then do with that what you will.  I turned my list into an observable collection and bound it into a XAML form. One important note, you need to add a reference to ActiveDs Type Library in the COM section of the world in references to get to LargeInteger. Here’s the class: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices; using ActiveDs; using log4net; /// <summary> /// Finds users inside of the active directory system. /// </summary> public class UserFinder { /// <summary> /// Creates the default logger /// </summary> private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(UserFinder)); /// <summary> /// Finds last logon information /// </summary> /// <param name="domain">The domain to search.</param> /// <param name="userName">The username for the query.</param> /// <param name="password">The password for the query.</param> /// <returns>A list of users with their last logon information.</returns> public IList<UserLoginInformation> GetLastLogonInformation(string domain, string userName, string password) { IList<UserLoginInformation> result = new List<UserLoginInformation>(); DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(domain, userName, password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher directorySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry); directorySearcher.PropertyNamesOnly = true; directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name"); directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("lastLogonTimeStamp"); SearchResultCollection searchResults; try { searchResults = directorySearcher.FindAll(); } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to do a find all.", ex); throw; } try { foreach (SearchResult searchResult in searchResults) { DirectoryEntry resultEntry = searchResult.GetDirectoryEntry(); if (resultEntry.SchemaClassName == "user") { UserLoginInformation logon = new UserLoginInformation(); logon.Name = resultEntry.Name; PropertyValueCollection timeStampObject = resultEntry.Properties["lastLogonTimeStamp"]; if (timeStampObject.Count > 0) { IADsLargeInteger logonTimeStamp = (IADsLargeInteger)timeStampObject[0]; long lastLogon = (long)((uint)logonTimeStamp.LowPart + (((long)logonTimeStamp.HighPart) << 32)); logon.LastLogonTime = DateTime.FromFileTime(lastLogon); } result.Add(logon); } } } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to iterate search results.", ex); throw; } return result; } } } Some important things to note: Username and Password can be set to null and if your computer us part of the domain, this may still work. Domain should be set to something like LDAP://servername/CN=Users,CN=Domain,CN=com You’re actually getting a com object back, so that’s why the LongInteger conversions are happening.  The class for UserLoginInformation looks like this:   namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; /// <summary> /// Represents user login information. /// </summary> public class UserLoginInformation { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets Name /// </summary> public string Name { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets LastLogonTime /// </summary> public DateTime LastLogonTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the age of the account. /// </summary> public TimeSpan AccountAge { get { TimeSpan result = TimeSpan.Zero; if (this.LastLogonTime != DateTime.MinValue) { result = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastLogonTime); } return result; } } } } I hope this is useful and instructive. Technorati Tags: Active Directory

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  • Top Tweets SOA Partner Community – November 2011

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity soacommunity SOA Community Dutch ACEs SOA Partner Community award celebration wp.me/p10C8u-i9 OracleBPM Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy – part 1/2, bit.ly/vJE9UZ MagicChatzi Dutch ACE’s and ACE Directors had a small party: achatzia.blogspot.com/2011/11/celebr… leonsmiers #Capgemini #Oracle #BPM Blog index bit.ly/tUYtvD #yam lucasjellema Blog post by my colleague Emiel on the AMIS blog: Timeouts in Oracle SOA Suite 11g – tinyurl.com/73amo3r biemond Solving __OAUX_GENXSD_.TOP.XSD with BPEL: When you use an external web service in combination with a BPEL servic… t.co/Gzzatzrr OracleBlogs Jumpstart Fusion Middleware projects with Oracle User Productivity Kit ow.ly/1fJMev cpurdy on Oracle Coherence data grid, its new RESTful APIs, and Oracle Service Bus (OSB): blogs.oracle.com/slc/entry/orac… Accenture Learn how Service-Oriented Architecture can help public service agencies solve legacy system issues. bit.ly/sTteM4 #SOA eelzinga Thanks for organising it Andreas! #soacommunity eelzinga Had a nice drink with the fellow Dutch Oracle ACE members for a little celebration of the SOA Community Partner Award. #soacommunity EmielP Wrote a blogpost about timeouts in the #Oracle #SOA Suite: bit.ly/uhUcrX OracleBlogs Processing Binary Data in SOA Suite 11g t.co/Tzd1xBsY OracleBlogs Finding the Value in SOA by Stephen Bennett t.co/9MMLJoLz OTNArchBeat SOA All the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration hurdles t.co/5viNj8ib OracleBlogs Demo: Business Transaction Management with SOA Management Pack ow.ly/1fFBv3 OTNArchBeat SOA All the Time; Architects in AZ; Clearing Info Integration hurdles t.co/Dnfzo0PN oracletechnet Wikis.oracle.com lives leonsmiers A new #capgemini #oracle #blog, Measuring the Human Task activity in Oracle BPM bit.ly/uPan08 #yam @CapgeminiOracle OTNArchBeat 3 SOA business cases, explained in a 2-minute elevator speech | @JoeMcKendrick t.co/aYGNkZup OTNArchBeat Gartner, Inc. places Oracle SOA Governance in Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies t.co/bSG5cuTr Jphjulstad Red carpet to Oracle BPM – evita.no evita.no/ikbViewer/soa-… Oracle #Oracle Named a Leader in #SOA Governance Magic Quadrant by Leading Analyst Firm t.co/prnyGu2U soacommunity What presentations & topics do you like to see at the next SOA & BPM & Webcenter Community Forum early 2012? #soacommunity soacommunity Oracle BPM Suite 11g Handbook Released wp.me/p10C8u-hU OTNArchBeat SOA Development Virtual Developer Day (On Demand) | @soacommunity bit.ly/sqhQmX OracleBlogs SOA Development Virtual Developer Day (On Demand) t.co/MDrdnx0h 9 Nov Favorite Undo Retweet Reply OracleBlogs Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events t.co/qTgyEpY4 biemond @stevendavelaar this is for you t.co/hInKCcfY it explains your sso problem soacommunity SOA Development Virtual Developer Day (on demand) t.co/flXPWk4R soacommunity IPT Swiss SOA Experts – thanks for the nice ink wp.me/p10C8u-i3 soacommunity Enjoy #wjax specially the presentations from our #ACE @t_winterberg @myfear @AdamBien pic.twitter.com/m8VcBSG3 OTNArchBeat Discounts on books, more, for Oracle Technology Network members bit.ly/vRxMfB OracleSOA Justify the ROI of SOA in 10 seconds…a pic is worth 1000 words bit.ly/roi_of_soa_img #oraclesoa #soa #oow11 orclateamsoa A-Team SOA Blog: Case Management in BPM 11g -  Mark Foster Oracle BPM 11g & Case Management I’ve seen… t.co/l5zb6pFr t_winterberg Die nächste SIG #SOA steht an: 7.12. in Hamburg. Neues Tooling und Erfahrungen rund um Oracle FMW, SOA, BPM… (cont) deck.ly/~YC57v OracleBlogs Continuous Integration for SOA/BPM ow.ly/1fsekI OracleBlogs BPM Suite 11g Handbook Released ow.ly/1frlzv lucasjellema Iterating over collection (array) in BPM (and dispatching jobs for entries in array): t.co/1SEhSvWv – subprocesses are the key. lucasjellema Lucas Jellema Useful tip from Mark Nelson: BPM API documentation (as well as Human Workflow Service) available: redstack.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/api… OTNArchBeat SOA, cloud: it’s the architecture that matters | Joe McKendrick zd.net/tNCiTF orclateamsoa: Building a job dispatcher in BPM -or- Iterating over collections in BPM ow.ly/1frbrz orclateamsoa Using the Database as a Policy Store for SOA 11g ow.ly/1frbrA OracleBPM Oracle launches Process Accelerators for BPM: t.co/XPEE61QL Jphjulstad Human-Centric BPM Selection Checklist t.co/3TZXZHLH OracleBlogs Fusion Middleware General Session at OOW 2011: Missed It? Read On… t.co/aU5JvM6K gschmutz Great! The product page of the OSB 11g Development Cookbook is now online: t.co/5Jfbe6Ng Looking forward to get it, u too? brhubart Oracle IT Architecture Essentials; Lightweight Composite Service Development with SCA and Spring; Cloud Migration ow.ly/7esNg eelzinga New blogpost : Oracle Service Bus, Generic fault handling, bit.ly/sGr4UL #osb #oracleservicebus For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity,twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

    - by mbridge
    MVC 3 View Enhancements MVC 3 introduces two improvements to the MVC view engine: - Ability to select the view engine to use. MVC 3 allows you to select from any of your  installed view engines from Visual Studio by selecting Add > View (including the newly introduced ASP.NET “Razor” engine”): - Support for the next ASP.NET “Razor” syntax. The newly previewed Razor syntax is a concise lightweight syntax. MVC 3 Control Enhancements - Global Filters: ASP.NET MVC 3  allows you to specify that a filter which applies globally to all Controllers within an app by adding it to the GlobalFilters collection.  The RegisterGlobalFilters() method is now included in the default Global.asax class template and so provides a convenient place to do this since is will then be called by the Application_Start() method: void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters) { filters.Add(new HandleLoggingAttribute()); filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); } void Application_Start() { RegisterGlobalFilters (GlobalFilters.Filters); } - Dynamic ViewModel Property : MVC 3 augments the ViewData API with a new “ViewModel” property on Controller which is of type “dynamic” – and therefore enables you to use the new dynamic language support in C# and VB pass ViewData items using a cleaner syntax than the current dictionary API. Public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = "Hello World"; return View(); } - New ActionResult Types : MVC 3 includes three new ActionResult types and helper methods: 1. HttpNotFoundResult – indicates that a resource which was requested by the current URL was not found. HttpNotFoundResult will return a 404 HTTP status code to the calling client. 2. PermanentRedirects – The HttpRedirectResult class contains a new Boolean “Permanent” property which is used to indicate that a permanent redirect should be done. Permanent redirects use a HTTP 301 status code.  The Controller class  includes three new methods for performing these permanent redirects: RedirectPermanent(), RedirectToRoutePermanent(), andRedirectToActionPermanent(). All  of these methods will return an instance of the HttpRedirectResult object with the Permanent property set to true. 3. HttpStatusCodeResult – used for setting an explicit response status code and its associated description. MVC 3 AJAX and JavaScript Enhancements MVC 3 ships with built-in JSON binding support which enables action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and then model-bind it to action method parameters. For example a jQuery client-side JavaScript could define a “save” event handler which will be invoked when the save button is clicked on the client. The code in the event handler then constructs a client-side JavaScript “product” object with 3 fields with their values retrieved from HTML input elements. Finally, it uses jQuery’s .ajax() method to POST a JSON based request which contains the product to a /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server: $('#save').click(function () { var product = { ProdName: $('#Name').val() Price: $('#Price').val(), } $.ajax({ url: '/theStore/UpdateProduct', type: "POST"; data: JSON.stringify(widget), datatype: "json", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", success: function () { $('#message').html('Saved').fadeIn(), }, error: function () { $('#message').html('Error').fadeIn(), } }); return false; }); MVC will allow you to implement the /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server by using an action method as below. The UpdateProduct() action method will accept a strongly-typed Product object for a parameter. MVC 3 can now automatically bind an incoming JSON post value to the .NET Product type on the server without having to write any custom binding. [HttpPost] public ActionResult UpdateProduct(Product product) { // save logic here return null } MVC 3 Model Validation Enhancements MVC 3 builds on the MVC 2 model validation improvements by adding   support for several of the new validation features within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in .NET 4.0: - Support for the new DataAnnotations metadata attributes like DisplayAttribute. - Support for the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class which now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more info on  the current validation context, like what object is being validated. - Support for the new IValidatableObject interface which enables you to perform model-level validation and also provide validation error messages which are specific to the state of the overall model. MVC 3 Dependency Injection Enhancements MVC 3 includes better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and also integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. Currently MVC 3 Preview 1 has support for DI in the below places: - Controllers (registering & injecting controller factories and injecting controllers) - Views (registering & injecting view engines, also for injecting dependencies into view pages) - Action Filters (locating and  injecting filters) And this is another important blog about Microsoft .NET and technology: - Windows 2008 Blog - SharePoint 2010 Blog - .NET 4 Blog And you can visit here if you're looking for ASP.NET MVC 3 hosting

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  • Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

    - by me
    @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

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  • The Top Ten Security Top Ten Lists

    - by Troy Kitch
    As a marketer, we're always putting together the top 3, or 5 best, or an assortment of top ten lists. So instead of going that route, I've put together my top ten security top ten lists. These are not only for security practitioners, but also for the average Joe/Jane; because who isn't concerned about security these days? Now, there might not be ten for each one of these lists, but the title works best that way. Starting with my number ten (in no particular order): 10. Top 10 Most Influential Security-Related Movies Amrit Williams pulls together a great collection of security-related movies. He asks for comments on which one made you want to get into the business. I would have to say that my most influential movie(s), that made me want to get into the business of "stopping the bad guys" would have to be the James Bond series. I grew up on James Bond movies: thwarting the bad guy and saving the world. I recall being both ecstatic and worried when Silicon Valley-themed "A View to A Kill" hit theaters: "An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley." Yikes! 9. Top Ten Security Careers From movies that got you into the career, here’s a top 10 list of security-related careers. It starts with number then, Information Security Analyst and ends with number one, Malware Analyst. They point out the significant growth in security careers and indicate that "according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field is expected to experience growth rates of 22% between 2010-2020. If you are interested in getting into the field, Oracle has many great opportunities all around the world.  8. Top 125 Network Security Tools A bit outside of the range of 10, the top 125 Network Security Tools is an important list because it includes a prioritized list of key security tools practitioners are using in the hacking community, regardless of whether they are vendor supplied or open source. The exhaustive list provides ratings, reviews, searching, and sorting. 7. Top 10 Security Practices I have to give a shout out to my alma mater, Cal Poly, SLO: Go Mustangs! They have compiled their list of top 10 practices for students and faculty to follow. Educational institutions are a common target of web based attacks and miscellaneous errors according to the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.    6. (ISC)2 Top 10 Safe and Secure Online Tips for Parents This list is arguably the most important list on my list. The tips were "gathered from (ISC)2 member volunteers who participate in the organization’s Safe and Secure Online program, a worldwide initiative that brings top cyber security experts into schools to teach children ages 11-14 how to protect themselves in a cyber-connected world…If you are a parent, educator or organization that would like the Safe and Secure Online presentation delivered at your local school, or would like more information about the program, please visit here.” 5. Top Ten Data Breaches of the Past 12 Months This type of list is always changing, so it's nice to have a current one here from Techrader.com. They've compiled and commented on the top breaches. It is likely that most readers here were effected in some way or another. 4. Top Ten Security Comic Books Although mostly physical security controls, I threw this one in for fun. My vote for #1 (not on the list) would be Professor X. The guy can breach confidentiality, integrity, and availability just by messing with your thoughts. 3. The IOUG Data Security Survey's Top 10+ Threats to Organizations The Independent Oracle Users Group annual survey on enterprise data security, Leaders Vs. Laggards, highlights what Oracle Database users deem as the top 12 threats to their organization. You can find a nice graph on page 9; Figure 7: Greatest Threats to Data Security. 2. The Ten Most Common Database Security Vulnerabilities Though I don't necessarily agree with all of the vulnerabilities in this order...I like a list that focuses on where two-thirds of your sensitive and regulated data resides (Source: IDC).  1. OWASP Top Ten Project The Online Web Application Security Project puts together their annual list of the 10 most critical web application security risks that organizations should be including in their overall security, business risk and compliance plans. In particular, SQL injection risks continues to rear its ugly head each year. Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall can help prevent SQL injection attacks and monitor database and system activity as a detective security control. Did I miss any?

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  • Uget tray icon not showing

    - by ArK
    Since I upgraded to Saucy, Uget is not showing in the system tray, although the Always show tray icon option in Uget settings is checked. P.S. this happens only with Uget, all the other Softwares have working tray icons (vlc,qbittorrent..) Here is the snapshot which shows the settings of Uget: sudo dpkg -l | grep -e "^rc" -e "^iU": rc account-plugin-generic-oauth 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 i386 GNOME Control Center account plugin for single signon - generic OAuth rc appmenu-gtk:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc appmenu-gtk3:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc arora 0.11.0-0ubuntu1 i386 simple cross platform web browser rc buc 0.5.2-20 i386 BUC rc clementine 1.1.1+dfsg-2ubuntu1 i386 modern music player and library organizer rc epiphany-browser 3.6.1-2ubuntu1 i386 Intuitive GNOME web browser rc epiphany-browser-data 3.6.1-2ubuntu3 all Data files for the GNOME web browser rc fancontrol 1:3.3.3-1ubuntu1 all utilities to read temperature/voltage/fan sensors rc flaremonitor 1.0-5 i386 It is an advanced browser integration helper module of FlareGet rc google-chrome-stable 28.0.1500.95-r213514 i386 The web browser from Google rc hal 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer rc hotot-gtk 1:0.9.8.5+git20120630.884797d-1 all lightweight microblogging client - GTK+ wrapper rc jockey-common 0.9.7-0ubuntu13 all user interface and desktop integration for driver management rc libanalitza4abi1 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitza5 4:4.11.2-0ubuntu1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitzagui4abi2 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - GUI routines rc libanalitzaplot4 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - plot routines rc libavcodec53:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav codec library rc libavutil51:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav utility library rc libbamf3-1:i386 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Window matching library - shared library rc libboost-iostreams1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Iostreams Library rc libboost-program-options1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 program options library for C++ rc libboost-python1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Python Library rc libboost-thread1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 portable C++ multi-threading rc libbrlapi0.5:i386 4.4-8ubuntu4 i386 braille display access via BRLTTY - shared library rc libcamel-1.2-40 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Evolution MIME message handling library rc libcolumbus0-0 0.4.0daily13.04.16~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 error tolerant matching engine - shared library rc libdns95 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 DNS Shared Library used by BIND rc libdvbpsi7 0.2.2-1 i386 library for MPEG TS and DVB PSI tables decoding and generating rc libebackend-1.2-5 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Utility library for evolution data servers rc libechonest2.0:i386 2.0.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libechonest2.1:i386 2.1.0-2 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libedata-book-1.2-15 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution address books rc libedata-cal-1.2-18 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution calendars rc libftgl2 2.1.3~rc5-4ubuntu1 i386 library to render text in OpenGL using FreeType rc libgc1c3:i386 1:7.2d-0ubuntu5 i386 conservative garbage collector for C and C++ rc libgnome-desktop-3-4 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Utility library for loading .desktop files - runtime files rc libgtksourceview-3.0-0:i386 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 shared libraries for the GTK+ syntax highlighting widget rc libgweather-3-1 3.6.2-0ubuntu1 i386 GWeather shared library rc libhal-storage1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library for storage devices rc libhal1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library rc libharfbuzz0:i386 0.9.13-1 i386 OpenType text shaping engine rc libhd16 16.0-2.2 i386 Hardware identification system library rc libibus-1.0-0:i386 1.4.2-0ubuntu2 i386 Intelligent Input Bus - shared library rc libical0 0.48-2 i386 iCalendar library implementation in C (runtime) rc libimobiledevice3 1.1.4-1ubuntu6.2 i386 Library for communicating with the iPhone and iPod Touch rc libisc92 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 ISC Shared Library used by BIND rc libkdegamesprivate1 4:4.10.2-0ubuntu1 i386 private shared library for KDE games rc libkeybinder0 0.3.0-1ubuntu1 i386 registers global key bindings for applications rc libkgapi0:i386 0.4.4-0ubuntu1 i386 Google API library for KDE rc liblastfm1:i386 1.0.7-2 i386 Last.fm web services library rc libnetfilter-queue1 1.0.2-1 i386 Netfilter netlink-queue library rc libnl1:i386 1.1-7ubuntu1 i386 library for dealing with netlink sockets rc libossp-uuid16 1.6.2-1.3 i386 OSSP uuid ISO-C and C++ - shared library rc libpackagekit-glib2-14:i386 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 i386 Library for accessing PackageKit using GLib rc libpoppler28:i386 0.20.5-1ubuntu3 i386 PDF rendering library rc libprojectm2 2.1.0+dfsg-1build1 i386 Advanced Milkdrop-compatible music visualization library rc libqxt-core0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt core classes (LibQxt) rc libqxt-gui0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt GUI classes (LibQxt) rc libraw5:i386 0.14.7-0ubuntu1.13.04.2 i386 raw image decoder library rc librhythmbox-core6 2.98-0ubuntu5 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc librhythmbox-core7 3.0.1-0~13.10~ppa1 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc libsnmp15 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 i386 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) library rc libsqlite0 2.8.17-8fakesync1 i386 SQLite shared library rc libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 4.2.0-0ubuntu1 i386 Ubuntu One synchronization daemon library rc libtiff4:i386 3.9.7-2ubuntu1 i386 Tag Image File Format (TIFF) library (old version) rc libunity-core-6.0-5 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Core library for the Unity interface. rc libva-wayland1:i386 1.2.1-0ubuntu0~raring i386 Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- Wayland runtime rc libwayland0:i386 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 i386 wayland compositor infrastructure - shared libraries rc libwebp2:i386 0.1.3-3 i386 Lossy compression of digital photographic images. rc linux-image-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900-generic 3.9.0-030900.201304291257 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900rc8-generic 3.9.0-030900rc8.201304211835 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc preload 0.6.4-2 i386 adaptive readahead daemon rc steam-launcher 1.0.0.39 all Launcher for the Steam software distribution service rc super-boot-manager 0.7.15 all Simple gui to configure Grub2, Burg and Plymouth. rc totem 3.6.3-0ubuntu6 i386 Simple media player for the GNOME desktop based on GStreamer rc transmission-gtk 2.77-0ubuntu1 i386 lightweight BitTorrent client (GTK interface) rc unity-common 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 all Common files for the Unity interface. rc vino 3.6.2-0ubuntu4 i386 VNC server for GNOME rc wicd-daemon 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - daemon rc wicd-gtk 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - GTK+ client rc xscreensaver 5.15-2ubuntu1 i386 Automatic screensaver for X rc xscreensaver-data 5.15-3ubuntu1 i386 data files to be shared among screensaver frontends sudo dpkg -l | grep uget: ii uget 1.10.3-1 i386 easy-to-use download manager written in GTK+ sudo dpkg -l | grep indicator: ii gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Typelib files for libappindicator3-1. ii gir1.2-syncmenu-0.1 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - bindings ii indicator-applet-complete 12.10.2+13.10.20130924.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Clone of the GNOME panel indicator applet ii indicator-application 12.10.1daily13.01.25-0ubuntu1 i386 Application Indicators ii indicator-appmenu 13.01.0+13.10.20130930-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator for application menus. ii indicator-bluetooth 0.0.6+13.10.20131016-0ubuntu1 i386 System bluetooth indicator. ii indicator-datetime 13.10.0+13.10.20131023.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Simple clock ii indicator-keyboard 0.0.0+13.10.20131010.1-0ubuntu1 i386 Keyboard indicator ii indicator-messages 13.10.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator that collects messages that need a response ii indicator-multiload 0.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Graphical system load indicator for CPU, ram, etc. ii indicator-power 12.10.6+13.10.20131008-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator showing power state. ii indicator-printers 0.1.7daily13.03.01-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing active print jobs ii indicator-session 12.10.5+13.10.20131023.1-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing session management, status and user switching ii indicator-sound 12.10.2+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 System sound indicator. ii indicator-sync 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status ii libappindicator1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libappindicator3-1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libindicator3-7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libindicator7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libsync-menu1:i386 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - libraries ii python-appindicator 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Python bindings for libappindicator ii sni-qt:i386 0.2.6-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator support for Qt ii telepathy-indicator 0.3.1daily13.06.19-0ubuntu1 i386 Desktop service to integrate Telepathy with the messaging menu.

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  • ASP.NET MVC: Converting business objects to select list items

    - by DigiMortal
    Some of our business classes are used to fill dropdown boxes or select lists. And often you have some base class for all your business classes. In this posting I will show you how to use base business class to write extension method that converts collection of business objects to ASP.NET MVC select list items without writing a lot of code. BusinessBase, BaseEntity and other base classes I prefer to have some base class for all my business classes so I can easily use them regardless of their type in contexts I need. NB! Some guys say that it is good idea to have base class for all your business classes and they also suggest you to have mappings done same way in database. Other guys say that it is good to have base class but you don’t have to have one master table in database that contains identities of all your business objects. It is up to you how and what you prefer to do but whatever you do – think and analyze first, please. :) To keep things maximally simple I will use very primitive base class in this example. This class has only Id property and that’s it. public class BaseEntity {     public virtual long Id { get; set; } } Now we have Id in base class and we have one more question to solve – how to better visualize our business objects? To users ID is not enough, they want something more informative. We can define some abstract property that all classes must implement. But there is also another option we can use – overriding ToString() method in our business classes. public class Product : BaseEntity {     public virtual string SKU { get; set; }     public virtual string Name { get; set; }       public override string ToString()     {         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Name))             return base.ToString();           return Name;     } } Although you can add more functionality and properties to your base class we are at point where we have what we needed: identity and human readable presentation of business objects. Writing list items converter Now we can write method that creates list items for us. public static class BaseEntityExtensions {            public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems<T>         (this IList<T> baseEntities) where T : BaseEntity     {         return ToSelectListItems((IEnumerator<BaseEntity>)                    baseEntities.GetEnumerator());     }       public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems         (this IEnumerator<BaseEntity> baseEntities)     {         var items = new HashSet<SelectListItem>();           while (baseEntities.MoveNext())         {             var item = new SelectListItem();             var entity = baseEntities.Current;               item.Value = entity.Id.ToString();             item.Text = entity.ToString();               items.Add(item);         }           return items;     } } You can see here to overloads of same method. One works with List<T> and the other with IEnumerator<BaseEntity>. Although mostly my repositories return IList<T> when querying data there are always situations where I can use more abstract types and interfaces. Using extension methods in code In your code you can use ToSelectListItems() extension methods like shown on following code fragment. ... var model = new MyFormModel(); model.Statuses = _myRepository.ListStatuses().ToSelectListItems(); ... You can call this method on all your business classes that extend your base entity. Wanna have some fun with this code? Write overload for extension method that accepts selected item ID.

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  • NET Math Libraries

    - by JoshReuben
    NET Mathematical Libraries   .NET Builder for Matlab The MathWorks Inc. - http://www.mathworks.com/products/netbuilder/ MATLAB Builder NE generates MATLAB based .NET and COM components royalty-free deployment creates the components by encrypting MATLAB functions and generating either a .NET or COM wrapper around them. .NET/Link for Mathematica www.wolfram.com a product that 2-way integrates Mathematica and Microsoft's .NET platform call .NET from Mathematica - use arbitrary .NET types directly from the Mathematica language. use and control the Mathematica kernel from a .NET program. turns Mathematica into a scripting shell to leverage the computational services of Mathematica. write custom front ends for Mathematica or use Mathematica as a computational engine for another program comes with full source code. Leverages MathLink - a Wolfram Research's protocol for sending data and commands back and forth between Mathematica and other programs. .NET/Link abstracts the low-level details of the MathLink C API. Extreme Optimization http://www.extremeoptimization.com/ a collection of general-purpose mathematical and statistical classes built for the.NET framework. It combines a math library, a vector and matrix library, and a statistics library in one package. download the trial of version 4.0 to try it out. Multi-core ready - Full support for Task Parallel Library features including cancellation. Broad base of algorithms covering a wide range of numerical techniques, including: linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK routines), numerical analysis (integration and differentiation), equation solvers. Mathematics leverages parallelism using .NET 4.0's Task Parallel Library. Basic math: Complex numbers, 'special functions' like Gamma and Bessel functions, numerical differentiation. Solving equations: Solve equations in one variable, or solve systems of linear or nonlinear equations. Curve fitting: Linear and nonlinear curve fitting, cubic splines, polynomials, orthogonal polynomials. Optimization: find the minimum or maximum of a function in one or more variables, linear programming and mixed integer programming. Numerical integration: Compute integrals over finite or infinite intervals, over 2D and higher dimensional regions. Integrate systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). Fast Fourier Transforms: 1D and 2D FFT's using managed or fast native code (32 and 64 bit) BigInteger, BigRational, and BigFloat: Perform operations with arbitrary precision. Vector and Matrix Library Real and complex vectors and matrices. Single and double precision for elements. Structured matrix types: including triangular, symmetrical and band matrices. Sparse matrices. Matrix factorizations: LU decomposition, QR decomposition, singular value decomposition, Cholesky decomposition, eigenvalue decomposition. Portability and performance: Calculations can be done in 100% managed code, or in hand-optimized processor-specific native code (32 and 64 bit). Statistics Data manipulation: Sort and filter data, process missing values, remove outliers, etc. Supports .NET data binding. Statistical Models: Simple, multiple, nonlinear, logistic, Poisson regression. Generalized Linear Models. One and two-way ANOVA. Hypothesis Tests: 12 14 hypothesis tests, including the z-test, t-test, F-test, runs test, and more advanced tests, such as the Anderson-Darling test for normality, one and two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and Levene's test for homogeneity of variances. Multivariate Statistics: K-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), multivariate probability distributions. Statistical Distributions: 25 29 continuous and discrete statistical distributions, including uniform, Poisson, normal, lognormal, Weibull and Gumbel (extreme value) distributions. Random numbers: Random variates from any distribution, 4 high-quality random number generators, low discrepancy sequences, shufflers. New in version 4.0 (November, 2010) Support for .NET Framework Version 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 TPL Parallellized – multicore ready sparse linear program solver - can solve problems with more than 1 million variables. Mixed integer linear programming using a branch and bound algorithm. special functions: hypergeometric, Riemann zeta, elliptic integrals, Frensel functions, Dawson's integral. Full set of window functions for FFT's. Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $999  $399  Team License (3 developers) $1999  $799  Department License (8 developers) $3999  $1599  Site License (Unlimited developers in one physical location) $7999  $3199    NMath http://www.centerspace.net .NET math and statistics libraries matrix and vector classes random number generators Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) numerical integration linear programming linear regression curve and surface fitting optimization hypothesis tests analysis of variance (ANOVA) probability distributions principal component analysis cluster analysis built on the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL), which contains highly-optimized, extensively-threaded versions of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage). Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $1295 $388 Team License (5 developers) $5180 $1554   DotNumerics http://www.dotnumerics.com/NumericalLibraries/Default.aspx free DotNumerics is a website dedicated to numerical computing for .NET that includes a C# Numerical Library for .NET containing algorithms for Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Optimization problems. The Linear Algebra library includes CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack, ports from Fortran to C# of LAPACK, BLAS and EISPACK, respectively. Linear Algebra (CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack). Systems of linear equations, eigenvalue problems, least-squares solutions of linear systems and singular value problems. Differential Equations. Initial-value problem for nonstiff and stiff ordinary differential equations ODEs (explicit Runge-Kutta, implicit Runge-Kutta, Gear's BDF and Adams-Moulton). Optimization. Unconstrained and bounded constrained optimization of multivariate functions (L-BFGS-B, Truncated Newton and Simplex methods).   Math.NET Numerics http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/ free an open source numerical library - includes special functions, linear algebra, probability models, random numbers, interpolation, integral transforms. A merger of dnAnalytics with Math.NET Iridium in addition to a purely managed implementation will also support native hardware optimization. constants & special functions complex type support real and complex, dense and sparse linear algebra (with LU, QR, eigenvalues, ... decompositions) non-uniform probability distributions, multivariate distributions, sample generation alternative uniform random number generators descriptive statistics, including order statistics various interpolation methods, including barycentric approaches and splines numerical function integration (quadrature) routines integral transforms, like fourier transform (FFT) with arbitrary lengths support, and hartley spectral-space aware sequence manipulation (signal processing) combinatorics, polynomials, quaternions, basic number theory. parallelized where appropriate, to leverage multi-core and multi-processor systems fully managed or (if available) using native libraries (Intel MKL, ACMS, CUDA, FFTW) provides a native facade for F# developers

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  • C#: String Concatenation vs Format vs StringBuilder

    - by James Michael Hare
    I was looking through my groups’ C# coding standards the other day and there were a couple of legacy items in there that caught my eye.  They had been passed down from committee to committee so many times that no one even thought to second guess and try them for a long time.  It’s yet another example of how micro-optimizations can often get the best of us and cause us to write code that is not as maintainable as it could be for the sake of squeezing an extra ounce of performance out of our software. So the two standards in question were these, in paraphrase: Prefer StringBuilder or string.Format() to string concatenation. Prefer string.Equals() with case-insensitive option to string.ToUpper().Equals(). Now some of you may already know what my results are going to show, as these items have been compared before on many blogs, but I think it’s always worth repeating and trying these yourself.  So let’s dig in. The first test was a pretty standard one.  When concattenating strings, what is the best choice: StringBuilder, string concattenation, or string.Format()? So before we being I read in a number of iterations from the console and a length of each string to generate.  Then I generate that many random strings of the given length and an array to hold the results.  Why am I so keen to keep the results?  Because I want to be able to snapshot the memory and don’t want garbage collection to collect the strings, hence the array to keep hold of them.  I also didn’t want the random strings to be part of the allocation, so I pre-allocate them and the array up front before the snapshot.  So in the code snippets below: num – Number of iterations. strings – Array of randomly generated strings. results – Array to hold the results of the concatenation tests. timer – A System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch() instance to time code execution. start – Beginning memory size. stop – Ending memory size. after – Memory size after final GC. So first, let’s look at the concatenation loop: 1: // build num strings using concattenation. 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: results[i] = "This is test #" + i + " with a result of " + strings[i]; 5: } Pretty standard, right?  Next for string.Format(): 1: // build strings using string.Format() 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: results[i] = string.Format("This is test #{0} with a result of {1}", i, strings[i]); 5: }   Finally, StringBuilder: 1: // build strings using StringBuilder 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: var builder = new StringBuilder(); 5: builder.Append("This is test #"); 6: builder.Append(i); 7: builder.Append(" with a result of "); 8: builder.Append(strings[i]); 9: results[i] = builder.ToString(); 10: } So I take each of these loops, and time them by using a block like this: 1: // get the total amount of memory used, true tells it to run GC first. 2: start = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(true); 3:  4: // restart the timer 5: timer.Reset(); 6: timer.Start(); 7:  8: // *** code to time and measure goes here. *** 9:  10: // get the current amount of memory, stop the timer, then get memory after GC. 11: stop = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(false); 12: timer.Stop(); 13: other = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(true); So let’s look at what happens when I run each of these blocks through the timer and memory check at 500,000 iterations: 1: Operator + - Time: 547, Memory: 56104540/55595960 - 500000 2: string.Format() - Time: 749, Memory: 57295812/55595960 - 500000 3: StringBuilder - Time: 608, Memory: 55312888/55595960 – 500000   Egad!  string.Format brings up the rear and + triumphs, well, at least in terms of speed.  The concat burns more memory than StringBuilder but less than string.Format().  This shows two main things: StringBuilder is not always the panacea many think it is. The difference between any of the three is miniscule! The second point is extremely important!  You will often here people who will grasp at results and say, “look, operator + is 10% faster than StringBuilder so always use StringBuilder.”  Statements like this are a disservice and often misleading.  For example, if I had a good guess at what the size of the string would be, I could have preallocated my StringBuffer like so:   1: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 2: { 3: // pre-declare StringBuilder to have 100 char buffer. 4: var builder = new StringBuilder(100); 5: builder.Append("This is test #"); 6: builder.Append(i); 7: builder.Append(" with a result of "); 8: builder.Append(strings[i]); 9: results[i] = builder.ToString(); 10: }   Now let’s look at the times: 1: Operator + - Time: 551, Memory: 56104412/55595960 - 500000 2: string.Format() - Time: 753, Memory: 57296484/55595960 - 500000 3: StringBuilder - Time: 525, Memory: 59779156/55595960 - 500000   Whoa!  All of the sudden StringBuilder is back on top again!  But notice, it takes more memory now.  This makes perfect sense if you examine the IL behind the scenes.  Whenever you do a string concat (+) in your code, it examines the lengths of the arguments and creates a StringBuilder behind the scenes of the appropriate size for you. But even IF we know the approximate size of our StringBuilder, look how much less readable it is!  That’s why I feel you should always take into account both readability and performance.  After all, consider all these timings are over 500,000 iterations.   That’s at best  0.0004 ms difference per call which is neglidgable at best.  The key is to pick the best tool for the job.  What do I mean?  Consider these awesome words of wisdom: Concatenate (+) is best at concatenating.  StringBuilder is best when you need to building. Format is best at formatting. Totally Earth-shattering, right!  But if you consider it carefully, it actually has a lot of beauty in it’s simplicity.  Remember, there is no magic bullet.  If one of these always beat the others we’d only have one and not three choices. The fact is, the concattenation operator (+) has been optimized for speed and looks the cleanest for joining together a known set of strings in the simplest manner possible. StringBuilder, on the other hand, excels when you need to build a string of inderterminant length.  Use it in those times when you are looping till you hit a stop condition and building a result and it won’t steer you wrong. String.Format seems to be the looser from the stats, but consider which of these is more readable.  Yes, ignore the fact that you could do this with ToString() on a DateTime.  1: // build a date via concatenation 2: var date1 = (month < 10 ? string.Empty : "0") + month + '/' 3: + (day < 10 ? string.Empty : "0") + '/' + year; 4:  5: // build a date via string builder 6: var builder = new StringBuilder(10); 7: if (month < 10) builder.Append('0'); 8: builder.Append(month); 9: builder.Append('/'); 10: if (day < 10) builder.Append('0'); 11: builder.Append(day); 12: builder.Append('/'); 13: builder.Append(year); 14: var date2 = builder.ToString(); 15:  16: // build a date via string.Format 17: var date3 = string.Format("{0:00}/{1:00}/{2:0000}", month, day, year); 18:  So the strength in string.Format is that it makes constructing a formatted string easy to read.  Yes, it’s slower, but look at how much more elegant it is to do zero-padding and anything else string.Format does. So my lesson is, don’t look for the silver bullet!  Choose the best tool.  Micro-optimization almost always bites you in the end because you’re sacrificing readability for performance, which is almost exactly the wrong choice 90% of the time. I love the rules of optimization.  They’ve been stated before in many forms, but here’s how I always remember them: For Beginners: Do not optimize. For Experts: Do not optimize yet. It’s so true.  Most of the time on today’s modern hardware, a micro-second optimization at the sake of readability will net you nothing because it won’t be your bottleneck.  Code for readability, choose the best tool for the job which will usually be the most readable and maintainable as well.  Then, and only then, if you need that extra performance boost after profiling your code and exhausting all other options… then you can start to think about optimizing.

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  • AWS: setting up auto-scale for EC2 instances

    - by Elton Stoneman
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/16/aws-setting-up-auto-scale-for-ec2-instances.aspxWith Amazon Web Services, there’s no direct equivalent to Azure Worker Roles – no Elastic Beanstalk-style application for .NET background workers. But you can get the auto-scale part by configuring an auto-scaling group for your EC2 instance. This is a step-by-step guide, that shows you how to create the auto-scaling configuration, which for EC2 you need to do with the command line, and then link your scaling policies to CloudWatch alarms in the Web console. I’m using queue size as my metric for CloudWatch,  which is a good fit if your background workers are pulling messages from a queue and processing them.  If the queue is getting too big, the “high” alarm will fire and spin up a new instance to share the workload. If the queue is draining down, the “low” alarm will fire and shut down one of the instances. To start with, you need to manually set up your app in an EC2 VM, for a background worker that would mean hosting your code in a Windows Service (I always use Topshelf). If you’re dual-running Azure and AWS, then you can isolate your logic in one library, with a generic entry point that has Start() and Stop()  functions, so your Worker Role and Windows Service are essentially using the same code. When you have your instance set up with the Windows Service running automatically, and you’ve tested it starts up and works properly from a reboot, shut the machine down and take an image of the VM, using Create Image (EBS AMI) from the Web Console: When that completes, you’ll have your own AMI which you can use to spin up new instances, and you’re ready to create your auto-scaling group. You need to dip into the command-line tools for this, so follow this guide to set up the AWS autoscale command line tool. Now we’re ready to go. 1. Create a launch configuration This launch configuration tells AWS what to do when a new instance needs to be spun up. You create it with the as-create-launch-config command, which looks like this: as-create-launch-config sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config --image-id ami-7b9e9f12 # id of the AMI you extracted from your VM --region eu-west-1 # which region the new instance gets created in --instance-type t1.micro # size of the instance to create --group quicklaunch-1 #security group for the new instance 2. Create an auto-scaling group The auto-scaling group links to the launch config, and defines the overall configuration of the collection of instances: as-create-auto-scaling-group sc-xyz-asg # auto-scaling group name --region eu-west-1 # region to create in --launch-configuration sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config to invoke for new instances --min-size 1 # minimum number of nodes in the group --max-size 5 # maximum number of nodes in the group --default-cooldown 300 # period to wait (in seconds) after each scaling event, before checking if another scaling event is required --availability-zones eu-west-1a eu-west-1b eu-west-1c # which availability zones you want your instances to be allocated in – multiple entries means EC@ will use any of them 3. Create a scale-up policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “high” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one additional node being spun up: as-put-scaling-policy scale-up-policy # policy name -g sc-psod-woker-asg # auto-scaling group the policy works with --adjustment 1 # size of the adjustment --region eu-west-1 # region --type ChangeInCapacity # type of adjustment, this specifies a fixed number of nodes, but you can use PercentChangeInCapacity to make an adjustment relative to the current number of nodes, e.g. increasing by 50% 4. Create a scale-down policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “low” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one node from the group being taken offline: as-put-scaling-policy scale-down-policy -g sc-psod-woker-asg "--adjustment=-1" # in Windows, use double-quotes to surround a negative adjustment value –-type ChangeInCapacity --region eu-west-1 5. Create a “high” CloudWatch alarm We’re done with the command line now. In the Web Console, open up the CloudWatch view and create a new alarm. This alarm will monitor your metrics and invoke the scale-up policy from your auto-scaling group, when the group is working too hard. Configure your metric – this example will fire the alarm if there are more than 10 messages in my queue for over a minute: Then link the alarm to the scale-up policy in your group: 6. Create a “low” CloudWatch alarm The opposite of step 4, this alarm will trigger when the instances in your group don’t have enough work to do (e.g fewer than 2 messages in the queue for 1 minute), and will invoke the scale-down policy. And that’s it. You don’t need your original VM as the auto-scale group has a minimum number of nodes connected. You can test out the scaling by flexing your CloudWatch metric – in this example, filling up a queue from a  stub publisher – and watching AWS create new nodes as required, then stopping the publisher and watch AWS kill off the spare nodes.

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  • Lists NotifyPropertyChanging

    - by Carlo
    Well BindingList and ObservableCollection work great to keep data updated and to notify when one of it's objects has changed. However, when notifying a property is about to change, I think these options are not very good. What I have to do right now to solve this (and I warn this is not elegant AT ALL), is to implement INotifyPropertyChanging on the list's type object and then tie that to the object that holds the list PropertyChanging event, or something like the following: // this object will be the type of the BindingList public class SomeObject : INotifyPropertyChanging, INotifyPropertyChanged { private int _intProperty = 0; private string _strProperty = String.Empty; public int IntProperty { get { return this._intProperty; } set { if (this._intProperty != value) { NotifyPropertyChanging("IntProperty"); this._intProperty = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("IntProperty"); } } } public string StrProperty { get { return this._strProperty; } set { if (this._strProperty != value) { NotifyPropertyChanging("StrProperty"); this._strProperty = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("StrProperty"); } } } #region INotifyPropertyChanging Members public event PropertyChangingEventHandler PropertyChanging; #endregion #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; #endregion public void NotifyPropertyChanging(string propertyName) { if (this.PropertyChanging != null) PropertyChanging(this, new PropertyChangingEventArgs(propertyName)); } public void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (this.PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public class ObjectThatHoldsTheList : INotifyPropertyChanging, INotifyPropertyChanged { public BindingList<SomeObject> BindingList { get; set; } public ObjectThatHoldsTheList() { this.BindingList = new BindingList<SomeObject>(); } // this helps notifie Changing and Changed on Add private void AddItem(SomeObject someObject) { // this will tie the PropertyChanging and PropertyChanged events of SomeObject to this object // so it gets notifies because the BindingList does not notify PropertyCHANGING someObject.PropertyChanging += new PropertyChangingEventHandler(someObject_PropertyChanging); someObject.PropertyChanged += new PropertyChangedEventHandler(someObject_PropertyChanged); this.NotifyPropertyChanging("BindingList"); this.BindingList.Add(someObject); this.NotifyPropertyChanged("BindingList"); } // this helps notifies Changing and Changed on Delete private void DeleteItem(SomeObject someObject) { if (this.BindingList.IndexOf(someObject) > 0) { // this unlinks the handlers so the garbage collector can clear the objects someObject.PropertyChanging -= new PropertyChangingEventHandler(someObject_PropertyChanging); someObject.PropertyChanged -= new PropertyChangedEventHandler(someObject_PropertyChanged); } this.NotifyPropertyChanging("BindingList"); this.BindingList.Remove(someObject); this.NotifyPropertyChanged("BindingList"); } // this notifies an item in the list is about to change void someObject_PropertyChanging(object sender, PropertyChangingEventArgs e) { NotifyPropertyChanging("BindingList." + e.PropertyName); } // this notifies an item in the list has changed void someObject_PropertyChanged(object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e) { NotifyPropertyChanged("BindingList." + e.PropertyName); } #region INotifyPropertyChanging Members public event PropertyChangingEventHandler PropertyChanging; #endregion #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; #endregion public void NotifyPropertyChanging(string propertyName) { if (this.PropertyChanging != null) PropertyChanging(this, new PropertyChangingEventArgs(propertyName)); } public void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (this.PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } Sorry, I know this is a lot of code, which takes me back to my main point IT'S A LOT OF CODE to implement this. So my question is, does anyone know a better, shorter, more elegant solution? Thanks for your time and suggestions.

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  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler&lt;TEventArgs&gt; delegates

    - by James Michael Hare
    Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates that can be used to eliminate the need for defining custom delegates when creating events: the EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates. Events and delegates Before we begin, let’s quickly consider events in .NET.  According to the MSDN: An event in C# is a way for a class to provide notifications to clients of that class when some interesting thing happens to an object. So, basically, you can create an event in a type so that users of that type can subscribe to notifications of things of interest.  How is this different than some of the delegate programming that we talked about in the last two weeks?  Well, you can think of an event as a special access modifier on a delegate.  Some differences between the two are: Events are a special access case of delegates They behave much like delegates instances inside the type they are declared in, but outside of that type they can only be (un)subscribed to. Events can specify add/remove behavior explicitly If you want to do additional work when someone subscribes or unsubscribes to an event, you can specify the add and remove actions explicitly. Events have access modifiers, but these only specify the access level of those who can (un)subscribe A public event, for example, means anyone can (un)subscribe, but it does not mean that anyone can raise (invoke) the event directly.  Events can only be raised by the type that contains them In contrast, if a delegate is visible, it can be invoked outside of the object (not even in a sub-class!). Events tend to be for notifications only, and should be treated as optional Semantically speaking, events typically don’t perform work on the the class directly, but tend to just notify subscribers when something of note occurs. My basic rule-of-thumb is that if you are just wanting to notify any listeners (who may or may not care) that something has happened, use an event.  However, if you want the caller to provide some function to perform to direct the class about how it should perform work, make it a delegate. Declaring events using custom delegates To declare an event in a type, we simply use the event keyword and specify its delegate type.  For example, let’s say you wanted to create a new TimeOfDayTimer that triggers at a given time of the day (as opposed to on an interval).  We could write something like this: 1: public delegate void TimeOfDayHandler(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e); 2:  3: // A timer that will fire at time of day each day. 4: public class TimeOfDayTimer : IDisposable 5: { 6: // Event that is triggered at time of day. 7: public event TimeOfDayHandler Elapsed; 8:  9: // ... 10: } The first thing to note is that the event is a delegate type, which tells us what types of methods may subscribe to it.  The second thing to note is the signature of the event handler delegate, according to the MSDN: The standard signature of an event handler delegate defines a method that does not return a value, whose first parameter is of type Object and refers to the instance that raises the event, and whose second parameter is derived from type EventArgs and holds the event data. If the event does not generate event data, the second parameter is simply an instance of EventArgs. Otherwise, the second parameter is a custom type derived from EventArgs and supplies any fields or properties needed to hold the event data. So, in a nutshell, the event handler delegates should return void and take two parameters: An object reference to the object that raised the event. An EventArgs (or a subclass of EventArgs) reference to event specific information. Even if your event has no additional information to provide, you are still expected to provide an EventArgs instance.  In this case, feel free to pass the EventArgs.Empty singleton instead of creating new instances of EventArgs (to avoid generating unneeded memory garbage). The EventHandler delegate Because many events have no additional information to pass, and thus do not require custom EventArgs, the signature of the delegates for subscribing to these events is typically: 1: // always takes an object and an EventArgs reference 2: public delegate void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) It would be insane to recreate this delegate for every class that had a basic event with no additional event data, so there already exists a delegate for you called EventHandler that has this very definition!  Feel free to use it to define any events which supply no additional event information: 1: public class Cache 2: { 3: // event that is raised whenever the cache performs a cleanup 4: public event EventHandler OnCleanup; 5:  6: // ... 7: } This will handle any event with the standard EventArgs (no additional information).  But what of events that do need to supply additional information?  Does that mean we’re out of luck for subclasses of EventArgs?  That’s where the generic for of EventHandler comes into play… The generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegate Starting with the introduction of generics in .NET 2.0, we have a generic delegate called EventHandler<TEventArgs>.  Its signature is as follows: 1: public delegate void EventHandler<TEventArgs>(object sender, TEventArgs e) 2: where TEventArgs : EventArgs This is similar to EventHandler except it has been made generic to support the more general case.  Thus, it will work for any delegate where the first argument is an object (the sender) and the second argument is a class derived from EventArgs (the event data). For example, let’s say we wanted to create a message receiver, and we wanted it to have a few events such as OnConnected that will tell us when a connection is established (probably with no additional information) and OnMessageReceived that will tell us when a new message arrives (probably with a string for the new message text). So for OnMessageReceived, our MessageReceivedEventArgs might look like this: 1: public sealed class MessageReceivedEventArgs : EventArgs 2: { 3: public string Message { get; set; } 4: } And since OnConnected needs no event argument type defined, our class might look something like this: 1: public class MessageReceiver 2: { 3: // event that is called when the receiver connects with sender 4: public event EventHandler OnConnected; 5:  6: // event that is called when a new message is received. 7: public event EventHandler<MessageReceivedEventArgs> OnMessageReceived; 8:  9: // ... 10: } Notice, nowhere did we have to define a delegate to fit our event definition, the EventHandler and generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates fit almost anything we’d need to do with events. Sidebar: Thread-safety and raising an event When the time comes to raise an event, we should always check to make sure there are subscribers, and then only raise the event if anyone is subscribed.  This is important because if no one is subscribed to the event, then the instance will be null and we will get a NullReferenceException if we attempt to raise the event. 1: // This protects against NullReferenceException... or does it? 2: if (OnMessageReceived != null) 3: { 4: OnMessageReceived(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 5: } The above code seems to handle the null reference if no one is subscribed, but there’s a problem if this is being used in multi-threaded environments.  For example, assume we have thread A which is about to raise the event, and it checks and clears the null check and is about to raise the event.  However, before it can do that thread B unsubscribes to the event, which sets the delegate to null.  Now, when thread A attempts to raise the event, this causes the NullReferenceException that we were hoping to avoid! To counter this, the simplest best-practice method is to copy the event (just a multicast delegate) to a temporary local variable just before we raise it.  Since we are inside the class where this event is being raised, we can copy it to a local variable like this, and it will protect us from multi-threading since multicast delegates are immutable and assignments are atomic: 1: // always make copy of the event multi-cast delegate before checking 2: // for null to avoid race-condition between the null-check and raising it. 3: var handler = OnMessageReceived; 4: 5: if (handler != null) 6: { 7: handler(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 8: } The very slight trade-off is that it’s possible a class may get an event after it unsubscribes in a multi-threaded environment, but this is a small risk and classes should be prepared for this possibility anyway.  For a more detailed discussion on this, check out this excellent Eric Lippert blog post on Events and Races. Summary Generic delegates give us a lot of power to make generic algorithms and classes, and the EventHandler delegate family gives us the flexibility to create events easily, without needing to redefine delegates over and over.  Use them whenever you need to define events with or without specialized EventArgs.   Tweet Technorati Tags: .NET, C#, CSharp, Little Wonders, Generics, Delegates, EventHandler

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  • Create a Slide Show in Windows 7 Media Center

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you looking for a nice way to create and display a slide show from your photo collection? Today we’ll show you how to create a slide show, how to add music to it, and watch it from the comfort of your couch in Windows 7 Media Center. Create Slide Show Launch Windows 7 Media Center and click on the Picture Library tile found under Pictures and Videos.   In the Pictures Library, scroll across to slide shows and click on Create Slide show.   Enter a name for the slide show and click Next.   If you are using a Windows Media Center remote, click on the OK button to bring up the onscreen keyboard. Use the directional buttons to navigate across the keyboard and press OK to select each letter. Click Done when finished. Select Picture Library and click Next. Select the pictures to include in your slide show. If using a remote, navigate through the images and press OK to select. If you are using a mouse, simply click on the selections. When you are finished, click Next.    Now, we can review and edit the slide show. Click the up or down pointing arrows to move pictures up and down in the order.  (more intuitive titles would be helpful in this case as opposed to the randomly generated titles in the example below) If you are finished, click Create. You can also choose to go back and add music to your slide show. (or even more pictures) We’ll take a look at adding some music in our example. Click on the Add More button.   Add Music to Your Slide Show Here we’ll select Music Library to add a song. Click Next.   You’ll now be able to browse your Music Library to select songs for your slide show. Select your songs and click Next.   When you are finished adding Music and Pictures click Create.   Once your slide show is saved, you can play it any time by going to clicking on slide shows in the Picture Library, then selecting the slide show title. Select play slide show when you’re ready to enjoy your new production.   If you ever want to edit or delete the slide show, select it in the Picture Library, and scroll to Actions. You’ll see those option under additional commands. You have the option to Edit Slide Show, Burn a CD/DVD, or Delete. Editing Slide Show Settings Within Media Center, go to Tasks… Click on Pictures…   Then choose Slide Shows. From the Slide Show settings you have the option to Show pictures in random order, Show picture information, Show song information, and Use Pan and zoom effect. You can also adjust the length of time to display each picture, and change the background color. Be sure to click Save to apply and changes before exiting. If you choose to show picture information, the picture title, date, and star rating will be displayed in the top right.   If your slide show is accompanied by music and you choose to show song information, you will get a translucent overlay for a few seconds at the beginning of each song to indicate the song, album, and artist. One of the really cool things about creating a slide show in Windows 7 Media Center is you can complete the entire process using just a Media Center remote. Can’t get enough slide shows? Check out how to turn your desktop into a picture slide show in Windows 7. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterTurn Your Desktop into a Picture Slideshow in Windows 7 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 Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons

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  • Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

    - by Alois Kraus
    Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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  • Silverlight Cream for February 26, 2011 -- #1052

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mark Monster, Gill Cleeren, Pencho Popadiyn, Kevin Dockx, Joost van Schaik, Jesse Liberty, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Arik Poznanski(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata, Mike Snow, Alfred Astort, Samuel Jack, XAMLNinja, and Shawn Wildermuth. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available!" Shawn Wildermuth MVVM: "Validating our ViewModel" Mark Monster Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth has a video up of his FadingMessage class to show it off: Introducing Phoney's FadingMessage Class From SilverlightCream.com: Validating our ViewModel Mark Monster discusses Validation in his latest post... using INotifyDataErrorInfo and his own implementation of a ViewModel base that supports it and INPC. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7) Gill Cleeren hits part 7 of his series at SilverlightShow on a great walk through Silverlight and getting ready for the exam. This is the final part and concentrates on deploying apps. Windows Phone 7–Creating Custom Keyboard Pencho Popadiyn has a post at SilverlightShow discussing problems with WP7 keyboards in his native Bulgaria, and his solution to the problem... create his own. 360 Degrees Feedback by Kevin Dockx Kevin Dockx produced a white paper for his company about an employee review solution they did in Silverlight. The white paper is available, and SilverlightShow interviewd Kevin to answer questions about the app. Extended Windows Phone 7 page for handling rotation, focused element updates and back key press Looks like Joost van Schaik has a few posts I've missed... and I'm not going to get to them all today! ... this one is about the base class he uses for WP7 apps... a bunch of utilities he uses... definitely worth a look (and a take). Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx Jesse Liberty has his 8th post in the Rx series up and this one's on Asynchronous Callbacks... if you haven't seen this before, you should definitely look into it... cool stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV 63: Exploring National Instruments' App Using Data and Business Features John Papa has Silverlight TV number 63 up and is talking to Steve Lasker about National Instruments and their Lab View product. Great demo and discussion. Jounce Part 11: Debugging MEF Jeremy Likness's latest (number 11) in his series on his MVVM framework Jounce is out, and he's discussing how to debug MEF, which Jounce handles nicely through the logging he provides... and you can use it externally to Jounce. Get Twitter Trends on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a couple Twitter for WP7 posts up... first is one for pulling Twitter trends from whatthetrend.com... plus the code to do it. Searching Twitter on Windows Phone 7 In his next post, Arik Poznanski shows how to search twitter from your WP7 ... again with code. Tiled Background Control in Silverlight Page Brooks shows how to get a tiled background control in Silverlight ... did you know there was one in the JetPack them? Silverlight Charting: Displaying Data Above the Column Deborah Kurata continues her charting posts with this one displaying the column value above the column. I like this... it has a clean look and all the data is available at a glance. Silverlight: Tasks on the Win7 Mobile Phone Mike Snow has a list of the WP7 tasks available and an example of using them... looks like a pretty good reference! 10 of 10 - Aesthetics and alignment matter Alfred Astort discusses aesthetics and WP7 dev... looks like it's the same as any app development, but if you're not doing it, you should be. Simon Squared – We have Multi-player: Days 4, 5 and (ahem!) 6 Samuel Jack details the completion of his multi-player game for WP7 utilizing Azure, in the hour-by-hour detail he's done the rest... plus a video of the final product! Who ate all the pies!! XAMLNinja has a very good discussion/link set of Charting posts all leading up to a portrait-only version of charting for WP7 with labels that looks looks great Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available! Shawn Wildermuth has a collection of classes he always uses with WP7 dev, and he's sharing them with all of us a "Phoney" Tools project on Codeplex... and now has a NuGet project also. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Workarounds for supporting MVVM in the Silverlight TreeView Control

    - by cibrax
    MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) is the pattern that you will typically choose for building testable user interfaces either in WPF or Silverlight. This pattern basically relies on the data binding support in those two technologies for mapping an existing model class (the view model) to the different parts of the UI or view. Unfortunately, MVVM was not threated as first citizen for some of controls released out of the box in the Silverlight runtime or the Silverlight toolkit. That means that using data binding for implementing MVVM is not always something trivial and usually requires some customization in the existing controls. In ran into different problems myself trying to fully support data binding in controls like the tree view or the context menu or things like drag & drop.  For that reason, I decided to write this post to show how the tree view control or the tree view items can be customized to support data binding in many of its properties. In first place, you will typically use a tree view for showing hierarchical data so the view model somehow must reflect that hierarchy. An easy way to implement hierarchy in a model is to use a base item element like this one, public abstract class TreeItemModel { public abstract IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children; } You can later derive your concrete model classes from that base class. For example, public class CustomerModel { public string FullName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public IEnumerable<OrderModel> Orders { get; set; } }   public class CustomerTreeItemModel : TreeItemModel { public CustomerTreeItemModel(CustomerModel customer) { }   public override IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children { get { // Return orders } } } The Children property in the CustomerTreeItem model implementation can return for instance an ObservableCollection<TreeItemModel> with the orders, so the tree view will automatically subscribe to all the changes in the collection. You can bind this model to the tree view control in the UI by using a Hierarchical data template. <e:TreeView x:Name="TreeView" ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}"> <e:TreeView.ItemTemplate> <sdk:HierarchicalDataTemplate ItemsSource="{Binding Children}"> <!-- TEMPLATE --> </sdk:HierarchicalDataTemplate> </e:TreeView.ItemTemplate> </e:TreeView> An interesting behavior with the Children property and the Hierarchical data template is that the Children property is only invoked before the expansion, so you can use lazy load at this point (The tree view control will not expand the whole tree in the first expansion). The problem with using MVVM in this control is that you can not bind properties in model with specific properties of the TreeView item such as IsSelected or IsExpanded. Here is where you need to customize the existing tree view control to support data binding in tree items. public class CustomTreeView : TreeView { public CustomTreeView() { }   protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride() { CustomTreeViewItem tvi = new CustomTreeViewItem(); Binding expandedBinding = new Binding("IsExpanded"); expandedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsExpandedProperty, expandedBinding); Binding selectedBinding = new Binding("IsSelected"); selectedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsSelectedProperty, selectedBinding); return tvi; } }   public class CustomTreeViewItem : TreeViewItem { public CustomTreeViewItem() { }   protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride() { CustomTreeViewItem tvi = new CustomTreeViewItem(); Binding expandedBinding = new Binding("IsExpanded"); expandedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsExpandedProperty, expandedBinding); Binding selectedBinding = new Binding("IsSelected"); selectedBinding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; tvi.SetBinding(CustomTreeViewItem.IsSelectedProperty, selectedBinding); return tvi; } } You basically need to derive the TreeView and TreeViewItem controls to manually add a binding for the properties you need. In the example above, I am adding a binding for the “IsExpanded” and “IsSelected” properties in the items. The model for the tree items now needs to be extended to support those properties as well, public abstract class TreeItemModel : INotifyPropertyChanged { bool isExpanded = false; bool isSelected = false;   public abstract IEnumerable<TreeItemModel> Children { get; }   public bool IsExpanded { get { return isExpanded; } set { isExpanded = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("IsExpanded")); } }   public bool IsSelected { get { return isSelected; } set { isSelected = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("IsSelected")); } }   public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; } However, as soon as you use this custom tree view control, you lose all the automatic styles from the built-in toolkit themes because they are tied to the control type (TreeView in this case).  The only ugly workaround I found so far for this problem is to copy the styles from the Toolkit source code and reuse them in the application.

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  • How-to filter table filter input to only allow numeric input

    - by frank.nimphius
    In a previous ADF Code Corner post, I explained how to change the table filter behavior by intercepting the query condition in a query filter. See sample #30 at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/index-101235.html In this OTN Harvest post I explain how to prevent users from providing invalid character entries as table filter criteria to avoid problems upon re-querying the table. In the example shown next, only numeric values are allowed for a table column filter. To create a table that allows data filtering, drag a View Object – or a data collection of a Web Service or JPA business service – from the DataControls panel and drop it as a table. Choose the Enable Filtering option in the Edit Table Columns dialog so the table renders with the column filter boxes displayed. The table filter fields are created using implicit af:inputText components that need to be customized for you to apply a custom filter input component, or to change the input behavior. To change the input filter, so only a defined set of input keys is allowed, you need to change the default filter field with your own af:inputText field to which you apply an af:clientListener tag that filters user keyboard entries. For this, in the Oracle JDeveloper visual editor, select the column which filter you want to change and expand the column node in the Oracle JDeveloper Structure Window. Part of the column definition is the Column facet node. Expand the facets so you see the filter facet entry. The filter facet is grayed out as there is no custom facet defined. In a next step, open theComponent Palette (ctrl+shift+P) and drag an Input Text component onto the facet. This demarks the first part in the filter customization. To make the custom filter component work, you need to map the af:inputText component value property to the ADF filter criteria that is exposed in the Expression Builder. Open the Expression Builder for the filter input component value property by clicking the arrow icon to its right. In the Expression Builder expand the JSP Objects | vs | filterCriteria node to select the attribute name represented by the table column. The vs entry is the name of a variable that is defined on the table and that grants you access to the table attributes. Now that the filter works as before – though using a custom filter input component – you can add the af:clientListener tag to your custom filter component – af:inputText – to call out to JavaScript when users type in the column filter field Point the client filter method property to a JavaScript function that you reference or add through using the af:resource tag and set the type property value to keyDown. <af:document id="d1">     <af:resource type="javascript" source="/js/filterHandler.js"/> … The filter definition looks as shown below <af:inputText label="Label 1" id="it1"                         value="#{vs.filterCriteria.Employe        <af:clientListener method="suppressCharacterInput"                                     type="keyDown"/> </af:inputText> The JavaScript code that you can use to either filter character inputs or numeric inputs is shown below. Just store this code in an external JavaScript (.js) file and reference it from the af:resource tag. //Allow numbers, cursor control keys and delete keys function suppressCharacterInput(evt) {     var _keyCode = evt.getKeyCode();     var _filterField = evt.getCurrentTarget();     var _oldValue = _filterField.getValue();     if (!((_keyCode < 57) ||(_keyCode > 96 && _keyCode < 105))) {         _filterField.setValue(_oldValue);         evt.cancel();     } } //Allow characters, cursor control keys and delete keys function suppressNumericInput(evt) {  var _keyCode = evt.getKeyCode();  var _filterField = evt.getCurrentTarget();  var _oldValue = _filterField.getValue();  //check for numbers  if ((_keyCode < 57 && _keyCode > 47) ||      (_keyCode > 96 && _keyCode < 105)){     _filterField.setValue(_oldValue);     evt.cancel();   } } But what if browsers don't allow JavaScript ? Don't worry about this. If browsers would not support JavaScript then ADF Faces as a whole would not work and you had a different problem.

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  • Optimizing collision engine bottleneck

    - by Vittorio Romeo
    Foreword: I'm aware that optimizing this bottleneck is not a necessity - the engine is already very fast. I, however, for fun and educational purposes, would love to find a way to make the engine even faster. I'm creating a general-purpose C++ 2D collision detection/response engine, with an emphasis on flexibility and speed. Here's a very basic diagram of its architecture: Basically, the main class is World, which owns (manages memory) of a ResolverBase*, a SpatialBase* and a vector<Body*>. SpatialBase is a pure virtual class which deals with broad-phase collision detection. ResolverBase is a pure virtual class which deals with collision resolution. The bodies communicate to the World::SpatialBase* with SpatialInfo objects, owned by the bodies themselves. There currenly is one spatial class: Grid : SpatialBase, which is a basic fixed 2D grid. It has it's own info class, GridInfo : SpatialInfo. Here's how its architecture looks: The Grid class owns a 2D array of Cell*. The Cell class contains two collection of (not owned) Body*: a vector<Body*> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, and a map<int, vector<Body*>> which contains all the bodies that are in the cell, divided in groups. Bodies, in fact, have a groupId int that is used for collision groups. GridInfo objects also contain non-owning pointers to the cells the body is in. As I previously said, the engine is based on groups. Body::getGroups() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body is part of. Body::getGroupsToCheck() returns a vector<int> of all the groups the body has to check collision against. Bodies can occupy more than a single cell. GridInfo always stores non-owning pointers to the occupied cells. After the bodies move, collision detection happens. We assume that all bodies are axis-aligned bounding boxes. How broad-phase collision detection works: Part 1: spatial info update For each Body body: Top-leftmost occupied cell and bottom-rightmost occupied cells are calculated. If they differ from the previous cells, body.gridInfo.cells is cleared, and filled with all the cells the body occupies (2D for loop from the top-leftmost cell to the bottom-rightmost cell). body is now guaranteed to know what cells it occupies. For a performance boost, it stores a pointer to every map<int, vector<Body*>> of every cell it occupies where the int is a group of body->getGroupsToCheck(). These pointers get stored in gridInfo->queries, which is simply a vector<map<int, vector<Body*>>*>. body is now guaranteed to have a pointer to every vector<Body*> of bodies of groups it needs to check collision against. These pointers are stored in gridInfo->queries. Part 2: actual collision checks For each Body body: body clears and fills a vector<Body*> bodiesToCheck, which contains all the bodies it needs to check against. Duplicates are avoided (bodies can belong to more than one group) by checking if bodiesToCheck already contains the body we're trying to add. const vector<Body*>& GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() { bodiesToCheck.clear(); for(const auto& q : queries) for(const auto& b : *q) if(!contains(bodiesToCheck, b)) bodiesToCheck.push_back(b); return bodiesToCheck; } The GridInfo::getBodiesToCheck() method IS THE BOTTLENECK. The bodiesToCheck vector must be filled for every body update because bodies could have moved meanwhile. It also needs to prevent duplicate collision checks. The contains function simply checks if the vector already contains a body with std::find. Collision is checked and resolved for every body in bodiesToCheck. That's it. So, I've been trying to optimize this broad-phase collision detection for quite a while now. Every time I try something else than the current architecture/setup, something doesn't go as planned or I make assumption about the simulation that later are proven to be false. My question is: how can I optimize the broad-phase of my collision engine maintaining the grouped bodies approach? Is there some kind of magic C++ optimization that can be applied here? Can the architecture be redesigned in order to allow for more performance? Actual implementation: SSVSCollsion Body.h, Body.cpp World.h, World.cpp Grid.h, Grid.cpp Cell.h, Cell.cpp GridInfo.h, GridInfo.cpp

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  • Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL Definitions: CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in Microsoft SharePoint technologies  Anonymous: A camel is a horse designed by committee  Dov Trietsch: A CAML is a HORS designed by Microsoft  I was advised against putting any Camel and Sphinx rhymes in here. Look it up in Google!  _____ Now that we have dispensed with the dromedary jokes (BTW, I have many more, but they are not fit to print!), here is an interesting problem and its solution.  We have built a list where the title must be kept unique so I needed to verify the existence (or absence) of a list item with a particular title. Two methods came to mind:  1: Span the list until the title is found (result = found) or until the list ends (result = not found). This is an algorithm of complexity O(N) and for long lists it is a performance sucker. 2: Use a CAML query instead. Here, for short list we’ll encounter some overhead, but because the query results in an SQL query on the content database, it is of complexity O(LogN), which is significantly better and scales perfectly. Obviously I decided to go with the latter and this is where the CAML s--t hit the fan.   A CAML query returns a SPListItemCollection and I simply checked its Count. If it was 0, the item did not already exist and it was safe to add a new item with the given title. Otherwise I cancelled the operation and warned the user. The trouble was that I always got a positive. Most of the time a false positive. The count was greater than 0 regardles of the title I checked (except when the list was empty, which happens only once). This was very disturbing indeed. To solve my immediate problem which was speedy delivery, I reverted to the “Span the list” approach, but the problem bugged me, so I wrote a little console app by which I tested and tweaked and tested, time and again, until I found the solution. Yes, one can pass the proverbial CAML thru the ey of the needle (e’s missing on purpose).  So here are my conclusions:  CAML that does not work:  Note: QT is my quote:  char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34); string titleQuery = "<Query>><Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; titleQuery += "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/></ViewFields>";  Why? Even though U2U generates it, the <Query> and </Query> tags do not belong in the query that you pass. Start your query with the <Where> clause.  Also the <ViewFiels> clause does not belong. I used this clause to limit the returned collection to a single column, and I still wish to do it. I’ll show how this is done a bit later.   When you use the <Query> </Query> tags in you query, it’s as if you did not specify the query at all. What you get is the all inclusive default query for the list. It returns evey column and every item. It is expensive for both server and network because it does all the extra processing and eats plenty of bandwidth.   Now, here is the CAML that works  string titleQuery = "<Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";  You’ll also notice that inside the unusable <ViewFields> clause above, we have a <FieldRef> clause. This is what we pass to the SPQuery object. Here is how:  SPQuery query = new SPQuery(); query.Query = titleQuery; query.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; query.RowLimit = 1; SPListItemCollection col = masterList.GetItems(query);  Two thing to note: we enter the view fields into the SPQuery object and we also limited the number of rows that the query returns. The latter is not always done, but in an existence test, there is no point in returning hundreds of rows. The query will now return one item or none, which is all we need in order to verify the existence (or non-existence) of items. Limiting the number of columns and the number of rows is a great performance enhancer. That’s all folks!!

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  • International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 1

    - by MarkPearl
    So I have been delving into F# more and more and thought the best way to learn the language is to write something useful. I have been meaning to get some more Silverlight knowledge (up to now I have mainly been doing WPF) so I came up with a really simple project that I can actually use at work. Simply put – I often get support calls from clients wanting new activation codes. One of our main app’s was written in VB6 and had its own “security” where it would require about a 45 character sequence for it to be activated. The catch being that each time you reopen the program it would require a different character sequence, which meant that when we activate clients systems we have to do it live! This involves us either referring them to a website, or reading the characters to them over the phone and since nobody in the office knows the IROA off by heart we would come up with some interesting words to represent characters… 9 times out of 10 the client would type in the wrong character and we would have to start all over again… with this app I am hoping to reduce the errors of reading characters over the phone by treating it like a ham radio. My “Silverlight” application will allow for the user to input a series of characters and the system will then generate the equivalent IROA words… very basic stuff e.g. Character Input – abc Words Generated – Alpha Bravo Charlie After listening to Anders Hejlsberg on Dot Net Rocks Show 541 he mentioned that he felt many applications could make use of F# but in an almost silo basis – meaning that you would write modules that leant themselves to Functional Programming in F# and then incorporate it into a solution where the front end may be in C# or where you would have some other sort of glue. I buy into this kind of approach, so in this project I will use F# to do my very intensive “Business Logic” and will use Silverlight/C# to do the front end. F# Business Layer I am no expert at this, so I am sure to get some feedback on way I could improve my algorithm. My approach was really simple. I would need a function that would convert a single character to a string – i.e. ‘A’ –> “Alpha” and then I would need a function that would take a string of characters, convert them into a sequence of characters, and then apply my converter to return a sequence of words… make sense? Lets start with the CharToString function let CharToString (element:char) = match element.ToString().ToLower() with | "1" -> "1" | "5" -> "5" | "9" -> "9" | "2" -> "2" | "6" -> "6" | "0" -> "0" | "3" -> "3" | "7" -> "7" | "4" -> "4" | "8" -> "8" | "a" -> "Alpha" | "b" -> "Bravo" | "c" -> "Charlie" | "d" -> "Delta" | "e" -> "Echo" | "f" -> "Foxtrot" | "g" -> "Golf" | "h" -> "Hotel" | "i" -> "India" | "j" -> "Juliet" | "k" -> "Kilo" | "l" -> "Lima" | "m" -> "Mike" | "n" -> "November" | "o" -> "Oscar" | "p" -> "Papa" | "q" -> "Quebec" | "r" -> "Romeo" | "s" -> "Sierra" | "t" -> "Tango" | "u" -> "Uniform" | "v" -> "Victor" | "w" -> "Whiskey" | "x" -> "XRay" | "y" -> "Yankee" | "z" -> "Zulu" | element -> "Unknown" Quite simple, an element is passed in, this element is them converted to a lowercase single character string and then matched up with the equivalent word. If by some chance a character is not recognized, “Unknown” will be returned… I know need a function that can take a string and can parse each character of the string and generate a new sequence with the converted words… let ConvertCharsToStrings (s:string) = s |> Seq.toArray |> Seq.map(fun elem -> CharToString(elem)) Here… the Seq.toArray converts the string to a sequence of characters. I then searched for some way to parse through every element in the sequence. Originally I tried Seq.iter, but I think my understanding of what iter does was incorrect. Eventually I found Seq.map, which applies a function to every element in a sequence and then creates a new collection with the adjusted processed element. It turned out to be exactly what I needed… To test that everything worked I created one more function that parsed through every element in a sequence and printed it. AT this point I realized the the Seq.iter would be ideal for this… So my testing code is below… let PrintStrings items = items |> Seq.iter(fun x -> Console.Write(x.ToString() + " ")) let newSeq = ConvertCharsToStrings("acdefg123") PrintStrings newSeq Console.ReadLine()   Pretty basic stuff I guess… I hope my approach was right? In Part 2 I will look into doing a simple Silverlight Frontend, referencing the projects together and deploying….

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  • Create Orchard Module in a Separate Project

    - by Steve Michelotti
    The Orchard Project is a new OOS Microsoft project that is being developed up on CodePlex. From the Orchard home page on CodePlex, it states “Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through modules and themes.” The Orchard Project site contains additional information including documentation and walkthroughs. The ability to create a composite solution based on a collection of modules is a compelling feature. In Orchard, these modules can just be created as simple MVC Areas or they can also be created inside of stand-alone web application projects.  The walkthrough for writing an Orchard module that is available on the Orchard site uses a simple Area that is created inside of the host application. It is based on the Orchard MIX presentation. This walkthrough does an effective job introducing various Orchard concepts such as hooking into the navigation system, theme/layout system, content types, and more.  However, creating an Orchard module in a separate project does not seem to be concisely documented anywhere. Orchard ships with several module OOTB that are in separate assemblies – but again, it’s not well documented how to get started building one from scratch. The following are the steps I took to successfully get an Orchard module in a separate project up and running. Step 1 – Download the OrchardIIS.zip file from the Orchard Release page. Unzip and open up the solution. Step 2 – Add your project to the solution. I named my project “Orchard.Widget” and used and “MVC 2 Empty Web Application” project type. Make sure you put the physical path inside the “Modules” sub-folder to the main project like this: At this point the solution should look like: Step 3 – Add assembly references to Orchard.dll and Orchard.Core.dll. Step 4 – Add a controller and view.  I’ll just create a Hello World controller and view. Notice I created the view as a partial view (*.ascx). Also add the [Themed] attribute to the top of the HomeController class just like the normal Orchard walk through shows it. Step 5 – Add Module.txt to the project root. The is a very important step. Orchard will not recognize your module without this text file present.  It can contain just the name of your module: name: Widget Step 6 – Add Routes.cs. Notice I’ve given an area name of “Orchard.Widget” on lines 26 and 33. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using System.Web.Routing; 5: using Orchard.Mvc.Routes; 6:   7: namespace Orchard.Widget 8: { 9: public class Routes : IRouteProvider 10: { 11: public void GetRoutes(ICollection<RouteDescriptor> routes) 12: { 13: foreach (var routeDescriptor in GetRoutes()) 14: { 15: routes.Add(routeDescriptor); 16: } 17: } 18:   19: public IEnumerable<RouteDescriptor> GetRoutes() 20: { 21: return new[] { 22: new RouteDescriptor { 23: Route = new Route( 24: "Widget/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 25: new RouteValueDictionary { 26: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"}, 27: {"controller", "Home"}, 28: {"action", "Index"}, 29: {"id", ""} 30: }, 31: new RouteValueDictionary(), 32: new RouteValueDictionary { 33: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"} 34: }, 35: new MvcRouteHandler()) 36: } 37: }; 38: } 39: } 40: } Step 7 – Add MainMenu.cs. This will make sure that an item appears in the main menu called “Widget” which points to the module. 1: using System; 2: using Orchard.UI.Navigation; 3:   4: namespace Orchard.Widget 5: { 6: public class MainMenu : INavigationProvider 7: { 8: public void GetNavigation(NavigationBuilder builder) 9: { 10: builder.Add(menu => menu.Add("Widget", item => item.Action("Index", "Home", new 11: { 12: area = "Orchard.Widget" 13: }))); 14: } 15:   16: public string MenuName 17: { 18: get { return "main"; } 19: } 20: } 21: } Step 8 – Clean up web.config. By default Visual Studio adds numerous sections to the web.config. The sections that can be removed are: appSettings, connectionStrings, authentication, membership, profile, and roleManager. Step 9 – Delete Global.asax. This project will ultimately be running from inside the Orchard host so this “sub-site” should not have its own Global.asax.   Now you’re ready the run the app.  When you first run it, the “Widget” menu item will appear in the main menu because of the MainMenu.cs file we added: We can then click the “Widget” link in the main menu to send us over to our view:   Packaging From start to finish, it’s a relatively painless experience but it could be better. For example, a Visual Studio project template that encapsulates aspects from this blog post would definitely make it a lot easier to get up and running with creating an Orchard module.  Another aspect I found interesting is that if you read the first paragraph of the walkthrough, it says, “You can also develop modules as separate projects, to be packaged and shared with other users of Orchard CMS (the packaging story is still to be defined, along with marketplaces for sharing modules).” In particular, I will be extremely curious to see how the “packaging story” evolves. The first thing that comes to mind for me is: what if we explored MvcContrib Portable Areas as a potential mechanism for this packaging? This would certainly make things easy since all artifacts (aspx, aspx, images, css, javascript) are all wrapped up into a single assembly. Granted, Orchard does have its own infrastructure for layouts and themes but it seems like integrating portable areas into this pipeline would not be a difficult undertaking. Maybe that’ll be the next research task. :)

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  • Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Federal Digital Services Governance

    - by TedMcLaughlan
    The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)? A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects. So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations: Step 1: Gather a Core Team In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better. Step 2: Assess What You Have In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust. Step 3: Determine What You Want The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags"). At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s). Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

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  • Big Data – Various Learning Resources – How to Start with Big Data? – Day 20 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned how to become a Data Scientist for Big Data. In this article we will go over various learning resources related to Big Data. In this series we have covered many of the most essential details about Big Data. At the beginning of this series, I have encouraged readers to send me questions. One of the most popular questions is - “I want to learn more about Big Data. Where can I learn it?” This is indeed a great question as there are plenty of resources out to learn about Big Data and it is indeed difficult to select on one resource to learn Big Data. Hence I decided to write here a few of the very important resources which are related to Big Data. Learn from Pluralsight Pluralsight is a global leader in high-quality online training for hardcore developers.  It has fantastic Big Data Courses and I started to learn about Big Data with the help of Pluralsight. Here are few of the courses which are directly related to Big Data. Big Data: The Big Picture Big Data Analytics with Tableau NoSQL: The Big Picture Understanding NoSQL Data Analysis Fundamentals with Tableau I encourage all of you start with this video course as they are fantastic fundamentals to learn Big Data. Learn from Apache Resources at Apache are single point the most authentic learning resources. If you want to learn fundamentals and go deep about every aspect of the Big Data, I believe you must understand various concepts in Apache’s library. I am pretty impressed with the documentation and I am personally referencing it every single day when I work with Big Data. I strongly encourage all of you to bookmark following all the links for authentic big data learning. Haddop - The Apache Hadoop® project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Ambari: A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters which include support for Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, HCatalog, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Pig and Sqoop. Ambari also provides a dashboard for viewing cluster health such as heat maps and ability to view MapReduce, Pig and Hive applications visually along with features to diagnose their performance characteristics in a user-friendly manner. Avro: A data serialization system. Cassandra: A scalable multi-master database with no single points of failure. Chukwa: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems. HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables. Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying. Mahout: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library. Pig: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation. ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. Learn from Vendors One of the biggest issues with about learning Big Data is setting up the environment. Every Big Data vendor has different environment request and there are lots of things require to set up Big Data framework. Many of the users do not start with Big Data as they are afraid about the resources required to set up framework as well as a time commitment. Here Hortonworks have created fantastic learning environment. They have created Sandbox with everything one person needs to learn Big Data and also have provided excellent tutoring along with it. Sandbox comes with a dozen hands-on tutorial that will guide you through the basics of Hadoop as well it contains the Hortonworks Data Platform. I think Hortonworks did a fantastic job building this Sandbox and Tutorial. Though there are plenty of different Big Data Vendors I have decided to list only Hortonworks due to their unique setup. Please leave a comment if there are any other such platform to learn Big Data. I will include them over here as well. Learn from Books There are indeed few good books out there which one can refer to learn Big Data. Here are few good books which I have read. I will update the list as I will learn more. Ethics of Big Data Balancing Risk and Innovation Big Data for Dummies Head First Data Analysis: A Learner’s Guide to Big Numbers, Statistics, and Good Decisions If you search on Amazon there are millions of the books but I think above three books are a great set of books and it will give you great ideas about Big Data. Once you go through above books, you will have a clear idea about what is the next step you should follow in this series. You will be capable enough to make the right decision for yourself. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will wrap up this series of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • .NET Security Part 2

    - by Simon Cooper
    So, how do you create partial-trust appdomains? Where do you come across them? There are two main situations in which your assembly runs as partially-trusted using the Microsoft .NET stack: Creating a CLR assembly in SQL Server with anything other than the UNSAFE permission set. The permissions available in each permission set are given here. Loading an assembly in ASP.NET in any trust level other than Full. Information on ASP.NET trust levels can be found here. You can configure the specific permissions available to assemblies using ASP.NET policy files. Alternatively, you can create your own partially-trusted appdomain in code and directly control the permissions and the full-trust API available to the assemblies you load into the appdomain. This is the scenario I’ll be concentrating on in this post. Creating a partially-trusted appdomain There is a single overload of AppDomain.CreateDomain that allows you to specify the permissions granted to assemblies in that appdomain – this one. This is the only call that allows you to specify a PermissionSet for the domain. All the other calls simply use the permissions of the calling code. If the permissions are restricted, then the resulting appdomain is referred to as a sandboxed domain. There are three things you need to create a sandboxed domain: The specific permissions granted to all assemblies in the domain. The application base (aka working directory) of the domain. The list of assemblies that have full-trust if they are loaded into the sandboxed domain. The third item is what allows us to have a fully-trusted API that is callable by partially-trusted code. I’ll be looking at the details of this in a later post. Granting permissions to the appdomain Firstly, the permissions granted to the appdomain. This is encapsulated in a PermissionSet object, initialized either with no permissions or full-trust permissions. For sandboxed appdomains, the PermissionSet is initialized with no permissions, then you add permissions you want assemblies loaded into that appdomain to have by default: PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); // all assemblies need Execution permission to run at all restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); // grant general read access to C:\config.xml restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, @"C:\config.xml")); // grant permission to perform DNS lookups restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new DnsPermission(PermissionState.Unrestricted)); It’s important to point out that the permissions granted to an appdomain, and so to all assemblies loaded into that appdomain, are usable without needing to go through any SafeCritical code (see my last post if you’re unsure what SafeCritical code is). That is, partially-trusted code loaded into an appdomain with the above permissions (and so running under the Transparent security level) is able to create and manipulate a FileStream object to read from C:\config.xml directly. It is only for operations requiring permissions that are not granted to the appdomain that partially-trusted code is required to call a SafeCritical method that then asserts the missing permissions and performs the operation safely on behalf of the partially-trusted code. The application base of the domain This is simply set as a property on an AppDomainSetup object, and is used as the default directory assemblies are loaded from: AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = @"C:\temp\sandbox", }; If you’ve read the documentation around sandboxed appdomains, you’ll notice that it mentions a security hole if this parameter is set correctly. I’ll be looking at this, and other pitfalls, that will break the sandbox when using sandboxed appdomains, in a later post. Full-trust assemblies in the appdomain Finally, we need the strong names of the assemblies that, when loaded into the appdomain, will be run as full-trust, irregardless of the permissions specified on the appdomain. These assemblies will contain methods and classes decorated with SafeCritical and Critical attributes. I’ll be covering the details of creating full-trust APIs for partial-trust appdomains in a later post. This is how you get the strongnames of an assembly to be executed as full-trust in the sandbox: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); Creating the sandboxed appdomain So, putting these three together, you create the appdomain like so: AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); You can then load and execute assemblies in this appdomain like any other. For example, to load an assembly into the appdomain and get an instance of the Sandboxed.Entrypoint class, implementing IEntrypoint, you do this: IEntrypoint o = (IEntrypoint)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap( "C:\temp\sandbox\SandboxedAssembly.dll", "Sandboxed.Entrypoint"); // call method the Execute method on this object within the sandbox o.Execute(); The second parameter to CreateDomain is for security evidence used in the appdomain. This was a feature of the .NET 2 security model, and has been (mostly) obsoleted in the .NET 4 model. Unless the evidence is needed elsewhere (eg. isolated storage), you can pass in null for this parameter. Conclusion That’s the basics of sandboxed appdomains. The most important object is the PermissionSet that defines the permissions available to assemblies running in the appdomain; it is this object that defines the appdomain as full or partial-trust. The appdomain also needs a default directory used for assembly lookups as the ApplicationBase parameter, and you can specify an optional list of the strongnames of assemblies that will be given full-trust permissions if they are loaded into the sandboxed appdomain. Next time, I’ll be looking closer at full-trust assemblies running in a sandboxed appdomain, and what you need to do to make an API available to partial-trust code.

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  • Mocking successive calls of similar type via sequential mocking

    - by mehfuzh
    In this post , i show how you can benefit from  sequential mocking feature[In JustMock] for setting up expectations with successive calls of same type.  To start let’s first consider the following dummy database and entity class. public class Person {     public virtual string Name { get; set; }     public virtual int Age { get; set; } }   public interface IDataBase {     T Get<T>(); } Now, our test goal is to return different entity for successive calls on IDataBase.Get<T>(). By default, the behavior in JustMock is override , which is similar to other popular mocking tools. By override it means that the tool will consider always the latest user setup. Therefore, the first example will return the latest entity every-time and will fail in line #12: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Queue<Person> queue = new Queue<Person>();   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(() => queue.Dequeue()); Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person2);   // this will fail Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode());   Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); We can solve it the following way using a Queue and that removes the item from bottom on each call: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Queue<Person> queue = new Queue<Person>();   queue.Enqueue(person1); queue.Enqueue(person2);   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(queue.Dequeue());   Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); This will ensure that right entity is returned but this is not an elegant solution. So, in JustMock we introduced a  new option that lets you set up your expectations sequentially. Like: Person person1 = new Person { Age = 30, Name = "Kosev" }; Person person2 = new Person { Age = 80, Name = "Mihail" };   var database = Mock.Create<IDataBase>();   Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person1).InSequence(); Mock.Arrange(() => database.Get<Person>()).Returns(person2).InSequence();   Assert.Equal(person1.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); Assert.Equal(person2.GetHashCode(), database.Get<Person>().GetHashCode()); The  “InSequence” modifier will tell the mocking tool to return the expected result as in the order it is specified by user. The solution though pretty simple and but neat(to me) and way too simpler than using a collection to solve this type of cases. Hope that helps P.S. The example shown in my blog is using interface don’t require a profiler  and you can even use a notepad and build it referencing Telerik.JustMock.dll, run it with GUI tools and it will work. But this feature also applies to concrete methods that includes JM profiler and can be implemented for more complex scenarios.

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