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  • Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Prototyping Applications with SketchFlow

    - by T
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/10/blend-for-visual-studio-2013-prototyping-applications-with-sketchflow.aspxSketchFlow enables rapid creating of dynamic interface mockups very quickly. The SketchFlow workspace is the same as the standard Blend workspace with the inclusion of three panels: the SketchFlow Feedback panel, the SketchFlow Animation panel and the SketchFlow Map panel. By using SketchFlow to prototype, you can get feedback early in the process. It helps to surface possible issues, lower development iterations, and increase stakeholder buy in. SketchFlow prototypes not only provide an initial look but also provide a way to add additional ideas and input and make sure the team is on track prior to investing in complete development. When you have completed the prototyping, you can discard the prototype and just use the lessons learned to design the application from or extract individual elements from your prototype and include them in the application. I don’t recommend trying to transition the entire project into a development project. Objects that you add with the SketchFlow style have a hand-sketched look. The sketch style is used to remind stakeholders that this is a prototype. This encourages them to focus on the flow and functionality without getting distracted by design details. The sketchflow assets are under sketchflow in the asset panel and are identifiable by the postfix “–Sketch”. For example “Button-Sketch”. You can mix sketch and standard controls in your interface, if required. Be creative, if there is a missing control or your interface has a different look and feel than the out of the box one, reuse other sketch controls to mimic the functionality or look and feel. Only use standard controls if it doesn’t distract from the idea that this is a prototype and not a standard application. The SketchFlow Map panel provides information about the structure of your application. To create a new screen in your prototype: Right-click the map surface and choose “Create a Connected Screen”. Name the screens with names that are meaningful to the stakeholders. The start screen is the one that has the green arrow. To change the start screen, right click on any other screen and set to start screen. Only one screen can be the start screen at a time. Rounded screen are component screens to mimic reusable custom controls that will be built into the final application. You can change the colors of all of the boxes and should use colors to create functional groupings. The groupings can be identified in the SketchFlow Project Settings. To add connections between screens in the SketchFlow Map panel. Move the mouse over a screen in the SketchFlow and a menu will appear at the bottom of the screen node. In the menu, click Connect to an existing screen. Drag the arrow to another screen on the Map. You add navigation to your prototype by adding connections on the SketchFlow map or by adding navigation directly to items on your interface. To add navigation from objects on the artboard, right click the item then from the menu, choose “Navigate to”. This will expose a sub-menu with available screens, backward, or forward. When the map has connected screens, the SketchFlow Player displays the connected screens on the Navigate sidebar. All screens show in the SketchFlow Player Map. To see the SketchFlow Player, run your SketchFlow prototype. The Navigation sidebar is meant to show the desired user work flow. The map can be used to view the different screens regardless of suggested navigation in the navigation bar. The map is able to be hidden and shown. As mentioned, a component screen is a shared screen that is used in more than one screen and generally represents what will be a custom object in the application. To create a component screen, you can create a screen, right click on it in the SketchFlow Map and choose “Make into component screen”. You can mouse over a screen and from the menu that appears underneath, choose create and insert component screen. To use an existing screen, select if from the Asset panel under SketchFlow, Components. You can use Storyboards and Visual State animations in your SketchFlow project. However, SketchFlow also offers its own animation technique that is simpler and better suited for prototyping. The SketchFlow Animation panel is above your artboard by default. In SketchFlow animation, you create frames and then position the elements on your interface for each frame. You then specify elapsed time and any effects you want to apply to the transition. The + at the top is what creates new frames. Once you have a new Frame, select it and change the property you want to animate. In the example above, I changed the Text of the result box. You can adjust the time between frames in the lower area between the frames. The easing and effects functions are changed in the center between each frame. You edit the hold time for frames by clicking the clock icon in the lower left and the hold time will appear on each frame and can be edited. The FluidLayout icon (also located in the lower left) will create smooth transitions. Next to the FluidLayout icon is the name of that Animation. You can rename the animation by clicking on it and editing the name. The down arrow chevrons next to the name allow you to view the list of all animations in this prototype and select them for editing. To add the animation to the interface object (such as a button to start the animation), select the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction from the SketchFlow behaviors in the Assets menu and drag it to an object on your interface. With the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction that you just added selected in the Objects and Timeline, edit the properties to change the EventName to the event you want and choose the SketchFlowAnimation you want from the drop down list. You may want to add additional information to your screens that isn’t really part of the prototype but is relevant information or a request for clarification or feedback from the reviewer. You do this with annotations or notes. Both appear on the user interface, however, annotations can be switched on or off at design and review time. Notes cannot be switched off. To add an Annotation, chose the Create Annotation from the Tools menu. The annotation appears on the UI where you will add the notes. To display or Hide annotations, click the annotation toggle at the bottom right on the artboard . After to toggle annotations on, the identifier of the person who created them appears on the artboard and you must click that to expand the notes. To add a note to the artboard, simply select the Note-Sketch from Assets ->SketchFlow ->Styles ->Sketch Styles. Drag and drop it to the artboard and place where you want it. When you are ready for users to review the prototype, you have a few options available. Click File -> Export and choose one of the options from the list: Publish to Sharepoint, Package SketchFlowProject, Export to Microsoft Word, or Export as Images. I suggest you play with as many of the options as you can to see what they do. Both the Sharepoint and Packaged SketchFlowProject allow you to collect feedback from one or more users that you can import into the project. The user can make notes on the UI and in the Feedback area in the bottom left corner of the player. When the user is done adding feedback, it is exported from the right most folder icon in the My Feedback panel. Feeback is imported on a panel named SketchFlow Feedback. To get that panel to show up, select Window -> SketchFlow Feedback. Once you have the panel showing, click the + in the upper right of the panel and find the notes you exported. When imported, they will show up in a list and on the artboard. To document your prototype, use the Export to Microsoft Word option from the File menu. That should get you started with prototyping.

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  • B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different – Oracle Commerce named Leader in Forrester B2B Commerce Wave

    - by Katrina Gosek
    We weren’t surprised to see Oracle Commerce positioned as a Leader in Forrester’s first Commerce Wave focused on B2B, released earlier this month. The reports validates much of what we’ve heard from our largest customers – the world’s largest distribution, manufacturing and high-tech customers who sell billions of dollars of goods and services to other businesses through their Web channels. More importantly, the report confirms something very important: B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different. B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… Clearly, B2C experiences have set expectations for B2B. Every B2B buyer is a consumer at home and brings the same expectations to a website selling electronic components, aftermarket parts, or MRO products. Forrester calls these rich consumer-based capabilities that help B2B customers do their jobs “table stakes”: search & navigation, promotions, cross-channel commerce and mobile: “Whether they are just beginning to sell online or are in the late stages of launching a next-generation site, B2B eCommerce operations today must: offer a customer experience standard comparable to what leading b2c sites now offer; address the growing influence that mobile devices are having in the workplace; make a qualitative and quantitative business case that drives sustained investment.” Just five years ago, many of our B2B customers’ online business comprised only 5-10% of their total revenue. Today, when we speak to those same brands, we hear about double and triple digit growth in their online channels. Many have seen the percentage of the business they perform in their web channels cross the 30-50% threshold. You can hear first-hand from several Oracle Commerce B2B customers about the success they are seeing, and what they’re trying to accomplish (Carolina Biological, Premier Farnell, DeliXL, Elsevier). This momentum is likely the reason Forrester broke out the separate B2B Commerce Wave from the B2C Wave. In fact, B2B is becoming the larger force in commerce, expected to collect twice the online dollars of B2C this year ($559 billion). But a little different… Despite the similarities, there is a key and very important difference between B2C and B2B. Unlike a consumer shopping for shoes, a business shopper buying from a distributor or manufacturer is coming to the Web channel as a part of their job. So in addition to a rich, consumer-like experience this shopper expects, these B2B buyers need quoting tools and complex pricing capabilities, like eProcurement, bulk order entry, and other self-service tools such as account, contract and organization management.  Forrester also is emphasizing three additional “back-end” tools and capabilities their clients say they need to drive growth in their B2B online channels: i) product information management (PIM), which provides a single system of record for large part lists and product catalogs; ii) web content management (WCM), needed to manage large volumes of unstructured marketing information, and iii) order management systems (OMS), which manage and orchestrate the complex B2B order life cycle from quote through approval, submission to manufacturing, distribution and delivery.  We would like to expand on each of these 3 areas: As Forrester highlights, back-end PIM is definitely needed by B2B Commerce providers. Most B2B companies have made significant investments in enterprise-grade PIMs, given the importance of product data management for aggregation and syndication of content, product attribution, analytics, and handling of complex workflows. While in principle it may sound appealing to have a PIM as part of a commerce offering (especially for SMBs who have to do more with less), our customers have typically found that PIM in a commerce platform is largely redundant with what they already have in-place, and is not fully-featured or robust enough to handle the complexity of the product data sets that B2B distributors and manufacturers usually handle. To meet the PIM needs for commerce, Oracle offers enterprise PIM (Product Hub/Fusion PIM) and a robust enterprise data quality product (EDQP) integrated with the Oracle Commerce solution. These are key differentiators of our offering and these capabilities are becoming even more tightly integrated with Oracle Commerce over time. For Commerce, what customers really need is a robust product catalog and content management system for enabling business users to further enrich and ready catalog and content data to be presented and sold online.  This has been a significant area of investment in the Oracle Commerce platform , which continue to get stronger. We see this combination of capabilities as best meeting the needs of our customers for a commerce platform without adding a largely redundant, less functional PIM in the commerce front-end.   On the topic of web content management, we were pleased to see Forrester recognize Oracle’s unique functional capabilities in this area and the “unique opportunity in the market to lead the convergence of commerce and content management with the amalgamation of Oracle Commerce with WebCenter Sites (formally FatWire).” Strong content management capabilities are critical for distributors and manufacturers who are frequently serving an engineering audience coming to their websites to conduct product research in search of technical data sheets, drawings, videos and more. The convergence of content, commerce, and experience is critical for B2B brands selling online. Regarding order management, Forrester notes that many businesses use their existing back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage order life cycles.  We hear the same from most of our B2B customers, as they already have an ERP system—if not several of them—and are not interested in yet another one.  So what do we take away from the Wave results? Forrester notes that the Oracle Commerce Platform “has always had strong B2B commerce capabilities and Oracle has an exhaustive list of B2B customers using the solution.”  What makes us excited about developing leading B2B solutions are the close relationships with our customers and the clear opportunity in the market – which we’ll address in an exciting new release in the coming months. Oracle has one of the world’s largest B2B customer bases, providing leading solutions across key business-to-business functions – from marketing, sales automation, and service to master data management, and ERP.  To learn more about Oracle’s Commerce product vision and strategy, visit our website and check out these other B2B Commerce Resources: - 2013 B2B Commerce Trends Report - B2B Commerce Whitepaper: Consumerization, Complexity, Change - B2B Commerce Webcast: What Industry Trend Setters Do Right - Internet Retailer, Web Drives Sales for B2B Companies - Internet Retailer, The Web Means Business: B2B Companies Beef Up Their Websites, borrowing from b2c retailers and breaking new ground - Internet Retailer, B2B e-Commerce is poised for growth ----------THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY NOT BE INCORPORATED INTO A CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT 

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  • WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

    - by andrewbrust
    Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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  • So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

    - by Edith Mireles-Oracle
    By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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  • What's up with LDoms: Part 4 - Virtual Networking Explained

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

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  • Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaft auf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s

    - by Manuel Hossfeld
    Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaftauf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s Wenn man sich mit dem Virtualisierungsprodukt Oracle VM in der aktuellen Version 3.x näher befassen möchte, bietet es sich natürlich an, eine eigene Umgebung zu Lern- und Testzwecken zu installieren. Doch leichter gesagt als getan: Bei näherer Betrachtung der Architektur wird man schnell feststellen, dass mehrere Rechner benötigt werden, um überhaupt alle Komponenten abbilden zu können: Zum einen gilt es, den oder die OVM Server selbst zu installieren. Das ist recht leicht und schnell erledigt, aber da Oracle VM ein „Typ 1 Hypervisor ist“ - also direkt auf dem Rechner („bare metal“) installiert wird – ist der eigenen Arbeits-PC oder Laptop dafür recht ungeeignet. (Eine Dual-Boot Umgebung wäre zwar denkbar, aber recht unpraktisch.) Zum anderen wird auch ein Rechner benötigt, auf dem der OVM Manager installiert wird. Im Gegensatz zum OVM Server erfolgt dessen Installation nicht „bare metal“, sondern auf einem bestehenden Oracle Linux. Aber was tun, wenn man gerade keinen Linux-Server griffbereit hat und auch keine extra Hardware dafür opfern will? Möchte man alle Funktionen von Oracle VM austesten, so sollte man zusätzlich über einen Shared Storag everüfugen. Dieser kann wahlweise über NFS oder über ein SAN (per iSCSI oder FibreChannel) angebunden werden. Zwar braucht man zum Testen nicht zwingend entsprechende „echte“ Storage-Hardware, aber auch die „Simulation“ entsprechender Komponenten erfordert zusätzliche Hardware mit entsprechendem freien Plattenplatz.(Alternativ können auch fertige „Software Storage Appliances“ wie z.B. OpenFiler oder FreeNAS verwendet werden). Angenommen, es stehen tatsächlich keine „echte“ Server- und Storage Hardware zur Verfügung, so benötigt man für die oben genannten drei Punkte  drei bzw. vier Rechner (PCs, Laptops...) - je nachdem ob man einen oder zwei OVM Server starten möchte. Erfreulicherweise geht es aber auch mit deutlich weniger Aufwand: Wie bereits kurz im Blogpost anlässlich des letzten OVM-Releases 3.1.1 beschrieben, ist die aktuelle Version in der Lage, selbst vollständig innerhalb von VirtualBox als Gast zu laufen. Wer bei dieser „doppelten Virtualisierung“ nun an das Prinzip der russischen Matroschka-Puppen denkt, liegt genau richtig. Oracle VM VirtualBox stellt dabei gewissermaßen die äußere Hülle dar – und da es sich bei VirtualBox im Gegensatz zu Oracle VM Server um einen „Typ 2 Hypervisor“ handelt, funktioniert dieser Ansatz auch auf einem „normalen“ Arbeits-PC bzw. Laptop, ohne dessen eigentliche Betriebsystem komplett zu überschreiben. Doch das beste dabei ist: Die Installation der jeweiligen VirtualBox VMs muss man nicht selber durchführen. Der OVM Manager als auch der OVM Server stehen bereits als vorgefertigte „VirtualBox Appliances“ im Oracle Technology Network zum Download zur Verfügung und müssen im Grunde nur noch importiert und konfiguriert werden. Das folgende Schaubild verdeutlicht das Prinzip: Die dunkelgrünen Bereiche stellen jeweils Instanzen der eben erwähnten VirtualBox Appliances für OVM Server und OVM Manager dar. (Hier im Bild sind zwei OVM Server zu sehen, als Minimum würde natürlich auch einer genügen. Dann können aber viele Features wie z.B. OVM HA nicht ausprobieren werden.) Als cleveren Trick zur Einsparung einer weiteren VM für Storage-Zwecke hat Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering bei Oracle), der „Erbauer“ der VirtualBox Appliances, die OVM Manager Appliance bereits so vorbereitet, dass diese gleichzeitig als NFS-Share (oder ggf. sogar als iSCSI Target) dienen kann. Dies beschreibt er auch kurz auf seinem Blog. Die hellgrünen Ovale stellen die VMs dar, welche dann innerhalb einer der virtualisierten OVM Server laufen können. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass durch diese „doppelte Virtualisierung“ die Fähigkeit zur Hardware-Virtualisierung verloren geht, können diese „Nutz-VMs“ demzufolge nur paravirtualisiert sein (PVM). Die hier in blau eingezeichneten Netzwerk-Schnittstellen sind virtuelle Interfaces, welche beliebig innerhalb von VirtualBox eingerichtet werden können. Wer die verschiedenen Netzwerk-Rollen innerhalb von Oracle VM im Detail ausprobieren will, kann hier natürlich auch mehr als zwei dieser Interfaces konfigurieren. Die Vorteile dieser Lösung für Test- und Demozwecke liegen auf der Hand: Mit lediglich einem PC bzw. Laptop auf dem VirtualBox installiert ist, können alle oben genannten Komponenten installiert und genutzt werden – genügend RAM vorausgesetzt. Als Minimum darf hier 8GB gelten. Soll auf der „Host-Umgebung“ (also dem PC auf dem VirtualBox läuft) nebenbei noch gearbeiten werden und/oder mehrere „Nutz-VMs“ in dieser simulierten OVM-Server-Umgebung laufen, empfehlen sich natürlich eher 16GB oder mehr. Da die nötigen Schritte zum Installieren und initialen Konfigurieren der Umgebung ausführlich in einem entsprechenden Paper beschrieben sind, möchte ich im Rest dieses Artikels noch einige zusätzliche Tipps und Details erwähnen, welche einem das Leben etwas leichter machen können: Um möglichst entstpannt und mit zusätzlichen „Sicherheitsnetz“ an die Konfiguration der Umgebung herangehen zu können, empfiehlt es sich, ausgiebigen Gebrauch von der in VirtualBox eingebauten Funktionalität der VM Snapshots zu machen. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur ein Zurücksetzen falls einmal etwas schiefgehen sollte, sondern auch ein beliebiges Wiederholen von bereits absolvierten Teilschritten (z.B. um eine andere Idee oder Variante der Umgebung auszuprobieren). Sowohl bei den gerade erwähnten Snapshots als auch bei den VMs selbst sollte man aussagekräftige Namen verwenden. So ist sichergestellt, dass man nicht durcheinander kommt und auch nach ein paar Wochen noch weiß, welche Umgebung man da eigentlich vor sich hat. Dies beinhaltet auch die genaue Versions- und Buildnr. des jeweiligen OVM-Releases. (Siehe dazu auch folgenden Screenshot.) Weitere Informationen und Details zum aktuellen Zustand sowie Zweck der jeweiligen VMs kann in dem oft übersehenen Beschreibungsfeld hinterlegt werden. Es empfiehlt sich, bereits VOR der Installation einen Notizzettel (oder eine Textdatei) mit den geplanten IP-Adressen und Namen für die VMs zu erstellen. (Nicht vergessen: Auch der Server Pool benötigt eine eigene IP.) Dabei sollte man auch nochmal die tatsächlichen Netzwerke der zu verwendenden Virtualbox-Interfaces prüfen und notieren. Achtung: Es gibt im Rahmen der Installation einige Passworte, die vom Nutzer gesetzt werden können – und solche, die zunächst fest eingestellt sind. Zu letzterem gehört das Passwort für den ovs-agent sowie den root-User auf den OVM Servern, welche beide per Default „ovsroot“ lauten. (Alle weiteren Passwort-Informationen sind in dem „Read me first“ Dokument zu finden, welches auf dem Desktop der OVM Manager VM liegt.) Aufpassen muss man ggf. auch in der initialen „Interview-Phase“ welche die VirtualBox VMs durchlaufen, nachdem sie das erste mal gebootet werden. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt ist nämlich auf jeden Fall noch die amerikanische Tastaturbelegung aktiv, so dass man z.B. besser kein „y“ und „z“ in seinem selbst gewählten Passwort verwendet. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass wie oben erwähnt der OVM Manager auch gleichzeitig den Shared Storage bereitstellt, sollte darauf geachtet werden, dass dessen VM vor den OVM Server VMs gestartet wird. (Andernfalls „findet“ der dem OVM Server Pool zugrundeliegende Cluster sein sog. „Server Pool File System“ nicht.)

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

    - by Michael Williamson
    Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • The last MVVM you'll ever need?

    - by Nuri Halperin
    As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

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  • Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF

    - by Timmy Kokke
    Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with Snoop and Mole belong to the tools you’ll be using a lot exploring the possibilities.  Configuring the extension project Extensions are regular .NET class libraries. To create one, load up Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project. Because Blend is build using WPF, choose a WPF User Control Library from the Windows section and give it a name and location. I named mine DemoExtension1. Because Blend looks for addins named *.extension.dll  you’ll have to tell Visual Studio to use that in the Assembly Name. To change the Assembly Name right click your project and go to Properties. On the Application tab, add .Extension to name already in the Assembly name text field. To be able to debug this extension, I prefer to set the output path on the Build tab to the extensions folder of Expression Blend. This means that everything that used to go into the Debug folder is placed in the extensions folder. Including all referenced assemblies that have the copy local property set to false. One last setting. To be able to debug your extension you could start Blend and attach the debugger by hand. I like it to be able to just hit F5. Go to the Debug tab and add the the full path to Blend.exe in the Start external program text field. Extension Class Add a new class to the project.  This class needs to be inherited from the IPackage interface. The IPackage interface can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility namespace. To get access to this namespace add Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility.dll to your references. This file can be found in the same folder as the (Expression Blend 4 Beta) Blend.exe file. Make sure the Copy Local property is set to false in this reference. After implementing the interface the class would look something like: using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } } These two methods are called when your addin is loaded and unloaded. The parameter passed to the Load method, IServices services, is your main entry point into Blend. The IServices interface exposes the GetService<T> method. You will be using this method a lot. Almost every part of Blend can be accessed thru a service. For example, you can use to get to the commanding services of Blend by calling GetService<ICommandService>() or to get to the Windowing services by calling GetService<IWindowService>(). To get Blend to load the extension we have to implement MEF. (You can get up to speed on MEF on the community site or read the blog of Mr. MEF, Glenn Block.)  In the case of Blend extensions, all that needs to be done is mark the class with an Export attribute and pass it the type of IPackage. The Export attribute can be found in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace which is part of the .NET 4 framework. You need to add this to your references. using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility;   namespace DemoExtension1 { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { Blend is able to find your addin now. Adding UI The addin doesn’t do very much at this point. The WPF User Control Library came with a UserControl so lets use that in this example. I just drop a Button and a TextBlock onto the surface of the control to have something to show in the demo. To get the UserControl to work in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService.  Call GetService<IWindowService>() on the IServices interface to get access to the windowing services. The UserControl will be used in Blend on a Palette and has to be registered to enable it. This is done by calling the RegisterPalette on the IWindowService interface and passing it an identifier, an instance of the UserControl and a caption for the palette. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(); windowService.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } After hitting F5 to start debugging Expression Blend will start. You should be able to find the addin in the Window menu now. Activating this window will show the “Demo Extension” palette with the UserControl, style according to the settings of Blend. Now what? Because little is publicly known about how to access different parts of Blend adding breakpoints in Debug mode and browsing thru objects using the Quick Watch feature of Visual Studio is something you have to do very often. This demo extension can be used for that purpose very easily. Add the click event handler to the button on the UserControl. Change the contructor to take the IServices interface and store this in a field. Set a breakpoint in the Button_Click method. public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl { private readonly IServices _services;   public UserControl1(IServices services) { _services = services; InitializeComponent(); }   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } } Change the call to the constructor in the load method and pass it the services property. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService service = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(services); service.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } Hit F5 to compile and start Blend. Got to the window menu and start show the addin. Click on  the button to hit the breakpoint. Now place the carrot text _services text in the code window and hit Shift+F9 to show the Quick Watch window. Now start exploring and discovering where to find everything you need.  More Information The are no official resources available yet. Microsoft has released one extension for expression Blend that is very useful as a reference, the Microsoft Expression Blend® Add-in Preview for Windows® Phone. This will install a .extension.dll file in the extension folder of Blend. You can load this file with Reflector and have a peek at how Microsoft is building his addins. Conclusion I hope this gives you something to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Until Microsoft releases the final version, which hopefully includes more information about building extensions, we’ll have to work on documenting it in the community.

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  • B2B and B2C alike… but a little different – Oracle Commerce named Leader in Forrester B2B Commerce Wave

    - by Katrina Gosek
    We weren’t surprised to see Oracle Commerce positioned as a Leader in Forrester Research, Inc.’s first Commerce Wave focused on B2B, “The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q4 2013,” released earlier this month. We believe that the report validates much of what we’ve heard from our largest customers – the world’s largest distribution, manufacturing and high-tech customers who sell billions of dollars of goods and services to other businesses through their Web channels. More importantly, we feel that the report confirms something very important: B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different. B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… Clearly, B2C experiences have set expectations for B2B. Every B2B buyer is a consumer at home and brings the same expectations to a website selling electronic components, aftermarket parts, or MRO products. Forrester calls these rich consumer-based capabilities that help B2B customers do their jobs “table stakes”: front-office content, community, and commerce features that meet customer expectations for 24x7x365 ordering, real-time customer service, and expedited shipping — both online and on mobile devices: “Whether they are just beginning to sell online or are in the late stages of launching a next-generation site, B2B eCommerce operations today must: offer a customer experience standard comparable to what leading b2c sites now offer; address the growing influence that mobile devices are having in the workplace; make a qualitative and quantitative business case that drives sustained investment.” Just five years ago, many of our B2B customers’ online business comprised only 5-10% of their total revenue. Today, when we speak to those same brands, we hear about double and triple digit growth in their online channels. Many have seen the percentage of the business they perform in their web channels cross the 30-50% threshold. You can hear first-hand from several Oracle Commerce B2B customers about the success they are seeing, and what they’re trying to accomplish (Carolina Biological, Premier Farnell, DeliXL, Elsevier). It seems that this market momentum is likely the reason Forrester broke out the separate B2B Commerce Wave from the B2C Wave. In fact, B2B is becoming the larger force in commerce, expected to collect twice the online dollars of B2C this year ($559 billion). But a little different… Despite the similarities, there is a key and very important difference between B2C and B2B. Unlike a consumer shopping for shoes, a business shopper buying from a distributor or manufacturer is coming to the Web channel as a part of their job. So in addition to a rich, consumer-like experience this shopper expects, these B2B buyers need quoting tools and complex pricing capabilities, like eProcurement, bulk order entry, and other self-service tools such as account, contract and organization management. Forrester also is emphasizing three additional “back-end” tools and capabilities their clients say they need to drive growth in their B2B online channels: i) product information management (PIM), which provides a single system of record for large part lists and product catalogs; ii) web content management (WCM), needed to manage large volumes of unstructured marketing information, and iii) order management systems (OMS), which manage and orchestrate the complex B2B order life cycle from quote through approval, submission to manufacturing, distribution and delivery. We would like to expand on each of these 3 areas: As Forrester suggests, back-end PIM is definitely needed by B2B Commerce providers. Most B2B companies have made significant investments in enterprise-grade PIMs, given the importance of product data management for aggregation and syndication of content, product attribution, analytics, and handling of complex workflows. While in principle it may sound appealing to have a PIM as part of a commerce offering (especially for SMBs who have to do more with less), our customers have typically found that PIM in a commerce platform is largely redundant with what they already have in-place, and is not fully-featured or robust enough to handle the complexity of the product data sets that B2B distributors and manufacturers usually handle. To meet the PIM needs for commerce, Oracle offers enterprise PIM (Product Hub/Fusion PIM) and a robust enterprise data quality product (EDQP) integrated with the Oracle Commerce solution. These are key differentiators of our offering and these capabilities are becoming even more tightly integrated with Oracle Commerce over time. For Commerce, what customers really need is a robust product catalog and content management system for enabling business users to further enrich and ready catalog and content data to be presented and sold online.  This has been a significant area of investment in the Oracle Commerce platform , which continue to get stronger. We see this combination of capabilities as best meeting the needs of our customers for a commerce platform without adding a largely redundant, less functional PIM in the commerce front-end.  On the topic of web content management, we were pleased to see Forrester cite Oracle’s differentiated digital experience capability in this area and the “unique opportunity in the market to lead the convergence of commerce and content management with the amalgamation of Oracle Commerce with WebCenter Sites (formally FatWire).” Strong content management capabilities are critical for distributors and manufacturers who are frequently serving an engineering audience coming to their websites to conduct product research in search of technical data sheets, drawings, videos and more. The convergence of content, commerce, and experience is critical for B2B brands selling online. Regarding order management, Forrester notes that many businesses use their existing back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage order life cycles.  We hear the same from most of our B2B customers, as they already have an ERP system—if not several of them—and are not interested in yet another one. So what do we take away from the Wave results? Forrester notes that the Oracle Commerce Platform “has always had strong B2B commerce capabilities and Oracle certainly has an exhaustive list of B2B customers using the solution.”  What makes us excited about developing leading B2B solutions are the close relationships with our customers and the clear opportunity in the market – which we'll address in an exciting new release planned for the next 12 months. Oracle has one of the world’s largest B2B customer bases, providing leading solutions across key business-to-business functions – from marketing, sales automation, and service to master data management, and ERP. To learn more about Oracle’s Commerce product vision and strategy, visit our website and check out these other B2B Commerce Resources: -       2013 B2B Commerce Trends Report -       B2B Commerce Whitepaper: Consumerization, Complexity, Change -       B2B Commerce Webcast: What Industry Trend Setters Do Right -       Internet Retailer, Web Drives Sales for B2B Companies -       Internet Retailer Article, The Web Means Business: B2B Companies Beef Up Their Websites,        borrowing from b2c retailers and breaking new ground -       Internet Retailer Article, B2B e-Commerce is poised for growth

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  • Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

    - by danx
    Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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  • Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Integration With Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 11g

    - by Scott Elvington
    In a blog entry earlier this year, we announced the availability of the Ops Center 11g plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c. In this article I will walk you through the process of deploying the plug-in on your existing Enterprise Manager agents and show you some of the capabilities the plug-in provides. We'll also look at the integration from the Ops Center perspective. I will show you how to set up the connection to Enterprise Manager and give an overview of the information that is available. Installing and Configuring the Ops Center Plug-in The plug-in is available for download from the Self Update page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Self Update). The plug-in name is “Ops Center Infrastructure stack”. Once you have downloaded the plug-in you can navigate to the Plug-In management page (Setup ? Extensibility ? Plug-ins) to begin deployment. The plug-in must first be deployed on the Management Server. You will need to provide the repository password of the SYS user in order to deploy the plug-in to the Management Server. There are a few pre-requisites that need to be completed on the Ops Center side before the plug-in can be deployed and configured on the desired Enterprise Manager agents. Any servers, whether physical or virtual, for which you wish to see metrics and alerts need to be managed by Ops Center. This means that the Operating System needs to have an Ops Center management agent installed as a minimum. The plug-in can provide even more value when Ops Center is also managing the other “layers of the stack”, for example the service processor, the blade chassis or the XSCF of an M-Series server. The more information that Ops Center has about the stack, the more information that will be visible within Enterprise Manager via the plug-in. In order to access the information within Ops Center, the plug-in requires a user to connect as. This user does not require any particular Ops Center permissions or roles, it simply needs to exist. You can create a specific “EMPlugin” user within Ops Center or use an existing user. Oracle recommends creating a specific, non-privileged user account within Ops Center for this purpose. From the Ops Center Administration section, select Enterprise Controller, click the Users tab and finally click the Add User icon to create the desired user account. For the purpose of this article I have discovered and managed the OS and service processor of the server where my Enterprise Manager 12c installation is hosted. With the plug-in deployed to the Management Server and the setup done within Ops Center, we're now ready to deploy the plug-in to the agents and configure the targets to communicate with the Ops Center Enterprise Controller. From the Setup menu select Add Targets then Add Targets Manually. Select the bottom radio button “Add Targets Manually by Specifying Target Monitoring Properties”, select Infrastructure Stack from the Target Type dropdown and finally, select the Monitoring Agent where you wish to deploy the plug-in. Click the Add Manually.... button and fill in the details for the new target using the appropriate hostname for your Enterprise Controller and the user and password details for the plug-in access user. After the target has been added to the agent you will need to allow a few minutes for the initial data collection to complete. Once completed you can see the new target in the All Targets list. All metric collections are enabled by default except one. To enable Infrastructure Stack Alarms collection, navigate to the newly added target and then to Target ? Monitoring ? Metric and Collection Settings. There you can click the “Disabled” link under Collection Schedule to enable collection and set your desired collection frequency. By default, a Warning level alert in Ops Center will equate to a Warning level event in Enterprise Manager and a Critical alert will equate to a Critical event. This mapping can be altered in the Metric and Collection Settings also. The default incident rules in Enterprise Manager only create incidents from Critical events so keep this in mind in case you want to see incidents generated for Warning or Info level alerts from Ops Center. Also, because Enterprise Manager already monitors the OS through it's Host target type, the plug-in does not pull OS alerts from Ops Center so as to prevent duplication. In addition to alert propagation, the plug-in also provides data for several reports detailing the topology and configuration of the stack as well as any hardware sensor data that is available. These are available from the Information Publisher Reports. Navigate there from the Enterprise ? Reports menu or directly from the Infrastructure Stack target of interest. As an example, here is a sample of the Hardware Sensors report showing some of the available sensor data. The report can also be exported to a CSV file format if desired. Connecting Ops Center to Enterprise Manager Repository For an Enterprise Manager user, the plug-in provides a deeper visibility to the state of the infrastructure underlying the databases and middleware. On the Ops Center side, there is also a greater visibility to the targets running on the infrastructure. To set up the Ops Center data collection, just navigate to the Administration section and select the Grid Control link. Select the Configure/Connect action from the right-hand menu and complete the wizard forms to enable the connection to the Enterprise Manager repository and UI. Be sure to use the sysman account when configuring the database connection. Once the job completes and the initial data synchronization is done you will see new Target tabs on your OS assets. The new tab lists all the Enterprise Manager targets and any alerts, availability and performance data specific to the selected target. It is also possible to use the GoTo icon to launch the Enterprise Manager BUI in context of the specific target or alert to drill into more detail. Hopefully this brief overview of the integration between Enterprise Manager and Ops Center has provided a jumpstart to getting a more complete view of the full stack of your enterprise systems.

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  • Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

    - by albertpascual
    I’m a developer, I like to write new exciting code everyday, my perfect day at work is a day that when I wake up, I know that I have to write some code that I haven’t done before or to use a new framework/language/platform that is unknown to me. The best days in the office is when a project is waiting for me to architect or write. In my 15 years in the development field, I had to in order to get a better salary to manage people, not just to lead developers, to actually manage people. Something that I found out when I get into a management position is that I’m not that good at managing people, and not afraid to say it. I do not enjoy that part of the job, the worse one, takes time away from what I really like. Leading developers and managing people are very different things. I do like teaching and leading developers in a project. Yet most people believe, and is true in most companies, the way to get a better salary is to be promoted to a manager position. In order to advance in your career you need to let go of the everyday writing code and become a supervisor or manager. This is the path for developers after they become senior developers. As you get older and your family grows, the only way to hit your salary requirements is to advance your career to become a manager and get that manager salary. That path is the common in most companies, the most intelligent companies out there, have learned that promoting good developers mean getting a crappy manager and losing a good resource. Now scratch everything I said, because as I previously stated, I don’t see myself going to the office everyday and just managing people until is time to go home. I like to spend hours working in some code to accomplish a task, learning new platforms and languages or patterns to existing languages. Being interrupted every 15 minutes by emails or people stopping by my office to resolve their problems, is not something I could enjoy. All the sudden riding my motorcycle to work one cold morning over the Redlands Canyon and listening to .NET Rocks podcast, Michael “Doc” Norton explaining how to take control of your development career without necessary going to the manager’s track. I know, I should not have headphones under my helmet when riding a motorcycle in California. His conversation with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell was just confirming everything I have ever did with actually more details and assuring that there are other paths. His method was simple yet most of us, already do many of those steps, Mr. Michael “Doc” Norton believe that it pays off on the long run, that finally companies prefer to pay higher salaries to those developers, yet I would actually think that many companies do not see developers that way, this is not true for bigger companies. However I do believe the value of those developers increase and most of the time, changing companies could increase their salary instead of staying in the same one. In short without even trying to get into the shadow of Mr. Norton and without following the steps in the order; you should love to learn new technologies, and then teach them to other geeks. I personally have learn many technologies and I haven’t stop doing that, I am a professor at UCR where I teach ASP.NET and Silverlight. Mr Norton continues that after than, you want to be involve in the development community, user groups, online forums, open source projects. I personally talk to user groups, I’m very active in forums asking and answering questions as well as for those I got awarded the Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. After you accomplish all those, you should also expose yourself for what you know and what you do not know, learning a new language will make you humble again as well as extremely happy. There is no better feeling that learning a new language or pattern in your daily job. If you love your job everyday and what you do, I really recommend you to follow Michael’s presentation that he kindly share it on the link below. His confirmation is a refreshing, knowing that my future is not behind a desk where the computer screen is on my right hand side instead of in front of me. Where I don’t have to spent the days filling up performance forms for people and the new platforms that I haven’t been using yet are just at my fingertips. Presentation here. http://www.slideshare.net/LeanDog/take-control-of-your-development-career-michael-doc-norton?from=share_email_logout3 Take Control of Your Development Career Welcome! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] Recovering Post Technical I love to learn I love to teach I love to work in teams I love to write code I really love to write code What about YOU? Do you love your job? Do you love your Employer? Do you love your Boss? What do you love? What do you really love? Take Control Take Control • Get Noticed • Get Together • Get Your Mojo • Get Naked • Get Schooled Get Noticed Get Noticed Know Your Business Get Noticed Get Noticed Understand Management Get Noticed Get Noticed Do Your Existing Job Get Noticed Get Noticed Make Yourself Expendable Get Together Get Together Join a User Group Get Together Help Run a User Group Get Together Start a User Group Get Your Mojo Get Your Mojo Kata Get Your Mojo Koans Get Your Mojo Breakable Toys Get Your Mojo Open Source Get Naked Get Naked Run with Group A Get Naked Do Something Different Get Naked Own Your Mistakes Get Naked Admit You Don’t Know Get Schooled Get Schooled Choose a Mentor Get Schooled Attend Conferences Get Schooled Teach a New Subject Get Started Read These (Again) Take Control of Your Development Career Thank You! Michael “Doc” Norton @DocOnDev http://docondev.blogspot.com/ [email protected] In a short summary, I recommend any developer to check his blog and more important his presentation, I haven’t been lucky enough to watch him live, I’m looking forward the day I have the opportunity. He is giving us hope in the future of developers, when I see some of my geek friends moving to position that in short years they begin to regret, I get more unsure of my future doing what I love. I would say that now is looking at the spectrum of companies that understand and appreciate developers. There are a few there, hopefully with time code sweat shops will start disappearing and being a developer will feed a family of 4. Cheers Al tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/07/career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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  • 13.10 - Weird WiFi connection problems - WMP300N - Broadcom BCM4321

    - by user1898041
    Just installed 13.10 on my desktop and I really like it. After having problems with getting the wifi to work, I installed it connected to the internet with an ethernet cable and added in the 3rd party software and updates as per the installation procedure. After installation was completed, I saw the wifi icon in the upper right hand corner, but it was not seeing any wifi networks. Some Googling brought me to use the 'Additional Drivers' application. It found the WMP300N Broadcom BDM4321 based pci wifi card and installed the proprietary Broadcom STA wireless driver, which may have been installed before. I'm not sure. Here is the weird part: when I start my system, wifi seems to be in some sort of suspended state where the system sees that the card exists but the card will not detect any wifi networks. It will work after booting once I 'Additional Drivers' application and then start FireFox. I know it seems weird, but this is the process I've got down to get the card to recognize wifi networks. After those applications are open for a few seconds, the card starts to function like normal (although maintaining the wifi connection is problem but most likely a seperate issue). The reason this is a problem is because this is supposed to just be a headless box managed through SSH. Here are the readouts from the common network diagnosis programs BEFORE I open 'Additional Drivers' and 'FireFox'. All commands were done with sudo. lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express DRAM Controller (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02) 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet (rev b0) 03:00.0 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB368 IDE controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11b/g/n (rev 01) 05:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0) - lshw *-network description: Ethernet interface product: Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: b0 serial: 00:22:15:00:a8:12 capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1 driverversion=2.1.3 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:46 memory:feac0000-feafffff memory:feaa0000-feabffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: BCM4321 802.11b/g/n vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 logical name: eth1 version: 01 serial: 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.141 (r415941) latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:febfc000-febfffff - ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:22:15:00:a8:12 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 inet6 addr: fe80::223:69ff:fed8:2b16/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1856 (1.8 KB) TX bytes:1856 (1.8 KB) - iwconfig eth1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=200 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off - iwlist scan eth1 No scan results - Here are the various commands AFTER I open 'Additional Drivers' and 'FireFox' lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express DRAM Controller (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02) 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet (rev b0) 03:00.0 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB368 IDE controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11b/g/n (rev 01) 05:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0) - lshw *-network description: Ethernet interface product: Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: b0 serial: 00:22:15:00:a8:12 capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1 driverversion=2.1.3 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:46 memory:feac0000-feafffff memory:feaa0000-feabffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: BCM4321 802.11b/g/n vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 logical name: eth1 version: 01 serial: 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.141 (r415941) ip=192.168.1.103 latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:febfc000-febfffff - ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:22:15:00:a8:12 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 inet addr:192.168.1.103 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::223:69ff:fed8:2b16/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:85 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:11901 TX packets:132 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:52641 (52.6 KB) TX bytes:19058 (19.0 KB) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:76 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:76 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:6084 (6.0 KB) TX bytes:6084 (6.0 KB) - iwconfig eth1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:"BU" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: 00:26:F2:1F:81:02 Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=200 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=59/70 Signal level=-51 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 - iwlist scan A LOT OF SSIDs FOUND! - I'd like to have this problem fixed, but I'm not quite sure where to go. Been Googling a lot and can't seem to find anyone else with this problem.

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  • When OneTug Just Isn&rsquo;t Enough&hellip;

    - by onefloridacoder
    I stole that from the back of a T-shirt I saw at the Orlando Code Camp 2010.  This was my first code camp and my first time volunteering for an event like this as well.  It was an awesome day.  I cannot begin to count the “aaahh”, “I did-not-know I could do that”, in the crowds and for myself.  I think it was a great day of learning for everyone at all levels.  All of the presenters were different and provided great insights into the topics they were presenting.  Here’s a list of the ones that I attended. KodeFuGuru, “Pirates vs. Ninjas” He touched on many good topics to relax some of the ways we think when we are writing out code, and still looks good, readable, etc.  As he pointed out in all of his examples, we might not always realize everything that’s going on under the covers.  He exposed a bug in his own code, and verbalized the mental gymnastics he went through when he knew there was something wrong with one of his IEnumerable implementations.  For me, it was great to hear that someone else labors over these gut reactions to code quickly snapped together, to the point that we rush to the refactor stage to fix what’s bothering us – and learn.  He has some content on extension methods that was very interesting.  My “that is so cool” moment was when he swapped out AddEntity method on an entity class and used a With extension method instead.  Some of the LINQ scales fell off my eyes at that moment, and I realized my own code could be a lot more powerful (and readable) if incorporate a few of these examples at the appropriate times.  And he cautioned as well… “don’t go crazy with this stuff”, there’s a place and time for everything.  One of his examples demo’d toward the end of the talk is on his sight where he’s chaining methods together, cool stuff. Quotes I liked: “Extension Methods - Extension methods to put features back on the model type, without impacting the type.” “Favor Declarative Code” – Check out the ? and ?? operators if you’re not already using them. “Favor Fluent Code” “Avoid Pirate Ninja Zombies!  If you see one run!” I’m definitely going to be looking at “Extract Projection” when I get into VS2010. BDD 101 – Sean Chambers http://github.com/schambers This guy had a whole host of gremlins against him, final score Sean 5, Gremlins 1.  He ran the code samples from his github repo  in the code github code viewer since the PC they school gave him to use didn’t have VS installed. He did a great job of converting the grammar between BDD and TDD, and how this style of development can be used in integration tests as well as the different types of gated builds on a CI box – he didn’t go into a discussion around CI, but we could infer that it could work. Like when we use WSSF, it does cause a class explosion to happen however the amount of code per class it limit to just covering the concern at hand – no more, no less.  As in “When I as a <Role>, expect {something} to happen, because {}”  This keeps us (the developer) from gold plating our solutions and creating less waste.  He basically keeps the code that prove out the requirement to two lines of code.  Nice. He uses SpecUnit to merge this grammar into his .NET projects and gave an overview on how this ties into writing his own BDD tests.  Some folks were familiar with Given / When / Then as story acceptance criteria and here’s how he mapped it: “Given <Context>  When <Something Happens> Then <I expect...>”  There are a few base classes and overrides in the SpecUnit framework that help with setting up the context for each test which looked very handy. Successfully Running Your Own Coding Business The speaker ran through a list of items that sounded like common sense stuff LLC, banking, separating expenses, etc.  Then moved into role playing with business owners and an ISV.  That was pretty good stuff, it pays to be a good listener all of the time even if your client is sitting on the other side of the phone tearing you head off for you – but that’s all it is, and get used to it its par for the course.  Oh, yeah always answer the phone was one simple thing that you can do to move  your business forward.  But like Cory Foy tweeted this week, “If you owe me a lot of money, don’t have a message that says your away for five weeks skiing in Colorado.”  Lots of food for thought that’s on my list of “todo’s and to-don’ts”. Speaker Idol Next, I had the pleasure of helping Russ Fustino tape this part of Code Camp as my primary volunteer opportunity that day.  You remember Russ, “know the code” from the awesome Russ’ Tool Shed series.  He did a great job orchestrating and capturing the Speaker Idol finals.   So I didn’t actually miss any sessions, but was able to see three back to back in one setting.  The idol finalists gave a 10 minute talk and very deep subjects, but different styles of talks.  No one walked away empty handed for jobs very well done.  Russ has details on his site.  The pictures and  video captured is supposed to be published on Channel 9 at a later date.  It was also a valuable experience to see what makes technical speakers effective in their talks.  I picked up quite a few speaking tips from what I heard from the judges and contestants. Design For Developers – Diane Leeper If you are a great developer, you’re probably a lousy designer.  Diane didn’t come to poke holes in what we think we can do with UI layout and design, but she provided some tools we can use to figure out metaphors for visualizing data.  If you need help with that check out Silverlight Pivot – that’s what she was getting at.  I was first introduced to her at one of John Papa’s talks last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and she’s very passionate about design.  She was able to discuss different elements of Pivot, while to a developer is just looked cool. I believe she was providing the deck from her talk to folks after her talk, so send her an email if you’re interested.   She says she can talk about design for hours and hours – we all left that session believing her.   Rinse and Repeat Orlando Code Camp 2010 was awesome, and would totally do it again.  There were lots of folks from my shop there, and some that have left my shop to go elsewhere.  So it was a reunion of sorts and a great celebration for the simple fact that its great to be a developer and there’s a community that supports and recognizes it as well.  The sponsors were generous and the organizers were very tired, namely Esteban Garcia and Will Strohl who were responsible for making a lot of this magic happen.  And if you don’t believe me, check out the chatter on Twitter.

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  • Using Radio Button in GridView with Validation

    - by Vincent Maverick Durano
    A developer is asking how to select one radio button at a time if the radio button is inside the GridView.  As you may know setting the group name attribute of radio button will not work if the radio button is located within a Data Representation control like GridView. This because the radio button inside the gridview bahaves differentely. Since a gridview is rendered as table element , at run time it will assign different "name" to each radio button. Hence you are able to select multiple rows. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how select one radio button at a time in gridview and add a simple validation on it. To get started let's go ahead and fire up visual studio and the create a new web application / website project. Add a WebForm and then add gridview. The mark up would look something like this: <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" > <Columns> <asp:TemplateField> <ItemTemplate> <asp:RadioButton ID="rb" runat="server" /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Col1" HeaderText="First Column" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Col2" HeaderText="Second Column" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> Noticed that I've added a templatefield column so that we can add the radio button there. Also I have set up some BoundField columns and set the DataFields as RowNumber, Col1 and Col2. These columns are just dummy columns and i used it for the simplicity of this example. Now where these columns came from? These columns are created by hand at the code behind file of the ASPX. Here's the code below: private DataTable FillData() { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); DataRow dr = null; //Create DataTable columns dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col1", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col2", typeof(string))); //Create Row for each columns dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 1; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 2; dr["Col1"] = "AA"; dr["Col2"] = "BB"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 3; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 4; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 5; dr["Col1"] = "A"; dr["Col2"] = "B"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); return dt; } And here's the code for binding the GridView with the dummy data above. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { GridView1.DataSource = FillData(); GridView1.DataBind(); } } Okay we have now a GridView data with a radio button on each row. Now lets go ahead and switch back to ASPX mark up. In this example I'm going to use a JavaScript for validating the radio button to select one radio button at a time. Here's the javascript code below: function CheckOtherIsCheckedByGVID(rb) { var isChecked = rb.checked; var row = rb.parentNode.parentNode; if (isChecked) { row.style.backgroundColor = '#B6C4DE'; row.style.color = 'black'; } var currentRdbID = rb.id; parent = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var items = parent.getElementsByTagName('input'); for (i = 0; i < items.length; i++) { if (items[i].id != currentRdbID && items[i].type == "radio") { if (items[i].checked) { items[i].checked = false; items[i].parentNode.parentNode.style.backgroundColor = 'white'; items[i].parentNode.parentNode.style.color = '#696969'; } } } } The function above sets the row of the current selected radio button's style to determine that the row is selected and then loops through the radio buttons in the gridview and then de-select the previous selected radio button and set the row style back to its default. You can then call the javascript function above at onlick event of radio button like below: <asp:RadioButton ID="rb" runat="server" onclick="javascript:CheckOtherIsCheckedByGVID(this);" /> Here's the output below: On Load: After Selecting a Radio Button: As you have noticed, on initial load there's no default selected radio in the GridView. Now let's add a simple validation for that. We will basically display an error message if a user clicks a button that triggers a postback without selecting  a radio button in the GridView. Here's the javascript for the validation: function ValidateRadioButton(sender, args) { var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var items = gv.getElementsByTagName('input'); for (var i = 0; i < items.length ; i++) { if (items[i].type == "radio") { if (items[i].checked) { args.IsValid = true; return; } else { args.IsValid = false; } } } } The function above loops through the rows in gridview and find all the radio buttons within it. It will then check each radio button checked property. If a radio is checked then set IsValid to true else set it to false.  The reason why I'm using IsValid is because I'm using the ASP validator control for validation. Now add the following mark up below under the GridView declaration: <br /> <asp:Label ID="lblMessage" runat="server" /> <br /> <asp:Button ID="btn" runat="server" Text="POST" onclick="btn_Click" ValidationGroup="GroupA" /> <asp:CustomValidator ID="CustomValidator1" runat="server" ErrorMessage="Please select row in the grid." ClientValidationFunction="ValidateRadioButton" ValidationGroup="GroupA" style="display:none"></asp:CustomValidator> <asp:ValidationSummary ID="ValidationSummary1" runat="server" ValidationGroup="GroupA" HeaderText="Error List:" DisplayMode="BulletList" ForeColor="Red" /> And then at Button Click event add this simple code below just to test if  the validation works: protected void btn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblMessage.Text = "Postback at: " + DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss tt"); } Here's the output below that you can see in the browser:   That's it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JavaScript,GridView

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  • CDN on Hosted Service in Windows Azure

    - by Shaun
    Yesterday I told Wang Tao, an annoying colleague sitting beside me, about how to make the static content enable the CDN in his website which had just been published on Windows Azure. The approach would be Move the static content, the images, CSS files, etc. into the blob storage. Enable the CDN on his storage account. Change the URL of those static files to the CDN URL. I think these are the very common steps when using CDN. But this morning I found that the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 and new Windows Azure Developer Portal had just been published announced at the Windows Azure Blog. One of the new features in this release is about the CDN, which means we can enabled the CDN not only for a storage account, but a hosted service as well. Within this new feature the steps I mentioned above would be turned simpler a lot.   Enable CDN for Hosted Service To enable the CDN for a hosted service we just need to log on the Windows Azure Developer Portal. Under the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN” item we will find a new menu on the left hand side said “CDN”, where we can manage the CDN for storage account and hosted service. As we can see the hosted services and storage accounts are all listed in my subscriptions. To enable a CDN for a hosted service is veru simple, just select a hosted service and click the New Endpoint button on top. In this dialog we can select the subscription and the storage account, or the hosted service we want the CDN to be enabled. If we selected the hosted service, like I did in the image above, the “Source URL for the CDN endpoint” will be shown automatically. This means the windows azure platform will make all contents under the “/cdn” folder as CDN enabled. But we cannot change the value at the moment. The following 3 checkboxes next to the URL are: Enable CDN: Enable or disable the CDN. HTTPS: If we need to use HTTPS connections check it. Query String: If we are caching content from a hosted service and we are using query strings to specify the content to be retrieved, check it. Just click the “Create” button to let the windows azure create the CDN for our hosted service. The CDN would be available within 60 minutes as Microsoft mentioned. My experience is that about 15 minutes the CDN could be used and we can find the CDN URL in the portal as well.   Put the Content in CDN in Hosted Service Let’s create a simple windows azure project in Visual Studio with a MVC 2 Web Role. When we created the CDN mentioned above the source URL of CDN endpoint would be under the “/cdn” folder. So in the Visual Studio we create a folder under the website named “cdn” and put some static files there. Then all these files would be cached by CDN if we use the CDN endpoint. The CDN of the hosted service can cache some kind of “dynamic” result with the Query String feature enabled. We create a controller named CdnController and a GetNumber action in it. The routed URL of this controller would be /Cdn/GetNumber which can be CDN-ed as well since the URL said it’s under the “/cdn” folder. In the GetNumber action we just put a number value which specified by parameter into the view model, then the URL could be like /Cdn/GetNumber?number=2. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6:  7: namespace MvcWebRole1.Controllers 8: { 9: public class CdnController : Controller 10: { 11: // 12: // GET: /Cdn/ 13:  14: public ActionResult GetNumber(int number) 15: { 16: return View(number); 17: } 18:  19: } 20: } And we add a view to display the number which is super simple. 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<int>" %> 2:  3: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> 4: GetNumber 5: </asp:Content> 6:  7: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 8:  9: <h2>The number is: <% 1: : Model.ToString() %></h2> 10:  11: </asp:Content> Since this action is under the CdnController the URL would be under the “/cdn” folder which means it can be CDN-ed. And since we checked the “Query String” the content of this dynamic page will be cached by its query string. So if I use the CDN URL, http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?number=2, the CDN will firstly check if there’s any content cached with the key “GetNumber?number=2”. If yes then the CDN will return the content directly; otherwise it will connect to the hosted service, http://aurora-sys.cloudapp.net/Cdn/GetNumber?number=2, and then send the result back to the browser and cached in CDN. But to be notice that the query string are treated as string when used by the key of CDN element. This means the URLs below would be cached in 2 elements in CDN: http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?number=2&page=1 http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?page=1&number=2 The final step is to upload the project onto azure. Test the Hosted Service CDN After published the project on azure, we can use the CDN in the website. The CDN endpoint we had created is az25311.vo.msecnd.net so all files under the “/cdn” folder can be requested with it. Let’s have a try on the sample.htm and c_great_wall.jpg static files. Also we can request the dynamic page GetNumber with the query string with the CDN endpoint. And if we refresh this page it will be shown very quickly since the content comes from the CDN without MCV server side process. We style of this page was missing. This is because the CSS file was not includes in the “/cdn” folder so the page cannot retrieve the CSS file from the CDN URL.   Summary In this post I introduced the new feature in Windows Azure CDN with the release of Windows Azure SDK 1.4 and new Developer Portal. With the CDN of the Hosted Service we can just put the static resources under a “/cdn” folder so that the CDN can cache them automatically and no need to put then into the blob storage. Also it support caching the dynamic content with the Query String feature. So that we can cache some parts of the web page by using the UserController and CDN. For example we can cache the log on user control in the master page so that the log on part will be loaded super-fast. There are some other new features within this release you can find here. And for more detailed information about the Windows Azure CDN please have a look here as well.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Fixing a SkyDrive Sync Disaster

    - by Rick Strahl
    For a few months I've been using SkyDrive to handle some basic synching tasks for a number of folders of mine. Specifically I've been dumping a few of my development folders into sky drive so I have a live running backup. It had been working just fine until about a week ago when something went awry. Badly! The idea is that the SkyDrive should sync files, but somewhere in its sync relationship it appears that SkyDrive got confused and assumed it needed to sync back older files to my local machine from the SkyDrive server. So rather than syncing my newer files to the server SkyDrive was pushing older files back to me. Because SkyDrive is so slow actually updating data it's not unusual for SkyDrive to be far behind in syncing and apparently some files were out of date by several months. Of course this is insidious because I didn't notice it for quite some time. I'd been happily working away on my files when a few days ago I noted a bunch of files with -RasXps (my machine name) popping up in various folders. At first I thought my Git repository was giving me a fit, but eventually realized that SkyDrive was actually pushing old files into my monitored folders. To be fair SkyDrive did make backups of the existing files, but by the time I caught it there were literally a few thousand files scattered on my machine that were now updated with old files from online. Here's what some of this looks like: If you look at the directory list you see a bunch of files with a -RasXps postfix appended to them. Those are the files that SkyDrive replaced and backed up on my machine. As you can see the backed up files are actually newer than the ones it pulled from the online SkyDrive. Unless I modified the files after they were updated they all were older than the existing local files. Not exactly how I imagined my synching would work. At first I started cleaning up this mess manually. In most cases the obvious solution was to simply delete the original file and replace with the -RasXps file, but not in all files. Some scrutiny was required and besides being a pain in the ass to rename files, quite frequently I had to dig out Beyond Compare to compare a few files where it wasn't quite clear what's wrong. I quickly realized that doing this by hand would be too hard for the large number of files that got hosed. Hacking together a small .NET Utility So, I figured the easiest way to tackle this is to write a small utility app that shows me all the mangled files that have backups, allows me to compare them and then quickly select and update them, removing the -RasXps file after choosing one of the two files. What I ended up with was a quick and dirty WinForms app that allows me to pick a root folder, and then shows all the -MachineName files: I start by picking a base folder and a template to search for - typically the -MachineName. Clicking Go brings up a list of all files in that folder and its subdirectories.  The list also displays the dates for the saved (-MachineName) file and the current file on disk, along with highlighting for the newer of the two. I can right click on any file and get a context menu pop up to open the folder in Explorer, or open Beyond Compare and view the two files to compare differences which I found very helpful for a number of files where I had modified the files after SkyDrive had updated to an old one. Typically these would be the green files (of which there were thankfully few). To 'fix' files I can select any number of files in the list, then use one of the three buttons on the right to apply an operation. I can use the Saved files - that is the backup file that SkyDrive created with the -MachineName extension (-RasXps above). Or I can use the current file, which is the file with the right name on disk right now and delete the -MachineName file. Or on some occasions I can just opt to delete both of them. For some files like binaries it's often easier to just delete and them be rebuild than choosing. For the most part the process involves accepting the pink files, and checking the few green files and see if any modifications were made since the file was updated incorrectly by SkyDrive. For me luckily those are few in number. Anyways, I thought I share this utility in case anybody else runs into this issue. I've included the VS2012 solution and all the source code so you can see how it works and you can tweak it as needed. The .NET 4.5 binaries are also included if you can't compile. Be warned though!  This rough code is provided as is and makes no guarantees or claims about file safety. All three of the action buttons on the form will delete data. It's a very rough utility and there are no safeguards that ask nicely before deleting files. I highly recommend you make a backup before you have at it. This tools is very narrow in focus, but it might also work with other sync issues from other vendors. I seem to remember that I had similar issues with SugarSync at some point and it too created the -MachineName style files on sync conflicts. Hope this helps somebody out so you can avoid wasting the better part of a full work day on this… Resources Download the Source Code and Binaries for SkyDrive Rescue© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Windows  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • A simple Dynamic Proxy

    - by Abhijeet Patel
    Frameworks such as EF4 and MOQ do what most developers consider "dark magic". For instance in EF4, when you use a POCO for an entity you can opt-in to get behaviors such as "lazy-loading" and "change tracking" at runtime merely by ensuring that your type has the following characteristics: The class must be public and not sealed. The class must have a public or protected parameter-less constructor. The class must have public or protected properties Adhere to this and your type is magically endowed with these behaviors without any additional programming on your part. Behind the scenes the framework subclasses your type at runtime and creates a "dynamic proxy" which has these additional behaviors and when you navigate properties of your POCO, the framework replaces the POCO type with derived type instances. The MOQ framework does simlar magic. Let's say you have a simple interface:   public interface IFoo      {          int GetNum();      }   We can verify that the GetNum() was invoked on a mock like so:   var mock = new Mock<IFoo>(MockBehavior.Default);   mock.Setup(f => f.GetNum());   var num = mock.Object.GetNum();   mock.Verify(f => f.GetNum());   Beind the scenes the MOQ framework is generating a dynamic proxy by implementing IFoo at runtime. the call to moq.Object returns the dynamic proxy on which we then call "GetNum" and then verify that this method was invoked. No dark magic at all, just clever programming is what's going on here, just not visible and hence appears magical! Let's create a simple dynamic proxy generator which accepts an interface type and dynamically creates a proxy implementing the interface type specified at runtime.     public static class DynamicProxyGenerator   {       public static T GetInstanceFor<T>()       {           Type typeOfT = typeof(T);           var methodInfos = typeOfT.GetMethods();           AssemblyName assName = new AssemblyName("testAssembly");           var assBuilder = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(assName, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave);           var moduleBuilder = assBuilder.DefineDynamicModule("testModule", "test.dll");           var typeBuilder = moduleBuilder.DefineType(typeOfT.Name + "Proxy", TypeAttributes.Public);              typeBuilder.AddInterfaceImplementation(typeOfT);           var ctorBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineConstructor(                     MethodAttributes.Public,                     CallingConventions.Standard,                     new Type[] { });           var ilGenerator = ctorBuilder.GetILGenerator();           ilGenerator.EmitWriteLine("Creating Proxy instance");           ilGenerator.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);           foreach (var methodInfo in methodInfos)           {               var methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(                   methodInfo.Name,                   MethodAttributes.Public | MethodAttributes.Virtual,                   methodInfo.ReturnType,                   methodInfo.GetParameters().Select(p => p.GetType()).ToArray()                   );               var methodILGen = methodBuilder.GetILGenerator();               methodILGen.EmitWriteLine("I'm a proxy");               if (methodInfo.ReturnType == typeof(void))               {                   methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);               }               else               {                   if (methodInfo.ReturnType.IsValueType || methodInfo.ReturnType.IsEnum)                   {                       MethodInfo getMethod = typeof(Activator).GetMethod(/span>"CreateInstance",new Type[]{typeof((Type)});                                               LocalBuilder lb = methodILGen.DeclareLocal(methodInfo.ReturnType);                       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ldtoken, lb.LocalType);                       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Call, typeofype).GetMethod("GetTypeFromHandle"));  ));                       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Callvirt, getMethod);                       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Unbox_Any, lb.LocalType);                                                              }                 else                   {                       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ldnull);                   }                   methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);               }               typeBuilder.DefineMethodOverride(methodBuilder, methodInfo);           }                     Type constructedType = typeBuilder.CreateType();           var instance = Activator.CreateInstance(constructedType);           return (T)instance;       }   }   Dynamic proxies are created by calling into the following main types: AssemblyBuilder, TypeBuilder, Modulebuilder and ILGenerator. These types enable dynamically creating an assembly and emitting .NET modules and types in that assembly, all using IL instructions. Let's break down the code above a bit and examine it piece by piece                Type typeOfT = typeof(T);              var methodInfos = typeOfT.GetMethods();              AssemblyName assName = new AssemblyName("testAssembly");              var assBuilder = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(assName, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave);              var moduleBuilder = assBuilder.DefineDynamicModule("testModule", "test.dll");              var typeBuilder = moduleBuilder.DefineType(typeOfT.Name + "Proxy", TypeAttributes.Public);   We are instructing the runtime to create an assembly caled "test.dll"and in this assembly we then emit a new module called "testModule". We then emit a new type definition of name "typeName"Proxy into this new module. This is the definition for the "dynamic proxy" for type T                 typeBuilder.AddInterfaceImplementation(typeOfT);               var ctorBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineConstructor(                         MethodAttributes.Public,                         CallingConventions.Standard,                         new Type[] { });               var ilGenerator = ctorBuilder.GetILGenerator();               ilGenerator.EmitWriteLine("Creating Proxy instance");               ilGenerator.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);   The newly created type implements type T and defines a default parameterless constructor in which we emit a call to Console.WriteLine. This call is not necessary but we do this so that we can see first hand that when the proxy is constructed, when our default constructor is invoked.   var methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(                      methodInfo.Name,                      MethodAttributes.Public | MethodAttributes.Virtual,                      methodInfo.ReturnType,                      methodInfo.GetParameters().Select(p => p.GetType()).ToArray()                      );   We then iterate over each method declared on type T and add a method definition of the same name into our "dynamic proxy" definition     if (methodInfo.ReturnType == typeof(void))   {       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);   }   If the return type specified in the method declaration of T is void we simply return.     if (methodInfo.ReturnType.IsValueType || methodInfo.ReturnType.IsEnum)   {                               MethodInfo getMethod = typeof(Activator).GetMethod("CreateInstance",                                                         new Type[]{typeof(Type)});                               LocalBuilder lb = methodILGen.DeclareLocal(methodInfo.ReturnType);                                                     methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ldtoken, lb.LocalType);       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Call, typeof(Type).GetMethod("GetTypeFromHandle"));       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Callvirt, getMethod);       methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Unbox_Any, lb.LocalType);   }   If the return type in the method declaration of T is either a value type or an enum, then we need to create an instance of the value type and return that instance the caller. In order to accomplish that we need to do the following: 1) Get a handle to the Activator.CreateInstance method 2) Declare a local variable which represents the Type of the return type(i.e the type object of the return type) specified on the method declaration of T(obtained from the MethodInfo) and push this Type object onto the evaluation stack. In reality a RuntimeTypeHandle is what is pushed onto the stack. 3) Invoke the "GetTypeFromHandle" method(a static method in the Type class) passing in the RuntimeTypeHandle pushed onto the stack previously as an argument, the result of this invocation is a Type object (representing the method's return type) which is pushed onto the top of the evaluation stack. 4) Invoke Activator.CreateInstance passing in the Type object from step 3, the result of this invocation is an instance of the value type boxed as a reference type and pushed onto the top of the evaluation stack. 5) Unbox the result and place it into the local variable of the return type defined in step 2   methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ldnull);   If the return type is a reference type then we just load a null onto the evaluation stack   methodILGen.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);   Emit a a return statement to return whatever is on top of the evaluation stack(null or an instance of a value type) back to the caller     Type constructedType = typeBuilder.CreateType();   var instance = Activator.CreateInstance(constructedType);   return (T)instance;   Now that we have a definition of the "dynamic proxy" implementing all the methods declared on T, we can now create an instance of the proxy type and return that out typed as T. The caller can now invoke the generator and request a dynamic proxy for any type T. In our example when the client invokes GetNum() we get back "0". Lets add a new method on the interface called DayOfWeek GetDay()   public interface IFoo      {          int GetNum();          DayOfWeek GetDay();      }   When GetDay() is invoked, the "dynamic proxy" returns "Sunday" since that is the default value for the DayOfWeek enum This is a very trivial example of dynammic proxies, frameworks like MOQ have a way more sophisticated implementation of this paradigm where in you can instruct the framework to create proxies which return specified values for a method implementation.

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  • DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network

    Even though IPv6 might not be that important within your local network it might be good to get yourself into shape, and be able to provide some details of your infrastructure automatically to your network clients. This is the second article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. IPv6 addresses for everyone (in your network) Okay, after setting up the configuration of your local system, it might be interesting to enable all your machines in your network to use IPv6. There are two options to solve this kind of requirement... Either you're busy like a bee and you go around to configure each and every system manually, or you're more the lazy and effective type of network administrator and you prefer to work with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Obviously, I'm of the second type. Enabling dynamic IPv6 address assignments can be done with a new or an existing instance of a DHCPd. In case of Ubuntu-based installation this might be isc-dhcp-server. The isc-dhcp-server allows address pooling for IP and IPv6 within the same package, you just have to run to independent daemons for each protocol version. First, check whether isc-dhcp-server is already installed and maybe running your machine like so: $ service isc-dhcp-server6 status In case, that the service is unknown, you have to install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server Please bear in mind that there is no designated installation package for IPv6. Okay, next you have to create a separate configuration file for IPv6 address pooling and network parameters called /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf. This file is not automatically provided by the package, compared to IPv4. Again, use your favourite editor and put the following lines: $ sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf authoritative;default-lease-time 14400; max-lease-time 86400;log-facility local7;subnet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 {    option dhcp6.name-servers 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844;    option dhcp6.domain-search "ios.mu";    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::100 2001:db8:bad:a55::199;    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 temporary;} Next, save the file and start the daemon as a foreground process to see whether it is going to listen to requests or not, like so: $ sudo /usr/sbin/dhcpd -6 -d -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf eth0 The parameters are explained quickly as -6 we want to run as a DHCPv6 server, -d we are sending log messages to the standard error descriptor (so you should monitor your /var/log/syslog file, too), and we explicitely want to use our newly created configuration file (-cf). You might also use the command switch -t to test the configuration file prior to running the server. In my case, I ended up with a couple of complaints by the server, especially reporting that the necessary lease file wouldn't exist. So, ensure that the lease file for your IPv6 address assignments is present: $ sudo touch /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases$ sudo chown dhcpd:dhcpd /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases Now, you should be good to go. Stop your foreground process and try to run the DHCPv6 server as a service on your system: $ sudo service isc-dhcp-server6 startisc-dhcp-server6 start/running, process 15883 Check your log file /var/log/syslog for any kind of problems. Refer to the man-pages of isc-dhcp-server and you might check out Chapter 22.6 of Peter Bieringer's IPv6 Howto. The instructions regarding DHCPv6 on the Ubuntu Wiki are not as complete as expected and it might not be as helpful as this article or Peter's HOWTO. But see for yourself. Does the client get an IPv6 address? Running a DHCPv6 server on your local network surely comes in handy but it has to work properly. The following paragraphs describe briefly how to check the IPv6 configuration of your clients, Linux - ifconfig or ip command First, you have enable IPv6 on your Linux by specifying the necessary directives in the /etc/network/interfaces file, like so: $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces iface eth1 inet6 dhcp Note: Your network device might be eth0 - please don't just copy my configuration lines. Then, either restart your network subsystem, or enable the device manually using the dhclient command with IPv6 switch, like so: $ sudo dhclient -6 You would either use the ifconfig or (if installed) the ip command to check the configuration of your network device like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth1eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:09:5d:8d:98            inet addr:192.168.160.147  Bcast:192.168.160.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::193/64 Scope:Global          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5d:8d98/64 Scope:Link          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1 Looks good, the client has an IPv6 assignment. Now, let's see whether DNS information has been provided, too. $ less /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTENnameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844nameserver 192.168.1.2nameserver 127.0.1.1search ios.mu Nicely done. Windows - netsh Per description on TechNet the netsh is defined as following: "Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Netsh also provides a scripting feature that allows you to run a group of commands in batch mode against a specified computer. Netsh can also save a configuration script in a text file for archival purposes or to help you configure other servers." And even though TechNet states that it applies to Windows Server (only), it is also available on Windows client operating systems, like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In order to get or even set information related to IPv6 protocol, we have to switch the netsh interface context prior to our queries. Open a command prompt in Windows and run the following statements: C:\Users\joki>netshnetsh>interface ipv6netsh interface ipv6>show interfaces Select the device index from the Idx column to get more details about the IPv6 address and DNS server information (here: I'm going to use my WiFi device with device index 11), like so: netsh interface ipv6>show address 11 Okay, address information has been provided. Now, let's check the details about DNS and resolving host names: netsh interface ipv6> show dnsservers 11 Okay, that looks good already. Our Windows client has a valid IPv6 address lease with lifetime information and details about the configured DNS servers. Talking about DNS server... Your clients should be able to connect to your network servers via IPv6 using hostnames instead of IPv6 addresses. Please read on about how to enable a local named with IPv6.

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  • VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

    - by ScottGu
    This is the twenty-first in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s blog post covers a few of the nice usability improvements coming with the VS 2010 debugger.  The VS 2010 debugger has a ton of great new capabilities.  Features like Intellitrace (aka historical debugging), the new parallel/multithreaded debugging capabilities, and dump debuging support typically get a ton of (well deserved) buzz and attention when people talk about the debugging improvements with this release.  I’ll be doing blog posts in the future that demonstrate how to take advantage of them as well.  With today’s post, though, I thought I’d start off by covering a few small, but nice, debugger usability improvements that were also included with the VS 2010 release, and which I think you’ll find useful. Breakpoint Labels VS 2010 includes new support for better managing debugger breakpoints.  One particularly useful feature is called “Breakpoint Labels” – it enables much better grouping and filtering of breakpoints within a project or across a solution.  With previous releases of Visual Studio you had to manage each debugger breakpoint as a separate item. Managing each breakpoint separately can be a pain with large projects and for cases when you want to maintain “logical groups” of breakpoints that you turn on/off depending on what you are debugging.  Using the new VS 2010 “breakpoint labeling” feature you can now name these “groups” of breakpoints and manage them as a unit. Grouping Multiple Breakpoints Together using a Label Below is a screen-shot of the breakpoints window within Visual Studio 2010.  This lists all of the breakpoints defined within my solution (which in this case is the ASP.NET MVC 2 code base): The first and last breakpoint in the list above breaks into the debugger when a Controller instance is created or released by the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Using VS 2010, I can now select these two breakpoints, right-click, and then select the new “Edit labels…” menu command to give them a common label/name (making them easier to find and manage): Below is the dialog that appears when I select the “Edit labels” command.  We can use it to create a new string label for our breakpoints or select an existing one we have already defined.  In this case we’ll create a new label called “Lifetime Management” to describe what these two breakpoints cover: When we press the OK button our two selected breakpoints will be grouped under the newly created “Lifetime Management” label: Filtering/Sorting Breakpoints by Label We can use the “Search” combobox to quickly filter/sort breakpoints by label.  Below we are only showing those breakpoints with the “Lifetime Management” label: Toggling Breakpoints On/Off by Label We can also toggle sets of breakpoints on/off by label group.  We can simply filter by the label group, do a Ctrl-A to select all the breakpoints, and then enable/disable all of them with a single click: Importing/Exporting Breakpoints VS 2010 now supports importing/exporting breakpoints to XML files – which you can then pass off to another developer, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later.  To export only a subset of breakpoints, you can filter by a particular label and then click the “Export breakpoint” button in the Breakpoints window: Above I’ve filtered my breakpoint list to only export two particular breakpoints (specific to a bug that I’m chasing down).  I can export these breakpoints to an XML file and then attach it to a bug report or email – which will enable another developer to easily setup the debugger in the correct state to investigate it on a separate machine.  Pinned DataTips Visual Studio 2010 also includes some nice new “DataTip pinning” features that enable you to better see and track variable and expression values when in the debugger.  Simply hover over a variable or expression within the debugger to expose its DataTip (which is a tooltip that displays its value)  – and then click the new “pin” button on it to make the DataTip always visible: You can “pin” any number of DataTips you want onto the screen.  In addition to pinning top-level variables, you can also drill into the sub-properties on variables and pin them as well.  Below I’ve “pinned” three variables: “category”, “Request.RawUrl” and “Request.LogonUserIdentity.Name”.  Note that these last two variable are sub-properties of the “Request” object.   Associating Comments with Pinned DataTips Hovering over a pinned DataTip exposes some additional UI within the debugger: Clicking the comment button at the bottom of this UI expands the DataTip - and allows you to optionally add a comment with it: This makes it really easy to attach and track debugging notes: Pinned DataTips are usable across both Debug Sessions and Visual Studio Sessions Pinned DataTips can be used across multiple debugger sessions.  This means that if you stop the debugger, make a code change, and then recompile and start a new debug session - any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them.  Pinned DataTips can also be used across multiple Visual Studio sessions.  This means that if you close your project, shutdown Visual Studio, and then later open the project up again – any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them. See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature) How many times have you ever stopped the debugger only to go back to your code and say: $#@! – what was the value of that variable again??? One of the nice things about pinned DataTips is that they keep track of their “last value from debug session” – and you can look these values up within the VB/C# code editor even when the debugger is no longer running.  DataTips are by default hidden when you are in the code editor and the debugger isn’t running.  On the left-hand margin of the code editor, though, you’ll find a push-pin for each pinned DataTip that you’ve previously setup: Hovering your mouse over a pinned DataTip will cause it to display on the screen.  Below you can see what happens when I hover over the first pin in the editor - it displays our debug session’s last values for the “Request” object DataTip along with the comment we associated with them: This makes it much easier to keep track of state and conditions as you toggle between code editing mode and debugging mode on your projects. Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips As I mentioned earlier in this post, pinned DataTips are by default saved across Visual Studio sessions (you don’t need to do anything to enable this). VS 2010 also now supports importing/exporting pinned DataTips to XML files – which you can then pass off to other developers, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later. Combined with the new support for importing/exporting breakpoints, this makes it much easier for multiple developers to share debugger configurations and collaborate across debug sessions. Summary Visual Studio 2010 includes a bunch of great new debugger features – both big and small.  Today’s post shared some of the nice debugger usability improvements. All of the features above are supported with the Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition (the Pinned DataTip features are also supported in the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions)  I’ll be covering some of the “big big” new debugging features like Intellitrace, parallel/multithreaded debugging, and dump file analysis in future blog posts.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

    - by danx
    Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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  • Enabling Service Availability in WCF Services

    - by cibrax
    It is very important for the enterprise to know which services are operational at any given point. There are many factors that can affect the availability of the services, some of them are external like a database not responding or any dependant service not working. However, in some cases, you only want to know whether a service is up or down, so a simple heart-beat mechanism with “Ping” messages would do the trick. Unfortunately, WCF does not provide a built-in mechanism to support this functionality, and you probably don’t to implement a “Ping” operation in any service that you have out there. For solving this in a generic way, there is a WCF extensibility point that comes to help us, the “Operation Invokers”. In a nutshell, an operation invoker is the class responsible invoking the service method with a set of parameters and generate the output parameters with the return value. What I am going to do here is to implement a custom operation invoker that intercepts any call to the service, and detects whether a “Ping” header was attached to the message. If the “Ping” header is detected, the operation invoker returns a new header to tell the client that the service is alive, and the real operation execution is omitted. In that way, we have a simple heart beat mechanism based on the messages that include a "Ping” header, so the client application can determine at any point whether the service is up or down. My operation invoker wraps the default implementation attached by default to any operation by WCF. internal class PingOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker innerInvoker; object[] outputs = null; object returnValue = null; public const string PingHeaderName = "Ping"; public const string PingHeaderNamespace = "http://tellago.serviceModel"; public PingOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker innerInvoker, OperationDescription description) { this.innerInvoker = innerInvoker; outputs = description.SyncMethod.GetParameters() .Where(p => p.IsOut) .Select(p => DefaultForType(p.ParameterType)).ToArray(); var returnValue = DefaultForType(description.SyncMethod.ReturnType); } private static object DefaultForType(Type targetType) { return targetType.IsValueType ? Activator.CreateInstance(targetType) : null; } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { object returnValue; if (Invoke(out returnValue, out outputs)) { return returnValue; } else { return this.innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out outputs); } } private bool Invoke(out object returnValue, out object[] outputs) { object untypedProperty = null; if (OperationContext.Current .IncomingMessageProperties.TryGetValue(HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name, out untypedProperty)) { var httpRequestProperty = untypedProperty as HttpRequestMessageProperty; if (httpRequestProperty != null) { if (httpRequestProperty.Headers[PingHeaderName] != null) { outputs = this.outputs; if (OperationContext.Current .IncomingMessageProperties.TryGetValue(HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name, out untypedProperty)) { var httpResponseProperty = untypedProperty as HttpResponseMessageProperty; httpResponseProperty.Headers.Add(PingHeaderName, "Ok"); } returnValue = this.returnValue; return true; } } } var headers = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageHeaders; if (headers.FindHeader(PingHeaderName, PingHeaderNamespace) > -1) { outputs = this.outputs; MessageHeader<string> header = new MessageHeader<string>("Ok"); var untyped = header.GetUntypedHeader(PingHeaderName, PingHeaderNamespace); OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageHeaders.Add(untyped); returnValue = this.returnValue; return true; } returnValue = null; outputs = null; return false; } } The implementation above looks for the “Ping” header either in the Http Request or the Soap message. The next step is to implement a behavior for attaching this operation invoker to the services we want to monitor. [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method | AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] public class PingBehavior : Attribute, IServiceBehavior, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase, Collection<ServiceEndpoint> endpoints, BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase) { } public void Validate(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase) { foreach (var endpoint in serviceDescription.Endpoints) { foreach (var operation in endpoint.Contract.Operations) { if (operation.Behaviors.Find<PingBehavior>() == null) operation.Behaviors.Add(this); } } } public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, ClientOperation clientOperation) { } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { dispatchOperation.Invoker = new PingOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker, operationDescription); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { } } As an operation invoker can only be added in an “operation behavior”, a trick I learned in the past is that you can implement a service behavior as well and use the “Validate” method to inject it in all the operations, so the final configuration is much easier and cleaner. You only need to decorate the service with a simple attribute to enable the “Ping” functionality. [PingBehavior] public class HelloWorldService : IHelloWorld { public string Hello(string name) { return "Hello " + name; } } On the other hand, the client application needs to send a dummy message with a “Ping” header to detect whether the service is available or not. In order to simplify this task, I created a extension method in the WCF client channel to do this work. public static class ClientChannelExtensions { const string PingNamespace = "http://tellago.serviceModel"; const string PingName = "Ping"; public static bool IsAvailable<TChannel>(this IClientChannel channel, Action<TChannel> operation) { try { using (OperationContextScope scope = new OperationContextScope(channel)) { MessageHeader<string> header = new MessageHeader<string>(PingName); var untyped = header.GetUntypedHeader(PingName, PingNamespace); OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageHeaders.Add(untyped); try { operation((TChannel)channel); var headers = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageHeaders; if (headers.Any(h => h.Name == PingName && h.Namespace == PingNamespace)) { return true; } else { return false; } } catch (CommunicationException) { return false; } } } catch (Exception) { return false; } } } This extension method basically adds a “Ping” header to the request message, executes the operation passed as argument (Action<TChannel> operation), and looks for the corresponding “Ping” header in the response to see the results. The client application can use this extension with a single line of code, var client = new ServiceReference.HelloWorldClient(); var isAvailable = client.InnerChannel.IsAvailable<IHelloWorld>((c) => c.Hello(null)); The “isAvailable” variable will tell the client application whether the service is available or not. You can download the complete implementation from this location.    

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  • European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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  • Building KPIs to monitor your business Its not really about the Technology

    When I have discussions with people about Business Intelligence, one of the questions the inevitably come up is about building KPIs and how to accomplish that. From a technical level the concept of a KPI is very simple, almost too simple in that it is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. The key to that iceberg is not really the tip, but the mass of the iceberg that is hidden beneath the surface upon which the tip sits. The analogy of the iceberg is not meant to indicate that the foundation of the KPI is overly difficult or complex. The disparity in size in meant to indicate that the larger thing that needs to be defined is not the technical tip, but the underlying business definition of what the KPI means. From a technical perspective the KPI consists of primarily the following items: Actual Value This is the actual value data point that is being measured. An example would be something like the amount of sales. Target Value This is the target goal for the KPI. This is a number that can be measured against Actual Value. An example would be $10,000 in monthly sales. Target Indicator Range This is the definition of ranges that define what type of indicator the user will see comparing the Actual Value to the Target Value. Most often this is defined by stoplight, but can be any indicator that is going to show a status in a quick fashion to the user. Typically this would be something like: Red Light = Actual Value more than 5% below target; Yellow Light = Within 5% of target either direction; Green Light = More than 5% higher than Target Value Status\Trend Indicator This is an optional attribute of a KPI that is typically used to show some kind of trend. The vast majority of these indicators are used to show some type of progress against a previous period. As an example, the status indicator might be used to show how the monthly sales compare to last month. With this type of indicator there needs to be not only a definition of what the ranges are for your status indictor, but then also what value the number needs to be compared against. So now we have an idea of what data points a KPI consists of from a technical perspective lets talk a bit about tools. As you can see technically there is not a whole lot to them and the choice of technology is not as important as the definition of the KPIs, which we will get to in a minute. There are many different types of tools in the Microsoft BI stack that you can use to expose your KPI to the business. These include Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel, and SQL Reporting Services. There are pluses and minuses to each technology and the right technology is based a lot on your goals and how you want to deliver the information to the users. Additionally, there are other non-Microsoft tools that can be used to expose KPI indicators to your business users. Regardless of the technology used as your front end, the heavy lifting of KPI is in the business definition of the values and benchmarks for that KPI. The discussion about KPIs is very dependent on the history of an organization and how much they are exposed to the attributes of a KPI. Often times when discussing KPIs with a business contact who has not been exposed to KPIs the discussion tends to also be a session educating the business user about what a KPI is and what goes into the definition of a KPI. The majority of times the business user has an idea of what their actual values are and they have been tracking those numbers for some time, generally in Excel and all manually. So they will know the amount of sales last month along with sales two years ago in the same month. Where the conversation tends to get stuck is when you start discussing what the target value should be. The actual value is answering the What and How much questions. When you are talking about the Target values you are asking the question Is this number good or bad. Typically, the user will know whether or not the value is good or bad, but most of the time they are not able to quantify what is good or bad. Their response is usually something like I just know. Because they have been watching the sales quantity for years now, they can tell you that a 5% decrease in sales this month might actually be a good thing, maybe because the salespeople are all waiting until next month when the new versions come out. It can sometimes be very hard to break the business people of this habit. One of the fears generally is that the status indicator is not subjective. Thus, in the scenario above, the business user is going to be fearful that their boss, just looking at a negative red indicator, is going to haul them out to the woodshed for a bad month. But, on the flip side, if all you are displaying is the amount of sales, only a person with knowledge of last month sales and the target amount for this month would have any idea if $10,000 in sales is good or not. Here is where a key point about KPIs needs to be communicated to both the business user and any user who might be viewing the results of that KPI. The KPI is just one tool that is used to report on business performance. The KPI is meant as a quick indicator of one business statistic. It is not meant to tell the entire story. It does not answer the question Why. Its primary purpose is to objectively and quickly expose an area of the business that might warrant more review. There is always going to be the need to do further analysis on any potential negative or neutral KPI. So, hopefully, once you have convinced your business user to come up with some target numbers and ranges for status indicators, you then need to take the next step and help them answer the Why question. The main question here to ask is, Okay, you see the indicator and you need to discover why the number is what is, where do you go?. The answer is usually a combination of sources. A sales manager might have some of the following items at their disposal (Marketing report showing a decrease in the promotional discounts for the month, Pricing Report showing the reduction of prices of older models, an Inventory Report showing the discontinuation of a particular product line, or a memo showing the ending of a large affiliate partnership. The answers to the question Why are never as simple as a single indicator value. Bring able to quickly get to this information is all about designing how a user accesses the KPIs and then also how easily they can get to the additional information they need. This is where a Dashboard mentality can come in handy. For example, the business user can have a dashboard that shows their KPIs, but also has links to some of the common reports that they run regarding Sales Data. The users boss may have the same KPIs on their dashboard, but instead of links to individual reports they are going to have a link to a status report that was created by the user that pulls together all the data about the KPI in a summary format the users boss can review. So some of the key things to think about when building or evaluating KPIs for your organization: Technology should not be the driving factor KPIs are of little value without some indicator for whether a value is good, bad or neutral. KPIs only give an answer to the Is this number good\bad? question Make sure the ability to drill into the Why of a KPI is close at hand and relevant to the user who is viewing the KPI. The KPI is a key business tool when defined properly to help monitor business performance across the enterprise in an objective and consistent manner. At times it might feel like the process of defining the business aspects of a KPI can sometimes be arduous, the payoff in the end can far outweigh the costs. Some of the benefits of going through this process are a better understanding of the key metrics for an organization and the measure of those metrics and a consistent snapshot of business performance that can be utilized across the organization. And I think that these are benefits to any organization regardless of the technology or the implementation.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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