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  • Letter to Ballmer: Making Better Consumer Devices

    - by andrewbrust
    Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back.  The email contained a scan of a column I wrote praising Microsoft’s BI strategy.  His reply contained three simple words: “Super nice  thanks.” Well, now I’d like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher.  But I’m still super earnest. The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft’s CEO should do to improve that division’s offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line. So here goes:   1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7.  That’s plain silly.  You’ve got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you’re the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device.  Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly.  Show them that Google Android’s not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases. And another thing: make sure your OEMs’ devices have flawless touch screens.  If they don’t, then you shouldn’t certify them for delivery to customers.  Period. Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly.  It was DOA, and you know it.   2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform Media Center is, at its core, a good product.  But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts.  Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device – it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code – and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox – find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration.  Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it’s true).   3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter You have two media products with almost identical names.  One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities.  Can we merge these please?  My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you’ve announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.   4. Fix the Red Ring of Death People love the Xbox, but they really don’t love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up.  You’ve handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it’s been around for a long time now and it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.  You can do better.  In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.   5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology.  So if that’s true, why did you back HD DVD so hard?  You know why: for now, the film studios won’t allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand.  Don’t you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs?  Don’t you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery?  And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you’d have it all sewn up.  Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units?  No.  Do I think that it would move more units with desperately needed influential home theater consumers?  You bet.  And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process. But while you’re at it, make the fan quieter, please.   6. Make More of Windows Home Server Home Server is a fantastic product.  And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you’re letting it languish.  Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded.  WHS’ unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung.  Product cycles are slow.  Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking.  You’ve married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home!  That’s cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.  Make use of this ace card, and while you’re at it, give it real integration with Media Center.  The integration thus far proof-of-concept quality.  You should go way past that – both products will benefit immeasurably.   7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers There’s a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products.  They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers.  They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server.  But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don’t love them.  They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform.  This is a travesty.  Please fix it.  Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies.  Problem solved.  Markets expanded.   8. Make Your Own Hardware In other areas, I know you love your partners.  I help run one, so I appreciate that.  But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them it yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine).  Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices.  At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs’ offerings.  That’s what Google did with the Nexxus One.  And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things : (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it.  Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google’s phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it.  Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2.  I tend to believe you’d have a lot bigger market share than you do now.   9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative From what I hear, it sounds like it’s going well.  And this goes right along with making your own hardware.  When you build it, they will come.  And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.   10. Make an Acquisition (or Two) TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking.  With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something.  But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger.  Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?   11. Make Beautiful Stuff You’ve heard this one before, I know.  But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one.  You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design.  You know that appeals to consumers.  But it seems you think doing so is Apple’s game exclusively and so you shouldn’t even try.  Bull dinky.  Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design gallery.  You’ll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed.  You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start.  Now run with that.  Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can’t and shut them up.  For good.   12. Burst the Bubble Some of the products you’ve built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world.  That would appear to be the result of groupthink.  You must do better.  And there’s lots of people willing to advise you.  This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs.  Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too.  Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped.  Talk to high-end gear consumers.  Talk to Best Buy and CostCo customers too.   Signing Off I hope this was of value to you.  As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, even trite, some of these pieces of advice were and then, because of that, doubting they’d really help.  But I decided that they must not be obvious to Microsoft.  Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it’s hard to clear your head.  I think my head’s pretty clear here though (I’m wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help.  If not, well, then, I guess they all can’t be super nice.

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  • Top tweets SOA Partner Community – October 2013

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Ronald Luttikhuizen ?My latest upload: SOA Made Simple | Introduction to SOA on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/rluttikhuizen/soa-made-simple-introduction-to-soa … via @SlideShare OTNArchBeat ?ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 4, 2013 #cloud #linux #oaam #soa http://pub.vitrue.com/y4SK Lucas Jellema ?My blog article shows news on the new SOA Suite 12c release - as it was publicly available during #oow13 see: http://technology.amis.nl/2013/09/27/oow13-soa-suite-12c/ … Yogesh Sontakke ?Introducing OER's new Express Workflows - Simplified Lifecycle Management. Blog post: http://bit.ly/16JKHCf @soacommunity #soagovernance SrinivasPadmanabhuni ?"@OTNArchBeat: SOA and User Interfaces - by @soacommunity @HajoNormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg et al #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/KmOp " SOA Community ?SOA and User-Interfaces http://servicetechmag.com/I76/0913-2 article published part of #industrialSOA at Service Technology Magazine #soacommunity Estafet Limited ?@Estafet win @UKOUG Middleware Partner of the Year 2013 Yogesh Sontakke ?RT @VikasAatOracle: #Oracle #B2B - written by experts #soa #soacommunity #oraclesoa - time to get a copy ! @SOAScott Danilo Schmiedel ?Thanks a lot to Juergen @soacommunity for the super interesting and well-organized Partner Advisory Council yesterday! Such a Great Value! OTNArchBeat ?Case management supporting re-landscaping application portfolios | @leonsmiers http://pub.vitrue.com/MC5j Samantha Searle ?Apply for the #GartnerBPM 2014 Excellence Awards - find out how via this link http://ow.ly/ptaNQ #Gartner #bpm #process #entarch #cio OTNArchBeat ?SOA and User Interfaces - by @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg et al #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/KmOp Dain Hansen ?Hybrid #cloud is on the rise, but is the IT department's culture standing in the way? http://add.vc/eJN #CloudIntegration #OracleSOA OTNArchBeat #SOASuite 11g ps6 - Download your log files directly from the Enterprise Manager | @whitehorsenl http://pub.vitrue.com/KrJ2 Whitehorses ?Whiteblog: SOA Suite 11g ps6 - Download your log files directly from the Enterprise Manager (http://goo.gl/2Gqiax ) Rajesh Raheja ?Cloud integration session recap #oow13 http://blog.raastech.com/2013/09/recap-of-real-world-cloud-integration.html?m=1 … Vikas Anand ?@Ahmed_Aboulnaga thanks for the excellent summary and kind words. #oow13 #cloud #oraclesoa http://blog.raastech.com/2013/09/recap-of-real-world-cloud-integration.html?m=1 … Luis Augusto Weir ?REST is also SOA. Check it out http://www.soa4u.co.uk/2013/09/restful-is-also-soa.html?m=1 … #soacommunity Graham ?“@OracleBPM & @soacommunity: 5 Ways to Modernize Applications with BPM #AppAdvantage" #oracleday http://bit.ly/15yC6e3 SOA Community ?#ACED director asked me for BPM references in FSI - ever visited my #SOACommunity workspace? https://beehiveonline.oracle.com/teamcollab/overview/SOA_Community_Workspace … #soacommunity #bpm OracleBlogs ?SOA Community Newsletter September 2013 http://ow.ly/2Aj6oK OTNArchBeat ?OOW13: First glimpses of the new #SOASuite12c | @LucasJellema http://pub.vitrue.com/2YgX sbernhardt ?Just published new blog entry on OOW 2013 wrap up. http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/oracle-open-world-2013-wrap-up/ … #oow13 @OC_WIRE @soacommunity Emiel Paasschens ?Home with family after an overwhelming #OOW week in San Francisco with lot of info & meetings. Special thanx to @OracleBelux & @soacommunity Robert van Mölken ?Had a awesome week at #OOW13 in SF. Highlights were the @soacommunity Wine tour, @OracleBelux meet-ups and @OracleSOA CAB. Thanks to all :) SOA Community ?The place Oracle Fusion middleware comes from - Oracle 200 - TKs office - next Oracle 100 - SOA & BPM #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/qibFOQVbRo Oracle BPM ?5 Ways to Modernize Applications with BPM #AppAdvantage http://pub.vitrue.com/l2dn Simon Haslam ?Ha ha - how did we miss that! RT @lucasjellema: Post conference announcement of a new middleware appliance? #oow13 pic.twitter.com/3NvcjPfjXb OTNArchBeat ?The OTNArchBeat Daily is out! http://paper.li/OTNArchBeat/1329828521 … ? Top stories today via @lucasjellema @myfear @TylerJewell Packt Publishing ?Get 50% off ALL our DRM-free eBooks - this weekend only! Go to http://www.packtpub.com/ and use code BIG50, as often as you like! #BIG50 OracleBlogs ?Global Perspective: ACE Director from EMEA Weighs in on AppAdvantage http://ow.ly/2Afek2 orclateamsoa ?#orclateamsoa Blog: BPM Auditing Demystified - I've heard from a couple of customers recently asking about BPM aud... http://ow.ly/2AfbAn AMIS, Oracle & Java ?Cool #soasuite 12c feature managed file transfer - visit Dave Barry at demo point sr212 #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/gb4HLbUarR SOA Community ?Let us know what was best at #OOW @soacommunity save trip home - thanks for coming to #SF ;-) see you at #OOW2014 pic.twitter.com/xbWXjRapqh Lonneke Dikmans ?Nice @dschmied is talking about the different steps in his project. He starts with explaining the user interface design #oow13 #ux #acm Lonneke Dikmans ?Saving the best for the end: managing knowledge worker processes by @dschmied and Prasen.#oow13 #acm cool stuff: adaptive case management Luis Augusto Weir ?SOA Governance is more than just OER. Requires people, processes and tools. Check it out #SOA #soacommunity http://youtu.be/Ohn06smVKVw Lonneke Dikmans ?“@OracleSOA: #oow Join us for:Enterprise SOA Infrastructure Best Practices Thu 9/26 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM Moscone West - 2020 SOA Community ?Business Process Management (BPM) 11g PS6 Awareness Course http://wp.me/p10C8u-1as Ajay Khanna ?Detect, Analyze, Act - Fast! http://wp.me/p10C8u-1ao via @soacommunity #OracleBPM Simone Geib ?It took a while, but I finally reached 500 followers. Thanks everybody and especially @soacommunity :) SOA Community ?Functional Testing Business Processes In Oracle BPM Suite 11g by Arun Pareek http://wp.me/p10C8u-1aq SOA Community Distribute the September edition of the SOA Community newsletter READ it! Didn't receive it register http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity SOA Community ?Detect, Analyze, Act - Fast! by Ajay Khanna http://wp.me/p10C8u-1ao Robert van Mölken ?Finalised my #OOW presentation #CON8736 and live demo on wednesday 25th at 11:45am. Also giving a short version at the SOA CAB on thursday. Rajesh Raheja ?"The AppAdvantage of Oracle Cloud & On-premises Integration" http://bit.ly/14RYHmZ SOA Community ?Additional new content SOA & BPM Partner Community http://wp.me/p10C8u-1aw Dain Hansen ?Right now #oow13 SOA, BPM - Customer Advisory Boards. 'No tweeting' says @SOASimone. Instagram of funny cats still ok. leonsmiers ?Case Management with Oracle BPM Suite our presentation on #oow13 http://www.slideshare.net/leonsmiers/oracle-open-world-2013-case-management-smiers-kitson … #capgemini @nkitson72 Mark Simpson ?Flextronics reduced cost of processing an invoice to <$1 from $7 due to BPM @OracleBPM #oow13 saving millions. Way less than industry avg. Holger Mueller ?#Siemens Shared Services CIO says that #Fusion #Middleware made the difference for #Oracle over #Workday. #Integration matters. #OOW13 oracleopenworld ?Miss any #oow13 keynotes, or simply want to rewatch? Check out the live streaming site for keynotes on demand: http://pub.vitrue.com/RG4D SOA Community ?Analyze your m2m data and act on it! Big data Pattern matching, fast data & soa #soacommunity #oow pic.twitter.com/48Q1z4ckh7 SOA Community ?Top tweets SOA Partner Community – September 2013 http://wp.me/p10C8u-1cR Simone Geib ?#oraclesoa hands on lab at #oow13 pic.twitter.com/IJJrqXIMiu Danilo Schmiedel #oow13 CON8436: Managing Knowledge Worker Processes. Come & get a free Adaptive Case Management poster @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/FRc2CSyLwb John Sim ?Great job again Jurgen @soacommunity helping bring Ace Community together! Danilo Schmiedel ?Excellent #OracleBPM Adaptive Case Management intro by @heidibuelowBPM and Prasen at the #oow13 demo ground.Last chance today @soacommunity SOA Community ?Thanks to all our #bpm #soa and #weblogic partners for the great middleware business #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/dBwZ8DMHfH Whitehorses ?Thanks @soacommunity for the party tonight. Great to meet product management & see all the talented EMEA middleware specialists. #oow13 Danilo Schmiedel ?Great tool demo from Link Consulting about managing your SOA with OER #oow13 @soacommunity Torsten Winterberg ?“@soacommunity: thanks to @dschmied and @OC_WIRE for making it happen to have our case management poster as printed version hier at #oow13 Ronald Luttikhuizen ?These were the architects involved in the diagram excitement :) just after State of SOA podcast with @OTNArchBeat pic.twitter.com/5B8jIrVTA9 SOA Community ?Tanks to AVIO for the excellent #bpmn poster and the great bpm business - visit then at #OOW & get the poster pic.twitter.com/ebTg9pFY1C Dain Hansen ?Kurian introducing Oracle Platform-as-a-Service developments. #oow13 #OracleCloud pic.twitter.com/evJLTU53rx Bruce Tierney ?API Management "multi-level pie chart" at #oow13 by Oracle's Tim Hall pic.twitter.com/q12OIRdaue Dain Hansen ?This is not your Daddy's BAM @soacommunity: Is this BAM? Very cool in #soasuite 12c get a demo at sr225 pic.twitter.com/EvwqXW9U5j SOA Community ?Is this BAM? Very cool in #soasuite 12c get a demo at sr225 pic.twitter.com/LybHxyF362 SOA Community ?SOA governance by @Yogesh_Sontakke at demo point sr214 many good new features - key for soa projects #oow #soa pic.twitter.com/DFK0ummsK1 SOA Community ?Cool #soasuite 12c feature managed file transfer - visit Dave Barry at demo point sr212 #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/GDKcqDGhCF SOA Community ?Adaptive Case Management demo point at #OOW visit @heidibuelowBPM get a demo and cmmn notation poster #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/T7yEyI7tdn Lonneke Dikmans ?In case you missed it: http://blog.vennster.nl/2013/09/case-management-part-1.html?spref=tw … Lucas Jellema ?SOA Suite news: Cloud Adapters RightNow and SalesForce plus SDK to develop custom cloud adapters (CY13); REST/JSON support in SB/SCA (12c) Oracle SOA ?Cloud Integration and AppAdvantage: Transform your Enterprise #soa #oow13 http://pub.vitrue.com/UfPB Dain Hansen ?Cloud Integration and AppAdvantage: Transform your Enterprise #soa #oow13 http://pub.vitrue.com/4QWA Hajo Normann ?#BigData, eventing & real time #analytics suggest timely next actions in #oracleBPM & #oracleACM; #oow13 #FastData pic.twitter.com/aFVGrTXPqu Mark Simpson ?OEP CQL engine now used in BAM12c for event stream summary computation with temporal and pattern match features to feed dashboards. #oow13 Mark Simpson ?BAM12c virtually a new product. Analytics that senses ahead of time and also compares to historical trends to guide process or case #oow13 Andrejus Baranovskis ?Enabling UI Shell 12c/11g Multitasking Behavior http://fb.me/18l9vxQfA Amit Zavery ?Oracle Fusion Middleware Empowers Business Users, EVP Thomas Kurian's session summary http://onforb.es/18Ta1jf #oow13 #oraclemiddle #oracle Vikas Anand ?#oow13 #oracleopenworld BPM on display at Middleware keynote by Thomas Kurian pic.twitter.com/PMm719S0Ui SOA Community ?BPM composer - business user empowerment #oow #soacommunity #bpmsuite pic.twitter.com/0Qgl6oVh0h SOA Community ?Model your process in BPMN - make is executable and analyze & improve them #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/jkLlObDdoi Bruce Tierney ?@demed and Thomas Kurian talk mobile and cloud at #oow13 pic.twitter.com/bAAeqn5a2V Amit Zavery ?Thomas Kurian showcasing all the new features of Oracle Fusion Middleware #oraclemiddle #oow13 SOA Community ?Demo time cloud adapters in #soasuite at Thomas Kurian keynote. Build and integrate mobile apps in minutes #oow pic.twitter.com/qTnCOJLLwS SOA Community ?Soa suite cloud adapters and mobile apps by @demed at Thomas Kurian keynote #oow #oracle #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/5aMLkNH4Ng Danilo Schmiedel ?First impressions from Oracle Open World 2013 http://wp.me/p2fG8x-77 @soacommunity @OC_WIRE SOA Community ?Good morning SFO let us know if you attend #OOW & #OPN keynote - #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/hzLYGDlRgE Simon Haslam ?Had a very useful @wlscommunity PAC meeting yesterday... & probably the best swag to date! pic.twitter.com/Lqus8ysbp7 Vikas Anand ?Oracle SOA Suite - Team Blog http://bit.ly/18I1Zj7 Rajesh Raheja ?Introducing new Cloud Connectivity Adapters #soa #demopod #oow13. I'll be there Sep 23 & 24 3-6pm to meetup http://bit.ly/18I1Zj7 leonsmiers ?..and again a very successful Oracle SOA/BPM partner council on the eve of #oow13. Thanks Jurgen! @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/aM1LMlb7Yw Vikas Anand ?#oow13 #soa #oep #exalogic Canon Delivers Fast Data with Oracle Event Processing (Oracle SOA Suite) http://bit.ly/1dwPeHb #soacommunity Rolf Scheuch ?The ACM poster is a big success. Great talks and .... I am soon out of posters! #bpmcon #ACM pic.twitter.com/TriaUyXRWK Oracle SOA ?British Telecom Sucess with Oracle B2B #oow #soa #b2b http://pub.vitrue.com/1RWi leonsmiers ?(Oracle) Case Management supporting re-platforming, a pre-read before our presentation at #oow13 http://leonsmiers.blogspot.com/2013/09/case-management-supporting-re.html … #capgemini #yammer SOA & BPM Partner CommunityFor regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Twitter,SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

    - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com
    Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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  • E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OAUG Collaborate 12

    - by Max Arderius
    Members of our E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group will be at the OAUG Collaborate 12 conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 22 to 26, 2012.  Please drop by any of our sessions to hear the latest news and meet up with us. Speaker Sessions Session 9675Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Senior Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pmLocation: Jasmine B Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade planning tips gleaned from customers who have already performed the upgrade. Youll get specific, cross-product advice on how to decide your project's scope, understand the factors that affect your project's duration, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. Session 9401Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesElke Phelps, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:10 pm - 3:10 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session starts with an architecture review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the different tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in no-interactive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring system-wide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks etc... This session also describes the online patching capabilities coming in Release 12.2. Session 9368Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and RoadmapLisa Parekh, Vice President, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Sunday, April 22, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session provides an overview of Oracle E-Business Suite technology strategy, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, as well as a review of the product roadmap. As a cornerstone session for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, come hear about the latest usability enhancements, systems administration and configuration management tools, security-related updates, and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Session 10709Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateCliff Godwin, Sr. VP, Application Development, OracleMonday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: Mandalay Bay DIn this session, hear from Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin as he delivers an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You will come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and in the future. Session 9398How to Reduce TCO Using Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business SuiteAngelo Rosado, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKenneth Baxter, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Management Pack Fusion Middleware Management, OracleTuesday, April 24, 8:00 am - 9:00 amLocation: Breakers GThis session covers the methods and tools you can use to gain insights into your end users, troubleshoot performance problems, define service-level objectives, and proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle E-Business Suite environment to meet your availability and performance targets. Come hear how you can manage, diagnose, and monitor the Oracle E-Business Suite environment from a single console by using Oracle Enterprise Manager together with the Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. Session 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Tuesday, April 24, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: South Seas E Join us at this session if you are wondering which tools to integrate your data, your processes and your User Interface. Or what tools to customize and extend your screens and reports (OAF, Forms, ADF, Oracle Reports, BI etc....), what tools to secure, protect and manage your Oracle E-Business Suite etc... Or simply if you are looking for a technical roadmap for your Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure to CO-EXIST with the rest of your enterprise applications including Oracle Fusion Applications. Session 9375 Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Manager, Applications Development Group, OracleTuesday, April 24, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: Breakers GWhat's coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Topics include an architectural overview, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot-cloning and automated "lights out" cloning. Learn about how online patching will reduce your database patching downtimes to the time it takes to bounce your database server.Session 9369Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 8:15 am - 9:15 amLocation: South Seas FThis Oracle Development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including database releases/options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop OS, browsers, JRE releases, Office/OpenOffice, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, BI, security options, clouds, Oracle VM etc.... It also covers the most-commonly-asked questions about technology stack component support dates and upgrade implications. Session 9407The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability EnhancementsGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pmLocation: South Seas GIn this session, developers will get a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include rich new UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, Oracle ADF task flows etc.... In addition, we will cover the personalization/extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration and much more. Session 9374Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance Tuning and Upgrade OptimizationIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleUdayan Parvate, Director, Release Engineering, Quality and Release Management, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis presentation will offer tips and techniques on tuning all the layers of the Oracle E-Business Suite stack including the various tiers of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment. You will learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues on the Java and Java Virtual Machine layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules.Session 9412 Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Desktop Integration: Beyond Oracle Applications Desktop IntegratorGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleThursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: Breakers GThis session describes the new expanded functionality in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, Oracle Report Manager, and dedicated integrators. You have more options for desktop integration now, not fewer. Topics include an overview of prepackaged solutions for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and Projects. The session also discusses how you can use the Desktop Integration Framework feature to create your own integrators quickly and easily.Session 9533 Upgrading your Customizations to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1Sara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 11:00 am - 12:00 pmLocation: South Seas FHave you personalized Forms or OA Framework screens? Have you used mod_plsql or Applications Express to tailor your Release 11i functionality? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment using other tools? This session will help you understand customization scenarios, use cases, tools, and technologies for ensuring that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users' needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Session 10535OAUG Database SIG- Part IMichael Brown, Colibri Limited Company Sunday, April 22, 3:20 pm - 4:20 pmLocation: South Seas FThis is the annual meeting of the Database SIG at Collaborate. The call for candidates for the chair will be closed at the meeting. Plans include a speaker from Oracle and a presentation on applications performance. The details of the meeting will be posted on http://www.dbsig.com. Guest Presentation: Oracle E-Business Suite Database PerformanceIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Session 10720OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part ISrini Chaval, Cummins Monday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10510OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part IISrini Chaval, CumminsMonday, April 23, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching Kevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10522 OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Upgrading E-Business Suite Amrita Mehrok, Director, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Session 10722OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 4:15 pm - 5:15 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Tuning the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Panels Session 9360Oracle E-Business Suite Cloning PanelSandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Guest Speaker: Max Arderius, Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleWednesday, April 25, 9:30 am - 10:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis panel will discuss differences between available release 11i, R12 and R12.1 cloning methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each cloning method will be discussed in depth. This panel of experienced database administrators will lead a discussion focusing on the questions such as “which cloning method is best to use in your particular environment”. Attendees will gain practical knowledge, tips and tricks to assist with cloning of Oracle E-Business Suite release 11i, R12 and R12.1 environments. Session 10022Oracle Applications Tuning PanelMark Farnham, Rightsizing, Inc.Guest Speaker: Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleThursday, April 26, 09:45 am - 10:45 amLocation: South Seas FThis applications performance panel session, sponsored by the OAUG Database SIG, provides a Q&A forum focused on helping you address your Oracle Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel applications) performance- and scalability-related issues. The panel comprises several well-known Oracle Applications performance experts. Topic areas include Oracle Database; the network; and the applications tier, including patching and upgrade performance. For complete listing of all speaker sessions and other activities, please visit the OAUG Collaborate Web Site.

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  • SQLAuthority Book Review – DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA

    - by pinaldave
    DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA – Thomas LaRock Link to Amazon Link to Flipkart First of all, I thank all my readers when I wrote that I could not get this book in any local book stores, because they offered me to send a copy of this good book. A very special mention goes to Sripada and Jayesh for they gave so much effort in finding my home address and sending me the hard copy. Before, I did not have the copy of the book, but now I have two of it already! It surprises me how my readers were able to find my home address, which I have not publicly shared. Quick Review: This is indeed a one easy-to-read and fun book. We all work day and night with technology yet we should not forget to show our love and care for our family at home. For our souls that starve for peace and guidance, this one book is the “it” book for all the technology enthusiasts. Though this book was specifically written for DBAs, the reach is not limited to DBAs only because the lessons incorporated in it actually applies to all. This is one of the most motivating technical books I have read. Detailed Review: Let us go over a few questions first: Who wants to be as famous as rockstars in the field of Database Administration? How can one learn what it takes to become a top notch software developer? If you are a beginner in your field, how will you go to next level? Your boss may be very kind or like Dilbert’s Boss, what will you do? How do you keep growing when Eco-system around you does not support you? You are almost at top but there is someone else at the TOP, what do you do and how do you avoid office politics? As a database developer what should be your basic responsibility? and many more… I was able to completely read book in one sitting and I loved it. Before I continue with my opinion, I want to echo the opinion of Kevin Kline who has written the Forward of the book. He has truly suggested that “You hold in your hands a collection of insights and wisdom on the topic of database administration gained through many years of hard-won experience, long nights of study, and direct mentorship under some of the industry’s most talented database professionals and information technology (IT) experts.” Today, IT field is getting bigger and better, while talking about terabytes of the database becomes “more” normal every single day. The gods and demigods of database professionals are taking care of these large scale databases and are carefully maintaining them. In this world, there are only a few beginnings on the first step. There are many experts in different technology fields who are asked to address the issues with databases. There is YOU and ME, who is just new to this work. So we ask ourselves WHERE to begin and HOW to begin. We adore and follow the religion of our rockstars, but oftentimes we really have no idea about their background and their struggles. Every rockstar has his success story which needs to be digested before learning his tricks and tips. This book starts with the same note and teaches the two most important lessons for anybody who wants to be a DBA Rockstar –  to focus on their single goal of learning and to excel the technology. The story starts with three simple guidelines – Get Prepared, Get Trained, Get Certified. Once a person learns the skills, and then, it would be about time that he needs to enrich or to improve those skills you have learned. I am sure that the right opportunity will come finding themselves and they will not have to go run behind it. However, the real challenge for any person is the first day or first week. A new employee, no matter how much experienced he is, sometimes has no clue about what should one do at new job. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 precisely talk about what one should do as soon as the new job begins. It is also written with keeping the fact in focus that each job can be very much different but there are few infrastructure setups and programming concepts are the same. Learning basics of database was really interesting. I like to focus on the roots of any technology. It is important to understand the structure of the database before suggesting what indexes needs to be created, the same way this book covers the most essential knowledge one must learn by most database developers. I think the title of the fourth chapter is my favorite sentence in this book. I can see that I will be saying this again and again in the future – “A Development Server Is a Production Server to a Developer“. I have worked in the software industry for almost 8 years now and I have seen so many developers sitting on their chairs and waiting for instructions from their lead about how to improve the code or what to do the next. When I talk to them, I suggest that the experiment with their server and try various techniques. I think they all should understand that for them, a development server is their production server and needs to pay proper attention to the code from the beginning. There should be NO any inappropriate code from the beginning. One has to fully focus and give their best, if they are not sure they should ask but should do something and stay active. Chapter 5 and 6 talks about two essential skills for any developer and database administration – what are the ethics of developers when they are working with production server and how to support software which is running on the production server. I have met many people who know the theory by heart but when put in front of keyboard they do not know where to start. The first thing they do opening the browser and searching online, instead of opening SQL Server Management Studio. This can very well happen to anybody who is experienced as well. Chapter 5 and 6 addresses that situation as well includes the handy scripts which can solve almost all the basic trouble shooting issues. “Where’s the Buffet?” By far, this is the best chapter in this book. If you have ever met me, you would know that I love food. I think after reading this chapter, I felt Thomas has written this just keeping me in mind. I think there will be many other people who feel the same way, too. Even my wife who read this chapter thought this was specifically written for me. I will not talk any more about this chapter as this is one must read chapter. And of course this is about real ‘FOOD‘. I am an SQL Server Trainer and Consultant and I totally agree with the point made in the chapter 8 of this book. Yes, it says here that what is necessary to train employees and people. Millions of dollars worth the labor is continuously done in the world which has faults and incorrect. Once something goes wrong, very expensive consultant comes in and fixes the problem. This whole cycle which can be stopped and improved if proper training is done. There is plenty of free trainings available as well, if one cannot afford paid training. “Connect. Learn. Share” – I think this is a great summary and bird’s eye view of this book. Networking is the key. Everything which is discussed in this book can be taken to next level if one properly uses this tips and continuously grow with it. Connecting with others, helping learn each other and building the good knowledge sharing environment should be the goal of everyone. Before I end the review I want to share a real experience. I have personally met one DBA who has worked in a single department in a company for so long that when he was put in a different department in his company due to closing that department, he could not adjust and quit the job despite the same people and company around him. Adjusting in the new environment gets much tougher as one person gets more and more experienced. This book precisely addresses the same issue along with their solutions. I just cannot stop comparing the book with my personal journey. I found so many things which are coincidently in the book is written as how we developer and DBA think. I must express special thanks to Thomas for taking time in his personal life and write this book for us. This book is indeed a book for everybody who wants to grow healthy in the tough and competitive environment. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • Connecting Linux to WatchGuard Firebox SSL (OpenVPN client)

    Recently, I got a new project assignment that requires to connect permanently to the customer's network through VPN. They are using a so-called SSL VPN. As I am using OpenVPN since more than 5 years within my company's network I was quite curious about their solution and how it would actually be different from OpenVPN. Well, short version: It is a disguised version of OpenVPN. Unfortunately, the company only offers a client for Windows and Mac OS which shouldn't bother any Linux user after all. OpenVPN is part of every recent distribution and can be activated in a couple of minutes - both client as well as server (if necessary). WatchGuard Firebox SSL - About dialog Borrowing some files from a Windows client installation Initially, I didn't know about the product, so therefore I went through the installation on Windows 8. No obstacles (and no restart despite installation of TAP device drivers!) here and the secured VPN channel was up and running in less than 2 minutes or so. Much appreciated from both parties - customer and me. Of course, this whole client package and my long year approved and stable installation ignited my interest to have a closer look at the WatchGuard client. Compared to the original OpenVPN client (okay, I have to admit this is years ago) this commercial product is smarter in terms of file locations during installation. You'll be able to access the configuration and key files below your roaming application data folder. To get there, simply enter '%AppData%\WatchGuard\Mobile VPN' in your Windows/File Explorer and confirm with Enter/Return. This will display the following files: Application folder below user profile with configuration and certificate files From there we are going to borrow four files, namely: ca.crt client.crt client.ovpn client.pem and transfer them to the Linux system. You might also be able to isolate those four files from a Mac OS client. Frankly, I'm just too lazy to run the WatchGuard client installation on a Mac mini only to find the folder location, and I'm going to describe why a little bit further down this article. I know that you can do that! Feedback in the comment section is appreciated. Configuration of OpenVPN (console) Depending on your distribution the following steps might be a little different but in general you should be able to get the important information from it. I'm going to describe the steps in Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail). As usual, there are two possibilities to achieve your goal: console and UI. Let's what it is necessary to be done. First of all, you should ensure that you have OpenVPN installed on your system. Open your favourite terminal application and run the following statement: $ sudo apt-get install openvpn network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome Just to be on the safe side. The four above mentioned files from your Windows machine could be copied anywhere but either you place them below your own user directory or you put them (as root) below the default directory: /etc/openvpn At this stage you would be able to do a test run already. Just in case, run the following command and check the output (it's the similar information you would get from the 'View Logs...' context menu entry in Windows: $ sudo openvpn --config client.ovpn Pay attention to the correct path to your configuration and certificate files. OpenVPN will ask you to enter your Auth Username and Auth Password in order to establish the VPN connection, same as the Windows client. Remote server and user authentication to establish the VPN Please complete the test run and see whether all went well. You can disconnect pressing Ctrl+C. Simplifying your life - authentication file In my case, I actually set up the OpenVPN client on my gateway/router. This establishes a VPN channel between my network and my client's network and allows me to switch machines easily without having the necessity to install the WatchGuard client on each and every machine. That's also very handy for my various virtualised Windows machines. Anyway, as the client configuration, key and certificate files are located on a headless system somewhere under the roof, it is mandatory to have an automatic connection to the remote site. For that you should first change the file extension '.ovpn' to '.conf' which is the default extension on Linux systems for OpenVPN, and then open the client configuration file in order to extend an existing line. $ sudo mv client.ovpn client.conf $ sudo nano client.conf You should have a similar content to this one here: dev tunclientproto tcp-clientca ca.crtcert client.crtkey client.pemtls-remote "/O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server"remote-cert-eku "TLS Web Server Authentication"remote 1.2.3.4 443persist-keypersist-tunverb 3mute 20keepalive 10 60cipher AES-256-CBCauth SHA1float 1reneg-sec 3660nobindmute-replay-warningsauth-user-pass auth.txt Note: I changed the IP address of the remote directive above (which should be obvious, right?). Anyway, the required change is marked in red and we have to create a new authentication file 'auth.txt'. You can give the directive 'auth-user-pass' any file name you'd like to. Due to my existing OpenVPN infrastructure my setup differs completely from the above written content but for sake of simplicity I just keep it 'as-is'. Okay, let's create this file 'auth.txt' $ sudo nano auth.txt and just put two lines of information in it - username on the first, and password on the second line, like so: myvpnusernameverysecretpassword Store the file, change permissions, and call openvpn with your configuration file again: $ sudo chmod 0600 auth.txt $ sudo openvpn --config client.conf This should now work without being prompted to enter username and password. In case that you placed your files below the system-wide location /etc/openvpn you can operate your VPNs also via service command like so: $ sudo service openvpn start client $ sudo service openvpn stop client Using Network Manager For newer Linux users or the ones with 'console-phobia' I'm going to describe now how to use Network Manager to setup the OpenVPN client. For this move your mouse to the systray area and click on Network Connections => VPN Connections => Configure VPNs... which opens your Network Connections dialog. Alternatively, use the HUD and enter 'Network Connections'. Network connections overview in Ubuntu Click on 'Add' button. On the next dialog select 'Import a saved VPN configuration...' from the dropdown list and click on 'Create...' Choose connection type to import VPN configuration Now you navigate to your folder where you put the client files from the Windows system and you open the 'client.ovpn' file. Next, on the tab 'VPN' proceed with the following steps (directives from the configuration file are referred): General Check the IP address of Gateway ('remote' - we used 1.2.3.4 in this setup) Authentication Change Type to 'Password with Certificates (TLS)' ('auth-pass-user') Enter User name to access your client keys (Auth Name: myvpnusername) Enter Password (Auth Password: verysecretpassword) and choose your password handling Browse for your User Certificate ('cert' - should be pre-selected with client.crt) Browse for your CA Certificate ('ca' - should be filled as ca.crt) Specify your Private Key ('key' - here: client.pem) Then click on the 'Advanced...' button and check the following values: Use custom gateway port: 443 (second value of 'remote' directive) Check the selected value of Cipher ('cipher') Check HMAC Authentication ('auth') Enter the Subject Match: /O=WatchGuard_Technologies/OU=Fireware/CN=Fireware_SSLVPN_Server ('tls-remote') Finally, you have to confirm and close all dialogs. You should be able to establish your OpenVPN-WatchGuard connection via Network Manager. For that, click on the 'VPN Connections => client' entry on your Network Manager in the systray. It is advised that you keep an eye on the syslog to see whether there are any problematic issues that would require some additional attention. Advanced topic: routing As stated above, I'm running the 'WatchGuard client for Linux' on my head-less server, and since then I'm actually establishing a secure communication channel between two networks. In order to enable your network clients to get access to machines on the remote side there are two possibilities to enable that: Proper routing on both sides of the connection which enables both-direction access, or Network masquerading on the 'client side' of the connection Following, I'm going to describe the second option a little bit more in detail. The Linux system that I'm using is already configured as a gateway to the internet. I won't explain the necessary steps to do that, and will only focus on the additional tweaks I had to do. You can find tons of very good instructions and tutorials on 'How to setup a Linux gateway/router' - just use Google. OK, back to the actual modifications. First, we need to have some information about the network topology and IP address range used on the 'other' side. We can get this very easily from /var/log/syslog after we established the OpenVPN channel, like so: $ sudo tail -n20 /var/log/syslog Or if your system is quite busy with logging, like so: $ sudo less /var/log/syslog | grep ovpn The output should contain PUSH received message similar to the following one: Jul 23 23:13:28 ios1 ovpn-client[789]: PUSH: Received control message: 'PUSH_REPLY,topology subnet,route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0,dhcp-option DOMAIN ,route-gateway 192.168.6.1,topology subnet,ping 10,ping-restart 60,ifconfig 192.168.6.2 255.255.255.0' The interesting part for us is the route command which I highlighted already in the sample PUSH_REPLY. Depending on your remote server there might be multiple networks defined (172.16.x.x and/or 10.x.x.x). Important: The IP address range on both sides of the connection has to be different, otherwise you will have to shuffle IPs or increase your the netmask. {loadposition content_adsense} After the VPN connection is established, we have to extend the rules for iptables in order to route and masquerade IP packets properly. I created a shell script to take care of those steps: #!/bin/sh -eIPTABLES=/sbin/iptablesDEV_LAN=eth0DEV_VPNS=tun+VPN=192.168.1.0/24 $IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_LAN -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $DEV_VPNS -o $DEV_LAN -s $VPN -j ACCEPT$IPTABLES -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $DEV_VPNS -d $VPN -j MASQUERADE I'm using the wildcard interface 'tun+' because I have multiple client configurations for OpenVPN on my server. In your case, it might be sufficient to specify device 'tun0' only. Simplifying your life - automatic connect on boot Now, that the client connection works flawless, configuration of routing and iptables is okay, we might consider to add another 'laziness' factor into our setup. Due to kernel updates or other circumstances it might be necessary to reboot your system. Wouldn't it be nice that the VPN connections are established during the boot procedure? Yes, of course it would be. To achieve this, we have to configure OpenVPN to automatically start our VPNs via init script. Let's have a look at the responsible 'default' file and adjust the settings accordingly. $ sudo nano /etc/default/openvpn Which should have a similar content to this: # This is the configuration file for /etc/init.d/openvpn## Start only these VPNs automatically via init script.# Allowed values are "all", "none" or space separated list of# names of the VPNs. If empty, "all" is assumed.# The VPN name refers to the VPN configutation file name.# i.e. "home" would be /etc/openvpn/home.conf#AUTOSTART="all"#AUTOSTART="none"#AUTOSTART="home office"## ... more information which remains unmodified ... With the OpenVPN client configuration as described above you would either set AUTOSTART to "all" or to "client" to enable automatic start of your VPN(s) during boot. You should also take care that your iptables commands are executed after the link has been established, too. You can easily test this configuration without reboot, like so: $ sudo service openvpn restart Enjoy stable VPN connections between your Linux system(s) and a WatchGuard Firebox SSL remote server. Cheers, JoKi

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  • How to Reuse Your Old Wi-Fi Router as a Network Switch

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Just because your old Wi-Fi router has been replaced by a newer model doesn’t mean it needs to gather dust in the closet. Read on as we show you how to take an old and underpowered Wi-Fi router and turn it into a respectable network switch (saving your $20 in the process). Image by mmgallan. Why Do I Want To Do This? Wi-Fi technology has changed significantly in the last ten years but Ethernet-based networking has changed very little. As such, a Wi-Fi router with 2006-era guts is lagging significantly behind current Wi-Fi router technology, but the Ethernet networking component of the device is just as useful as ever; aside from potentially being only 100Mbs instead of 1000Mbs capable (which for 99% of home applications is irrelevant) Ethernet is Ethernet. What does this matter to you, the consumer? It means that even though your old router doesn’t hack it for your Wi-Fi needs any longer the device is still a perfectly serviceable (and high quality) network switch. When do you need a network switch? Any time you want to share an Ethernet cable among multiple devices, you need a switch. For example, let’s say you have a single Ethernet wall jack behind your entertainment center. Unfortunately you have four devices that you want to link to your local network via hardline including your smart HDTV, DVR, Xbox, and a little Raspberry Pi running XBMC. Instead of spending $20-30 to purchase a brand new switch of comparable build quality to your old Wi-Fi router it makes financial sense (and is environmentally friendly) to invest five minutes of your time tweaking the settings on the old router to turn it from a Wi-Fi access point and routing tool into a network switch–perfect for dropping behind your entertainment center so that your DVR, Xbox, and media center computer can all share an Ethernet connection. What Do I Need? For this tutorial you’ll need a few things, all of which you likely have readily on hand or are free for download. To follow the basic portion of the tutorial, you’ll need the following: 1 Wi-Fi router with Ethernet ports 1 Computer with Ethernet jack 1 Ethernet cable For the advanced tutorial you’ll need all of those things, plus: 1 copy of DD-WRT firmware for your Wi-Fi router We’re conducting the experiment with a Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi router. The WRT54 series is one of the best selling Wi-Fi router series of all time and there’s a good chance a significant number of readers have one (or more) of them stuffed in an office closet. Even if you don’t have one of the WRT54 series routers, however, the principles we’re outlining here apply to all Wi-Fi routers; as long as your router administration panel allows the necessary changes you can follow right along with us. A quick note on the difference between the basic and advanced versions of this tutorial before we proceed. Your typical Wi-Fi router has 5 Ethernet ports on the back: 1 labeled “Internet”, “WAN”, or a variation thereof and intended to be connected to your DSL/Cable modem, and 4 labeled 1-4 intended to connect Ethernet devices like computers, printers, and game consoles directly to the Wi-Fi router. When you convert a Wi-Fi router to a switch, in most situations, you’ll lose two port as the “Internet” port cannot be used as a normal switch port and one of the switch ports becomes the input port for the Ethernet cable linking the switch to the main network. This means, referencing the diagram above, you’d lose the WAN port and LAN port 1, but retain LAN ports 2, 3, and 4 for use. If you only need to switch for 2-3 devices this may be satisfactory. However, for those of you that would prefer a more traditional switch setup where there is a dedicated WAN port and the rest of the ports are accessible, you’ll need to flash a third-party router firmware like the powerful DD-WRT onto your device. Doing so opens up the router to a greater degree of modification and allows you to assign the previously reserved WAN port to the switch, thus opening up LAN ports 1-4. Even if you don’t intend to use that extra port, DD-WRT offers you so many more options that it’s worth the extra few steps. Preparing Your Router for Life as a Switch Before we jump right in to shutting down the Wi-Fi functionality and repurposing your device as a network switch, there are a few important prep steps to attend to. First, you want to reset the router (if you just flashed a new firmware to your router, skip this step). Following the reset procedures for your particular router or go with what is known as the “Peacock Method” wherein you hold down the reset button for thirty seconds, unplug the router and wait (while still holding the reset button) for thirty seconds, and then plug it in while, again, continuing to hold down the rest button. Over the life of a router there are a variety of changes made, big and small, so it’s best to wipe them all back to the factory default before repurposing the router as a switch. Second, after resetting, we need to change the IP address of the device on the local network to an address which does not directly conflict with the new router. The typical default IP address for a home router is 192.168.1.1; if you ever need to get back into the administration panel of the router-turned-switch to check on things or make changes it will be a real hassle if the IP address of the device conflicts with the new home router. The simplest way to deal with this is to assign an address close to the actual router address but outside the range of addresses that your router will assign via the DHCP client; a good pick then is 192.168.1.2. Once the router is reset (or re-flashed) and has been assigned a new IP address, it’s time to configure it as a switch. Basic Router to Switch Configuration If you don’t want to (or need to) flash new firmware onto your device to open up that extra port, this is the section of the tutorial for you: we’ll cover how to take a stock router, our previously mentioned WRT54 series Linksys, and convert it to a switch. Hook the Wi-Fi router up to the network via one of the LAN ports (consider the WAN port as good as dead from this point forward, unless you start using the router in its traditional function again or later flash a more advanced firmware to the device, the port is officially retired at this point). Open the administration control panel via  web browser on a connected computer. Before we get started two things: first,  anything we don’t explicitly instruct you to change should be left in the default factory-reset setting as you find it, and two, change the settings in the order we list them as some settings can’t be changed after certain features are disabled. To start, let’s navigate to Setup ->Basic Setup. Here you need to change the following things: Local IP Address: [different than the primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.2] Subnet Mask: [same as the primary router, e.g. 255.255.255.0] DHCP Server: Disable Save with the “Save Settings” button and then navigate to Setup -> Advanced Routing: Operating Mode: Router This particular setting is very counterintuitive. The “Operating Mode” toggle tells the device whether or not it should enable the Network Address Translation (NAT)  feature. Because we’re turning a smart piece of networking hardware into a relatively dumb one, we don’t need this feature so we switch from Gateway mode (NAT on) to Router mode (NAT off). Our next stop is Wireless -> Basic Wireless Settings: Wireless SSID Broadcast: Disable Wireless Network Mode: Disabled After disabling the wireless we’re going to, again, do something counterintuitive. Navigate to Wireless -> Wireless Security and set the following parameters: Security Mode: WPA2 Personal WPA Algorithms: TKIP+AES WPA Shared Key: [select some random string of letters, numbers, and symbols like JF#d$di!Hdgio890] Now you may be asking yourself, why on Earth are we setting a rather secure Wi-Fi configuration on a Wi-Fi router we’re not going to use as a Wi-Fi node? On the off chance that something strange happens after, say, a power outage when your router-turned-switch cycles on and off a bunch of times and the Wi-Fi functionality is activated we don’t want to be running the Wi-Fi node wide open and granting unfettered access to your network. While the chances of this are next-to-nonexistent, it takes only a few seconds to apply the security measure so there’s little reason not to. Save your changes and navigate to Security ->Firewall. Uncheck everything but Filter Multicast Firewall Protect: Disable At this point you can save your changes again, review the changes you’ve made to ensure they all stuck, and then deploy your “new” switch wherever it is needed. Advanced Router to Switch Configuration For the advanced configuration, you’ll need a copy of DD-WRT installed on your router. Although doing so is an extra few steps, it gives you a lot more control over the process and liberates an extra port on the device. Hook the Wi-Fi router up to the network via one of the LAN ports (later you can switch the cable to the WAN port). Open the administration control panel via web browser on the connected computer. Navigate to the Setup -> Basic Setup tab to get started. In the Basic Setup tab, ensure the following settings are adjusted. The setting changes are not optional and are required to turn the Wi-Fi router into a switch. WAN Connection Type: Disabled Local IP Address: [different than the primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.2] Subnet Mask: [same as the primary router, e.g. 255.255.255.0] DHCP Server: Disable In addition to disabling the DHCP server, also uncheck all the DNSMasq boxes as the bottom of the DHCP sub-menu. If you want to activate the extra port (and why wouldn’t you), in the WAN port section: Assign WAN Port to Switch [X] At this point the router has become a switch and you have access to the WAN port so the LAN ports are all free. Since we’re already in the control panel, however, we might as well flip a few optional toggles that further lock down the switch and prevent something odd from happening. The optional settings are arranged via the menu you find them in. Remember to save your settings with the save button before moving onto a new tab. While still in the Setup -> Basic Setup menu, change the following: Gateway/Local DNS : [IP address of primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.1] NTP Client : Disable The next step is to turn off the radio completely (which not only kills the Wi-Fi but actually powers the physical radio chip off). Navigate to Wireless -> Advanced Settings -> Radio Time Restrictions: Radio Scheduling: Enable Select “Always Off” There’s no need to create a potential security problem by leaving the Wi-Fi radio on, the above toggle turns it completely off. Under Services -> Services: DNSMasq : Disable ttraff Daemon : Disable Under the Security -> Firewall tab, uncheck every box except “Filter Multicast”, as seen in the screenshot above, and then disable SPI Firewall. Once you’re done here save and move on to the Administration tab. Under Administration -> Management:  Info Site Password Protection : Enable Info Site MAC Masking : Disable CRON : Disable 802.1x : Disable Routing : Disable After this final round of tweaks, save and then apply your settings. Your router has now been, strategically, dumbed down enough to plod along as a very dependable little switch. Time to stuff it behind your desk or entertainment center and streamline your cabling.     

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 05, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 05, 2010New Projects555 Calculator: A simple calculator to help choosing resistor and capacitor values to get the frequency you're looking for on a 555 timer.BleQua .NET: PL: Program sieciowy BleQua .NET jest multi-komunikatorem. EN: Network program BleQua .NET is multicomunicator.ChatDiplomaWork: ChatSample is the sample project.CSUFVGDC Summer Jam: Repository for VGDC summer game jam.Database Export Wizard: ExportWizard is a Step Wizard for Database Export using ASP.net and SQL Server. It allows easy export in any of the standard formats: CSV, TXT, HTM...Dozer Enterprise Library for .NET: a light .net framework for enterprise applications developmentEmployee Management System: This is an Employee Management System. the goal here is to offer a software that caters to small to mid sized businesses for free. This program a...Fanray: My project on Codeplex.Infragistics Analytics Framework: This project includes wrappers for the Infragistics controls that integrate with the recently launched Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. ...KIME Simio Extensions: This is the official project of KIME Solutions. Here you find any current developments of KIME that are publicly available. KIME develops extension...MindTouch Community Extensions: MindTouch Community Extentions is a Native C# extention library for MindTouch Core that will have Dekiscript functions for full coverage of the API...NginxTray: NginxTray allows you manage easily Nginx Web Server by a Tray icon.NStore: NStore is a virtual store example done with ASP.NET MVC 2.0 tecnologyProjet Campus Numerique + Appli Mobile: Projet de création d'un campus numérique pour l'ISEN et d'un application mobile d'accès.SharePoint 2010 Feature Upgrade Kit: A set of tools for managing upgradable Features in SharePoint 2010. (Upgrading Features is a means of deploying code/artifact updates to existing S...SiteMap Utility for DNN Blog Module: This is a mini-project which allows you to easily add or generate an XML site map to your DotNetNuke® website for the search engines to use to inde...Space Explorer: A small app to help users examine folders to see which files and subfolders are taking up space. Still in development, no releases available curren...SQL Compact Toolbox: SQL Compact Toolbox is a Visual Studio 2010 add-in, that adds scripting, import, export, migrate, rename, run script and other upcoming SQL Server ...Twilverlight: Twliverlight is TweetDeck mixed with Silverlight. Much as I like using TweetDeck, it hogs my memory out, so this is an attempt to write a memory-ef...Visual Studio 2010 FxCop Extension: Visual Studio 2010 FxCop Extension allows to integrate stand-alone FxCop into Visual Studio 2010. You'll be able to analysis your source code with ...VisualStudio 2010 JavaScript Outlining: Visual Studio 2010 editor extension for JavaScript code blocks and custom regions outlining Wiki Shelf: Wiki Shelf is a Wikipedia browser app. The goal is to bring the library experience of browsing books, studying, and researching to the Wikipedia u...X-Arena - Magic: Projeto de PDS2 no Curso de Tecnologia em Desenvolvimento de Software no CEFETRN. O desenvolvimento do jogo Quiz Arena possui como pr...New Releases555 Calculator: 555Calc release v1.0: The initial 1 point uh-oh release of 555Calc.BleQua .NET: BleQua .NET 1.0.0.0: First releaseChatterbot JBot: JBot 1.0.1.155: Change presentation technology from Window Forms to Widndown Presentation Fundation.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V26: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V27: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V28: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...CSS 360 Planetary Calendar: Final Release: =============================================================================== Final Release Version: 2.0 Tools Used: - Collaboration, Releas...Database Export Wizard: Version 3: As described in CodeProject article: Database Export Wizard for ASP.net and SQL Server. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/DatabaseExportWizard.aspxEdu Math: Edu Math 2.0.10.122: Change version .NET Framework.Employee Management System: V1 (beta): This version is still in beta testing. Any issues, comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated. The export to excel function in this release o...ESB.NET: ESBDeploy_7.0.27.0 (x64 and x86) [ESB.NET 7.0 RC1]: Release Details Changes Since Last Release (since 6.3.47.1) - Targets .NET Framework 4, Visual Studio.NET 2010, Workflow 4 - Flowchart workflow ada...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.1.1 beta 2 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: *ShowIndicator() and HideIndicator() function has been implemented in Chart. So now user wi...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.4 beta 2 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: *ShowIndicator() and HideIndicator() function has been implemented in Chart. So now user wi...FsCheck: A random testing framework: FsCheck 0.7: What to download? If you use F# April 2010 CTP with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010, either Source or Binaries will do. To open source in...Git Source Control Provider: V 0.5: For VS 2010 users, it is recommanded to install it within Visual Studio by selecting Tools | Extension Manager. Run Visual Studio. Go to Tools ...GPdotNET - Genetic Programming Tool: GPdotNETv0.95: 1. Localization support 2. Export functionality for GP Model with training and testing data. 3. Export GPModel with Testing and Training data. 4....JoshDOS: JoshDOS 1.1: 1.1 adds a toutorial of how to create new commands and of course, you need the COMSOS user kit or dev kit. Ver 1.1 also includes a demo called Gue...KIME Simio Extensions: KIME.SimioDebugStep: This simple Simio step allows you to debug any number of expressions from within the simulation run. The debug information is displayed using a mes...NginxTray: NginxTray 0.3 Beta 2: NginxTray 0.3 Beta 2NginxTray: NginxTray 0.5 Beta 3: NginxTray 0.5 Beta 3NginxTray: NginxTray 0.6 RC1: NginxTray 0.6 RC1Open Source PLM Activities: Prodeos_OC beta 1.0: The “Innovator – MS Office Connector” is a product developed by Prodeos (www.prodeos.com). It is a light connector made to facilitate the use of Mi...Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.5.1: Changes in this release: Bitmap-mode images can now be loaded. Thanks to dhnc for filing the bug. Plugin no longer crashes on files with user m...SharePoint 2010 Feature Upgrade Kit: 1.0.0.0: This release contains:- - Custom application page to manage the upgrade of Site and Web-scoped Features. To come in the next release: - Companio...SiteMap Utility for DNN Blog Module: Blog SiteMap Utility v01.00.01: This is the first public release of the SiteMap Utility for the core DotNetNuke® Blog Module. Please see the documentation on this site on how to...SqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: SqlDiffFramework 1.0.2.0: Maintenance Release Defect Fixes: Issue # 3: 3 Issue # 4: 4 Enhancements: About Box now displays regional and language settings in effect. SDF...SuperSocket: First release of SuperSocket: !First release of SuperSocketThe Fastcopy Helper: FastcopyHelper: Fastcopy Helper 2.0 This is a final one. You can use it on the way. In order to use it , you should have the .NET3.5 ! 此软件必须下载 .NET3.5平台,方可使用!TV Show Renamer: TV Show Renamer Beta 3: I found the bug the prevented it from closing correctly so I fixed it and had to release it right away. If anyone else finds any problems. contact me.UrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer v2.0: UrzaGatherer is the first stable version. This release include UrzaBackgroundPictures.VisualStudio 2010 JavaScript Outlining: VisualStudion 2010 Javascript Outlining 1.0: Features Outlines JavaScript codeblock regions for the code placed between { }. Both places on a new line. Outlines custom regions defined by: //...Wouter's SharePoint Demo Land: Navigation Service with Proxy: A SharePoint 2010 Service Application that uses service proxies to relay commands to the actual service. The demo proxy makes use of in-memory comm...盘古分词-开源中文分词组件: V2.0.0.0: 进一步优化性能,分词速度达到将近 500K ,1.2.0.1 版本只有 320K 修改 PanGu.Lucene.Analyzer, 支持 Lucene.net 2.9 版本。 增加对字典中以数字开头的专业非中文词汇的识别 增加英文分词开关,权重由英文小写权重和英文词根权重两个参数来决定...Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeOutSyncASP.NET MVC Time PlannerNeatUploadMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets)AgUnit - Silverlight unit testing with ReSharperViperWorks IgnitionASP.NET MVC ExtensionsAviva Solutions C# Coding GuidelinesMute4Most Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSStyleCopFarseer Physics Enginesmark C# LibraryMirror Testing System

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 29, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 29, 2010New ProjectsDesign Technology Laboratory: DTL project is prominent.Em-Lib: Electronic Music Library เป็นโปรแกรมที่พัฒนาขึ้นเพื่อให้เป็นห้องสมุดอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ โดยตัวโปรแกรมจะสามารถจำลองเครื่องดนตรี พร้อมข้อมูลที่เกี่ย...Extensions For ASP.NET: Extensions For ASP.NETFIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: These PowerShell cmdlets let you manage objects in the Forefront Identity Manager 2010 web service easily and concisely. The five cmdlets let you e...Grunty OS: Grunty OS is a Free open source OS made my GruntXproductionsIrishDevelopers.net Test: IrishDevelopers.net TestJobping Url Shortener: MVC 2 project that Shortens urls Fully functioning 'bare bones' url shortening website. Just 1 page to create and display the short url. 'API' ...Made In Hell: Small console game. Just a training in code writings.manx: manx is a system for managing catalogs of technical documents. The system was created to handle the needs of the vintage computing community with ...ntn: playing around with new featuresOpen Bitrac: Bitrac is ASP.NET Blog SystemOpenNETCF.WindowsMobile.Ink: The Mobile Ink Library is a .NET component that provides support for the new Windows Mobile 6 WISP Lite API in your .NET Compact Framework applicat...Proxy Switch: Proxy switch is a program which allows the user to easily switch between a configured proxy server and a home network. The program is developed in ...Samcrypt: .Seoftware Evoluion Repository Mining: Project for mining data about develpoment effort from svn repository.SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer: Need to import/migrate files and folders from servers and network shares into SharePoint 2010 document libraries? This free commandline application...SL2 - A Scala interpreter for L2: A simple L2 Interpreter. Just a project for a class.sMAPedit: -SocialCare: SocialCare - Team EUSOCIALSqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: Unique in database comparison, SDF lets you compare live data--or saved snapshots--from any combination of SQL Server, Oracle, MySql, or ODBC data ...Yasminuroban: Yasminuroban is an open source "Sokoban" (aka "Warehouse Keeper" or "Boxes") alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that us...Хрень для ао: Test project to implement Bot.New ReleasesAntySpam Microsoft Outlook Plugin: AntySpam Microsoft Outlook 2010 Plugin v.2.0.1: this release only tested on MS Outlook 2010 version: 14.0.4536.1000 (32-bit and 64-bit) part of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010. Source pro...AppFabric Caching Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Admin Tool 1.2: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Refresh Test On:Win 7 (64x) Note: Must run as Administrator !!!AutoSPInstaller: Powershell script to pre-download prerequisites: This script will download all files required by Prerequisiteinstaller.exe in advance, in order to support an 'offline' installation of SharePoint 2...BeanProxy: BeanProxy 2.5: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. Any non-static, public interface/class/or abstract class can be...Bluetooth Radar: Verison 2.2.1: Please follow this link for the latest release - http://bluetoothradar.codeplex.com/releases/view/44232CSS 360 Planetary Calendar: LCA: Upload your LCA ppt pieces here. Then someone can merge them together.DeskNotes: DeskNotes 2.1.2: Version in development which features following improvements over DeskNotes 2.1.1: Each DeskNote can be made switchable between other windows on Wi...DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.01: Core Russian Resource Language Pack for DNN 05.04.01 Русский языковый пакет для DNN 05.04.01DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.04.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue with assembly version type. Fixed issue with multiple cancel buttons on Add User screen. Fixed issue with ve...Event Scavenger: Version 3.2: Tweaked the import foreign logs functionality. Set version to 3.2 for Admin tool, service and database. Viewer unaffected.Event Scavenger: Version 3.2 stable: Update viewer version to 3.2 for consistency. Minor changes for rest.Event Scavenger: Version 3.2.2: Added setting to enable/disable creation of historic data.FIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: Initial Release of FIM 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets: Initial release of FIM 2010 PowerShell cmdlets based on open source FIM web service client. Install by running installutil on Quest.FIMPowerhellSna...Fix.ly: Fix.ly 0.2: Fixed a bug where non-verbose mode would not workJobping Url Shortener: Deployment Code v0.1: Contains only the files necessary to run the Url Shortener website. Just provide a valid connection string in the web.configMetabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1: This is the release of the Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 for use with EPiServer 5 R2 SP2 and Page Type Builder 1.1. If you want to get the s...Metabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 (source): This is the source code release of the Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.1 for use with EPiServer 5 R2 SP2 and Page Type Builder 1.1.MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v0.8: This is the initial release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. Download contains source and a tutorial document in PDF format.MyWSAT - ASP.NET Membership Administration Tool: MyWSAT v3.5.2: MyWSAT 3.5.2 Update Notes - April 28th 2010 1.) Fixed theme engine for administration area. Now I can create theme packages to make them available ...N2 CMS: 2.0 rc2: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes (1.5 -> 2.0 release candid...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.122: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version signi...nRoute Framework: nRoute.Toolkit Release Version 0.4.5: Release Targets, Silverlight and WPF: - Targets Silverlight 4 for Web - Targets WPF in .NET 4 for Desktop nRoute Dependencies: - System.Windows...NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.4: NSIS Autorun 0.1.4 This release includes source code, application binary, and example materials.OpenNETCF.WindowsMobile.Ink: Initial Release: This is the source as originally hosted in the OpenNETCF SVN server.Resharper Settings Manager: RSM v2.1: Warning! The 'Load Settings File...' menu item won't show up in VS 2008. Will release an update soon. ChangesReworked plug-in options UI: Split RSM...RoTwee: RoTwee (11.1.0.0): Rotation is improved from 11.0.0.3.SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer: SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Importer 1.0.0.0: Features in 1.0.0.0 Command line interface Import folders and files with all subfolders Can be run from outside the SharePoint Server. Every a...sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.6 (Base): + base version containing the applicaion & html resourcesSocialCare: SocialCare_src: Codigo Fonte da Aplicação e Banco de DadosTFS Code Comment Checking Policy (CCCP): CCCP 4.0 for VS2010: This release installs side-by-side with CCCP 3.0 for VS2008 SP1.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.1: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30428.2: Automatic drop of latest buildХрень для ао: Первый релиз: Пробую что это такое.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETiTuner - The iTunes CompanionMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleParticle Plot PivotSqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data SourcesN2 CMSBlogEngine.NET

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  • Configure TFS portal afterwards

    Update #1 January 8th, 2010: There is an updated post on this topic for Beta 2: http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2009/12/10/Configure-TFS-portal-afterwards-Beta-2.aspx Update #2 October 10th, 2010: In the new Team Foundation Server Power Tools September 2010, there is now a command to create a portal. tfpt addprojectportal   Add or move portal for an existing team project Usage: tfpt addprojectportal /collection:uri                              /teamproject:"project name"                              /processtemplate:"template name"                              [/webapplication:"webappname"]                              [/relativepath:"pathfromwebapp"]                              [/validate]                              [/verbose] /collection Required. URL of Team Project Collection. /teamproject Required. Specifies the name of the team project. /processtemplate Required. Specifies that name of the process template. /webapplication The name of the SharePoint Web Application. Must also specify relativepath. /relativepath The path for the site relative to the root URL for the SharePoint Web Application. Must also specify webapplication. /validate Specifies that the user inputs are to be validated. If specified, only validation will be done and no portal setting will be changed. /verbose Switches on the verbose mode. I created a new Team Project in TFS 2010 Beta 1 and choose not to configure SharePoint during the creation of the Team Project. Of course I found out fairly quickly that a portal for TFS is very useful, especially the Iteration and the Product backlog workbooks and the dashboard reports. This blog describes how you can configure the sharepoint portal afterwards. Update: September 9th, 2009 Adding the portal afterwards is much easier as described below. Here are the steps Step 1: Create a new temporary project (with a SharePoint site for it). Open the Team Explorer Right click in the Team Explorer the root node (i.e. the project collection) Select "New team project" from the menu Walk throught he wizard and make sure you check the option to create the portal (which is by default checked) Step 2: Disable the site for the new project Open the Team Explorer Select the team project you created in step 1 In the menu click on Team -> Show Project Portal. In the menu click on Team -> Team Project Settings -> Portal Settings... The following dialog pops up Uncheck the option "Enable team project portal" Confirm the dialog with OK Step 3: Enable the site for the original one. Point it to the newly created site. Open the Team Explorer Select the team project you want to add the portal to In the menu open Team -> Team Project Settings -> Portal Settings... The same dialog as in step 2 pops up Check the option "Enable team project portal" Click on the "Configure URL" button The following dialog pops up   In the dialog select in the combobox of the web application the TFS server Enter in the Relative site path the text "sites/[Project Collection Name]/[Team Project Name created in step 1]" Confirm the "Specify an existing SharePoint Site" with OK Check the "Reports and dashboards refer to data for this team project" option Confirm the dialog "Project Portal Settings" with OK Step 4: Delete the temporary project you created. In Beta 1, I have found no way to delete a team project. Maybe it will be available in TFS 2010 Beta 2. Original post Step 1: Create new portal site Go to the sharepoint site of your project collection (/sites//default.aspx">/sites//default.aspx">http://<servername>/sites/<project_collection_name>/default.aspx) Click on the Site Actions at the left side of the screen and choose the option Site Settings In the site settings, choose the Sites and workspaces option Create a new site Enter the values for the Title, the description, the site address. And choose for the TFS2010 Agile Dashboard as template. Create the site, by clicking on the Create button Step 2: Integrate portal site with team project Open Visual Studio Open the Team Explorer (View -> Team Explorer) Select in the Team Explorer tool window the Team Project for which you are create a new portal Open the Project Portal Settings (Team -> Team Project Settings -> Portal Setings...) Check the Enable team project portal checkbox Click on Configure URL... You will get a new dialog as below Enter the url to the TFS server in the web application combobox And specify the relative site path: sites/<project collection>/<site name> Confirm with OK Check in the Project Portal Settings dialog the checkbox "Reports and dashboards refer to data for this team project" Confirm the settings with OK (this takes a while...) When you now browse to the portal, you will see that the dashboards are now showing up with the data for the current team project. Step 3: Download process template To get a copy of the documents that are default in a team project, we need to have a fresh set of files that are not attached to a team project yet. You can do that with the following steps. Start the Process Template Manager (Team -> Team Project Collection Settings -> Process Template Manager...) Choose the Agile process template and click on download Choose a folder to download Step 4: Add Product and Iteration backlog Go to the Team Explorer in Visual Studio Make sure the team project is in the list of team projects, and expand the team project Right click the Documents node, and choose New Document Library Enter "Shared Documents", and click on Add Right click the Shared Documents node and choose Upload Document Go the the file location where you stored the process template from step 3 and then navigate to the subdirectory "Agile Process Template 5.0\MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0\Windows SharePoint Services\Shared Documents\Project Management" Select in the Open Dialog the files "Iteration Backlog" and "Product Backlog", and click Open Step 5: Bind Iteration backlog workbook to the team project Right click on the "Iteration Backlog" file and select Edit, and confirm any warning messages Place your cursor in cell A1 of the Iteration backlog worksheet Switch to the Team ribbon and click New List. Select your Team Project and click Connect From the New List dialog, select the Iteration Backlog query in the Workbook Queries folder. The final step is to add a set of document properties that allow the workbook to communicate with the TFS reporting warehouse. Before we create the properties we need to collect some information about your project. The first piece of information comes from the table created in the previous step.  As you collect these properties, copy them into notepad so they can be used in later steps. Property How to retrieve the value? [Table name] Switch to the Design ribbon and select the Table Name value in the Properties portion of the ribbon [Project GUID] In the Visual Studio Team Explorer, right click your Team Project and select Properties.  Select the URL value and copy the GUID (long value with lots of characters) at the end of the URL [Team Project name] In the Properties dialog, select the Name field and copy the value [TFS server name] In the Properties dialog, select the Server Name field and copy the value [UPDATE] I have found that this is not correct: you need to specify the instance of your SQL Server. The value is used to create a connection to the TFS cube. Switch back to the Iteration Backlog workbook. Click the Office button and select Prepare – Properties. Click the Document Properties – Server drop down and select Advanced Properties. Switch to the Custom tab and add the following properties using the values you collected above. Variable name Value [Table name]_ASServerName [TFS server name] [Table name]_ASDatabase tfs_warehouse [Table name]_TeamProjectName [Team Project name] [Table name]_TeamProjectId [Project GUID] Click OK to close the properties dialog. It is possible that the Estimated Work (Hours) is showing the #REF! value. To resolve that change the formula with: =SUMIFS([Table name][Original Estimate]; [Table name][Iteration Path];CurrentIteration&"*";[Table name][Area Path];AreaPath&"*";[Table name][Work Item Type]; "Task") For example =SUMIFS(VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Original Estimate]; VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Iteration Path];CurrentIteration&"*";VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Area Path];AreaPath&"*";VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Work Item Type]; "Task") Also the Total Remaining Work in the Individual Capacity table may contain #REF! values. To resolve that change the formula with: =SUMIFS([Table name][Remaining Work]; [Table name][Iteration Path];CurrentIteration&"*";[Table name][Area Path];AreaPath&"*";[Table name][Assigned To];[Team Member];[Table name][Work Item Type]; "Task") For example =SUMIFS(VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Remaining Work]; VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Iteration Path];CurrentIteration&"*";VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Area Path];AreaPath&"*";VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Assigned To];[Team Member];VSTS_ab392b55_6647_439a_bae4_8c66e908bc0d[Work Item Type]; "Task") Save and close the workbook. Step 6: Bind Product backlog workbook to the team project Repeat the steps for binding the Iteration backlog for thiw workbook too. In the worksheet Capacity, the formula of the Storypoints might be missing. You can resolve it with: =IF([Iteration]="";"";SUMIFS([Table name][Story Points];[Table name][Iteration Path];[Iteration]&"*")) Example =IF([Iteration]="";"";SUMIFS(VSTS_487f1e4c_db30_4302_b5e8_bd80195bc2ec[Story Points];VSTS_487f1e4c_db30_4302_b5e8_bd80195bc2ec[Iteration Path];[Iteration]&"*"))

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 14, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 14, 2010Popular ReleasesFlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket Drop 2: Changes: based on SuperSocket 1.3 supported sub protocol supported SSL/TLS encryption (wss) in Sync socket mode fixed some data communication bugsSSH.NET Library: 2010.12.13: Fixes SFTP issue when you try to uploaded or download multiple files simultaneously. Usage example can be found hereRequest Tracker Data Access: 1.0.0.0: First releaseSQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 2.4: 1. auto adjust datagrids in query 2. disable activities related commands until activities tab is active.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.3 beta 1: SuperSocket 1.3 is built on .NET 4.0 framework. Bug fixes: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration value Third-part library upgrades: upgraded SuperSocket to .NET 4.0 upgraded EntLib 4.1 to 5.0 New features: supported UDP socket support custom protocol (can support binary protocol and other complecate...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 Release Candidate: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669) and package format. See http://nupack.codeplex.com/documentation?title=Nuspe...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.SwapWin: SwapWin 0.2: Updates: Bring all windows that are swapped to foreground. Make the window sent to primary screen active.??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2010-12-10: ?????All-In-One Code Framework(??) 2010?12??????!!http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?,???????ASP.NET, WinForm, Silverlight????12?Sample Code。???,??????????sample code。 ?????:http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2010/12/13/6072675.aspx ??,??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????,??Email ????UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.New ProjectsAugmented Reality system in Soccer video: Augmented reality system and camera calibration system in soccer videos based on homography and vanishing points. Code generated with Visual C++ (best compiler is .net)Database Schema Provider: Database Schema Provider gets a database schema in unified format independent on the type of database. It uses ADO.NET data provider for Entity Framework. Dicke Bertha: Many many cool features... DNN Bookmark: DNN Bookmarks is a DNN module that aggregates the most popular social bookmarking tools and also allows you to bookmark your DNN web siteDough: Dough is a UI starter kit built using ASP.Net MVC and ExtJS. It's name comes from the concept of Amish friendship bread, a type of bread or cake made from a sourdough starter that is often shared in a manner similar to a chain letter.Garra - Gerenciador Financeiro: Garra é um sistema completo de controle financeiro: contas a pagar, contas a receber, investimentos, etc...ghcwp7: ghcwp7Hackathon - DotNetNuke Razor User Locator: The DotNetNuke Razor User Locator module demonstrates how Razor can be used to author DNN modules. This module shows where recent users to a web site came from based on their IP address. Hackathon. DotNetNuke Razor. Flickr Badge: Flickr badge desktop module allows you to display image thumbnails from Flickr and preview them inside DotNetNuke or on Flickr (controlled by module settings). Image thumbnails can be loaded by tag, user id, user group id, user set id and more.Hackathon: Razor Youtube Gallery: This is a DotNetNuke module which allows a website admin to add several relevant Youtube videos to a pane. The end user watches the selected Youtube video play, while scrolling through thumbnails of other videos to play those without refreshing the page. jQuery UI MVC3 Demo: Demo and possibly a skeleton for using jQuery UI in MVC3 (currently RC2).Microsoft Office Communicator History manager: Needs to save conversation history just on the local workstation (folder) then application could redstore it and show in simple window (mode) or user could open folder and lock on it manuallyMSTest Extensions - Msbuild: This project contains various msbuild tasks that extend helps with test execution using Mcrosoft testing frameworkRayCharlesTracer: this is a scholar project for a raytracer.Refunctor: F# interactive inside Reflector.Request Tracker Data Access: Best Practical RT (Request Tracker) data access .NET library for REST interface.SurfzApp: An application that does data mining on web resources of interest for Swedish windsurfers...Tesseract Solutions Corp. Data Access Base: Tesseract Data Access speeds up data access in .Net projects. Developed in C# .Net 4. It is a C#, class based ORM.TimBazinga EVoting: Undergrad project - designing an e-voting software system.Tiny Library CQRS: Tiny Library CQRS is a small demonstration project which demonstrates the concept of Domain Driven Design and the CQRS architecture pattern. This project relies on the Apworks DDD framework.Toptoys: toptoysWebGroup: WebGroup makes it easier for your website members to comunicate online. It work like Web IM + Forum + Twitter. It can be easily used in your current project. Developed in C#.WpfCustomChromeLibrary: WpfCustomChromeLibrary makes it easier to create WPF applications with custom chrome and caption buttons (min/max/close). You'll no longer have to do all the dirty work yourself in each application where you want a custom chrome. It's developed in XAML and C#.

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  • Simple Branching and Merging with SVN

    Its a good idea not to do too much work without checking something into source control.  By too much work I mean typically on the order of a couple of hours at most, and certainly its a good practice to check in anything you have before you leave the office for the day.  But what if your changes break the build (on the build server you do have a build server dont you?) or would cause problems for others on your team if they get the latest code?  The solution with Subversion is branching and merging (incidentally, if youre using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, you can shelve your changes and share shelvesets with others, which accomplishes many of the same things as branching and merging, but is a bit simpler to do). Getting Started Im going to assume you have Subversion installed along with the nearly ubiquitous client, TortoiseSVN.  See my previous post on installing SVN server if you want to get it set up real quick (you can put it on your workstation/laptop just to learn how it works easily enough). Overview When you know you are going to be working on something that you wont be able to check in quickly, its a good idea to start a branch.  Its also perfectly fine to create the branch after-the-fact (have you ever started something thinking it would be an hour and 4 hours later realized you were nowhere near done?).  In any event, the first thing you need to do is create a branch.  A branch is simply a copy of the current trunk (a typical subversion setup has root directories called trunk, tags, and branches its a good idea to keep this and to put your branches in the branches folder).  Once you have a new branch, you need to switch your working copy so that it is bound to your branch.  As you work,  you may want to merge in changes that are happening in the trunk to your branch, and ultimately when you are done youll want to merge your branch back into the trunk.  When done, you can delete your branch (or not, but it may add clutter).  To sum up: Create a new branch Switch your local working copy to the new branch Develop in the branch (commit changes, etc.) Merge changes from trunk into your branch Merge changes from branch into trunk Delete the branch Create a new branch From the root of your repository, right-click and select TortoiseSVN > Branch/tag as shown at right (click to enlarge).  This will bring up the Copy (Branch / Tag) interface.  By default the From WC at URL: should be pointing at the trunk of your repository.  I recommend (after ensuring that you have the latest version) that you choose to make the copy from the HEAD revision in the repository (the first radio button).  In the To URL: textbox, you should change the URL from /trunk to /branches/NAME_OF_BRANCH.  You can name the branch anything you like, but its often useful to give it your name (if its just for your use) or some useful information (such as a datestamp or a bug/issue ID from that it relates to, or perhaps just the name of the feature you are adding. When youre done with that, enter in a log message for your new branch.  If you want to immediately switch your local working copy to the new branch/tag, check the box at the bottom of the dialog (Switch working copy to new branch/tag).  You can see an example at right. Assuming everything works, you should very quickly see a window telling you the Copy finished, like the one shown below: Switch Local Working Copy to New Branch If you followed the instructions above and checked the box when you created your branch, you dont need to do this step.  However, if you have a branch that already exists and you would like to switch over to working on it, you can do so by using the Switch command.  Youll find it in the explorer context menu under TortoiseSVN > Switch: This brings up a dialog that shows you your current binding, and lets you enter in a new URL to switch to: In the screenshot above, you can see that Im currently bound to a branch, and so I could switch back to the trunk or to another branch.  If youre not sure what to enter here, you can click the [] next to the URL textbox to explore your repository and find the appropriate root URL to use.  Also, the dropdown will show you URLs that might be a good fit (such as the trunk of the current repository). Develop in the Branch Once you have created a branch and switched your working copy to use it,  you can make changes and Commit them as usual.  Your commits are now going into the branch, so they wont impact other users or the build server that are working off of the trunk (or their own branches).  In theory you can keep on doing this forever, but practically its a good idea to periodically merge the trunk into your branch, and/or keep your branches short-lived and merge them back into the trunk before they get too far out of sync. Merge Changes from Trunk into your Branch Once you have been working in a branch for a little while, change to the trunk will have occurred that youll want to merge into your branch.  Its much safer and easier to integrate changes in small increments than to wait for weeks or months and then try to merge in two very different codebases.  To perform the merge, simply go to the root of your branch working copy and right click, select TortoiseSVN->Merge.  Youll be presented with this dialog: In this case you want to leave the default setting, Merge a range of revisions.  Click Next.  Now choose the URL to merge from.  You should select the trunk of your current repository (which should be in the dropdownlist, or you can click the [] to browse your repository for the correct URL).  You can leave everything else blank since you want to merge everything: Click Next.  Again you can leave the default settings.  If you want to do something more granular than everything in the trunk, you can select a different Merge depth, to include merging just one item in the tree.  You can also perform a Test merge to see what changes will take place before you click Merge (which is often a good idea).  Heres what the dialog should look like before you click Merge: After clicking Merge (or Test merge) you should see a confirmation like this (it will say Test Only in the title if you click Test merge): Now you should build your solution, run all of your tests, and verify that your branch still works the way it should, given the updates that youve just integrated from the trunk.  Once everything works, Commit your changes, and then continue with your work on the branch.  Note that until you commit, nothing has actually changed in your branch on the server.  Other team members who may also be working in this branch wont be impacted, etc.  The Merge is purely a client-side operation until you perform a Commit. In a more real-world scenario, you may have conflicts.  When you do, youll be presented with a dialog like this one: Its up to you which option you want to go with.  The more frequently you Merge, the fewer of these youll have to deal with.  Also, be very sure that youre merging the right folders together.  If you try and merge your trunk with some subfolder in your branchs structure, youll end up with all kinds of conflicts and problems.  Fortunately, theyre only on your working copy (unless you commit them!) but if you see something like that, be sure to doublecheck your URL and your local file location. Merge Your Branch Back Into Trunk When youre done working in your branch, its time to pull it back into the trunk.  The first thing you should do is follow the previous steps instructions for merging the latest from the trunk into your branch.  This lets you ensure that what you have in your branch works correctly with the current trunk.  Once youve done that and committed your changes to your branch, youre ready to proceed with this step. Once youre confident your branch is good to go, you should go to its root folder and select TortoiseSVN->Merge (as above) from the explorer right-click menu.  This time, select Reintegrate a branch as shown below: Click Next.  Youll want it to merge with the trunk, which should be the default: Click Next. Leave the default settings: Click Test merge to see a test, and then if all looks good, click Merge.  Note that if you havent checked in your working copy changes, youll see something like this: If on the other hand things are successful: After this step, its likely you are finished working in your branch.  Dont forget to use the ToroiseSVN->Switch command to change your working copy back to the trunk. Delete the Branch You dont have to delete the branch, but over time your branches area of your repository will get cluttered, and in any event if theyre not actively being worked on the branches are just taking up space and adding to later confusion.  Keeping your branches limited to things youre actively working on is simply a good habit to get into, just like making sure your codebase itself remains tidy and not filled with old commented out bits of code. To delete the branch after youre finished with it, the simplest thing to do is choose TortoiseSVN->Repo Browser.  From there, assuming you did this from your branch, it should already be highlighted.  In any event, navigate to your branch in the treeview on the left, and then right-click and select Delete.  Enter a log message if youd like: Click OK, and its gone.  Dont be too afraid of this, though.  You can still get to the files by viewing the log for branches, and selecting a previous revision (anything before the delete action): If for some reason you needed something that was previously in this branch, you could easily get back to any changeset you checked in, so you should have absolutely no fear when it comes to deleting branches youre done with.   Resources If youre using Eclipse, theres a nice write-up of the steps required by Zach Cox that I found helpful here. 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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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v5.5.0: Following on from our 101355 release, we bring you... v5.5.0! Resolved issues The following issues have been resolved in 5.5.0: 14634 14848 DataType Grid 14840 14842 14845 UpgradingThe best way to upgrade uComponents is to re-install via Umbraco's back-office package installer, (either from the package repository or a local package upload). Do not uninstall an existing uComponents package, as this may lead to data loss! Umbraco compatibilityThis release is compatible with Umbraco 4...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Scryber PDF Generation: Scryber.Installer.v0.8.3: This one has tables! A significant update to the scryber library, with the inclusion of tables. There is no column span, or row span, and nested tables are not fully supported. But - they overflow nicely and are well styled. And they can be data bound. Other updates The Link element has inner components directly as a child, rather than in a Content element. The existing files will still continue to work, but are invalid wrt the schema. Databinding is now supported at the document level, r...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.2.0 ???: *???????,??????????????,?????????????? ????????* ????????(Beta) Beta????:https://goagent.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic ??????:uygw@outlook.com ????:https://goagent.codeplex.com/documentation ?????????????????。Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesAscend 3D: Ascend (2013-07-17): Ascend 2.1 Animation bugfixes and speed/robustness improvements Added compatibility for multiple top-level bones on armatures Ascend Blender Exporter 2.1 Removed need to create parent-child relationship between armature and skinning mesh Added support for exporting multiple top-level bones on armatures AscendViewer 1.0.4 Updated to use latest version of Ascend libraryCommunity TFS Build Extensions: July 2013: The July 2013 release contains VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 The Community TFS Build Manager can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery here where updates will first become available. A version supporting VS2010 is also available in the Gallery here.smoketestgit1: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesthg: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesttfs: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingdatajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.1: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...New Projects[C#]A Complete MySQL Manager Project: An open-source MySQL database manager oriented to multi-threading environments, supporting to create an entire database from scratch and edit it.bCal Javascript Calendar Generator: Using this simple javascript library, you can create simple navigable calendars in your website with just one line of user code.Better Network: Tools to delete network profile and network lists in Windows 8.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: 'CS-Script Intellisense' is a real C# intellisense solution based on CS-Script and ICSharpCode.NRefactory/Mono.Cecil.DARF: Dynamic Application Runtime Framework: A set of tools and libraries which help software developers create fully distributed and component-based applications. FeiXinV5: Just TestFollower Catcher: Game made for the 2012 Windows 8 Megathon. Second place in Madrid's local competition.MeeOS .NET: El primer sistema operativo GNU GPL en español.Music Vault: Music Vault is program to store your favorite music in one place, you can in any time move all your music library by moving only one file.MVC uTorrent: This is an ASP.NET MVC uTorrent front end, that utilises the uTorrent API. The main features: - Single page application - Can be hosted in IISMyTaskManager: This project Related to distribute the task to log in users OO2RDF: OO2RDF is a framework for data triplification. P(y)rotein Subcellular Location Image Database: A library that allows communication with an OMERO database, an open-source software for storage and manipulation of biological images.PE Toolbox: PE Toolbox ? ????? ?? ???????????, ????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ?????. ???? ????? ??????????? ???????: - PE IFE (Importing from Excel) PeGscan: *PeGscan*ScriptZilla: ScriptZilla is an Free Editor for Windows with more Than 23 Languages.Sharepoint : Reconciliate SSRS Reports and Datasets with datasources Powershell: Powershell to link datasources to SSRS reports and datasetsSync-Moped: The idea behind the "Sync-Moped" is to synchronize two directories with backup functionality.System.Time: System.Time provides a type for .NET that allows the managing of a time in System.String, System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan form at the same time.Text Analytics: Project summary will be added later.Tibia Universal MC .NET: This tool was written as an attempt to port the [url:http://code.google.com/p/xenomc/] to the .NET Framework.VRFramework: VR Framework is a system for creating a virtual reality games using your PC, and Android smart phone, and Unity 3D.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 04, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 04, 2010New ProjectsAlbum photo de club - Club's Photos Album: Un album photos permettant d'afficher les photos et le détails des membres d'un club - Photo album allowing to view photos and details of the membersBlog.Net Blogging Components: Blog.Net server-side blogging components to add a blog to your current ASP.NET website.FilePirate - Really Advanced LAN File Sharing: Really Advanced, yet super easy, LAN Party File Sharing written using the .Net Framework and C#. Ditch DirectConnect or Windows File Sharing at y...Fisiogest: Programa de gestión de una clínica de fisioterapiaIdeaNMR: An online repository of NMR experiment automated setups with wiki type documentation library and client program providing automated experiment setu...Introducción a Unity: Código de ejemplo del uso de Unity en diferentes situaciones. - Registro de clases, instancias e interfaces. - Resolución de clases, instancias e...Iowa City .NET Developers: This is the project site for the Iowa City .NET Developers.isanywhere: A command line utility to see if one or more files (given a filemask) are to be found anywhere inside a specific directory, or elsewhere inside one...LczCode: lczLog4net udp logs viewer: UdpLogViewer is a .NET 4 WinForm application that receives udp messages from log4net and shows them in a grid. It is possible to filter them or sh...New Silverlight XPS Viewer (In Sl4): New Silverlight XPS viewer Novuz: Novuz is a usenet indexer and reporter. It's developed both in Visual Studio 2010 and MonoDevelop, one of the key features of Novuz is that it sho...PodSnatch: PodSnatch is a podcast client that makes it easy to download rss-enclosures. Multiple simultaneous downloads enabled by threading. GUI is built wi...Robot Shootans: A simple top down shooter game where the player has to kill robots running at them. Written in C++ using SDL with various extentionsSharePoint Rsync List: This program will syncronize files and directories from and unc/local/sharepoint to a SharePoint 2007 or 2010 server. Supports of to 2GB files and ...SignInAndStorageLib: SignInAndStorageLib makes properly handling both sign in and storage issues in Xbox 360 XBLIG XNA games simple. Written in C#, SignInAndStorageLib...SilverBBS: ANSI-style bbs experience delivered via Silverlight. Silverlight flip-down counter: A Silverlight widget that enables you to count down towards a preconfigured event on a configured date.SmartieFly: Smartie Fly is a quiz software program written in C# using Silverlight. It uses SQL Server as a backend database. VS2010 Framework Driven Testing: CodedUITests generate a lot of code, and they break on every change to the object under test. Goals: - write new tests manually, but with as litt...WMediaCatalog: Advanced multimedia cataloguer. Allows users to keep their musical collections well organized and provides flexible methods of filtering, serarching WPathFinder: A simple path management application for windows. Functionality includes: - Add/remove/change path entries easily. - Search for all instances of a...Yasminoku: Yasminoku is an open source "Sudoku" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. Includes sudoku solver. This c...New ReleasesAlbum photo de club - Club's Photos Album: App - version 0.4: version 0.4 - Critère d'affichage des membres : nom, année, ville - Navigation entre les images d'un membres - Navigation entre les membres - Affi...Album photo de club - Club's Photos Album: Code - Version 0.4: Code source de la version 0.4BigDecimal: Concept Evaluation Release 2 (BigDecimals): This in the second updates release of BigDecimals. It has the four simple arithmetic rules Addition, Subtract, Multiple and Division.CBM-Command: 2010-05-03: New features in this build Keyboard Shortcuts Panel Swapping Panel Toggling On/Off Toggling 40/80 Columns Confirming Quit Confirming GO64...Directory Linker: Directory Linker 2: This release introduces Undo Support and Symbolic File Link support. More details can be found here http://www.humblecoder.co.uk/?p=141DotNetNuke Skins Pack: DotNetNuke 80 Skins Pack: This released is the first for DNN 4 & 5 with Skin Token Design (legacy skin support on DNN 4 & 5)DTLoggedExec: 1.0.0.0: -FIRST NON-BETA RELEASE! :) -Code cleaned up -Added SetPackageInfo method to ILogProvider interface to make easier future improvements -Deprecated...GenerateTypedBamApi: Version 2.1: Changes in this release: NEW: Support for Office Data Connectivity Components 2010 NEW: Include both x86 and x64 EXE's due to lack of support in ...HobbyBrew Mobile: Beta 1 Refresh: Risolto bug circa il salvataggio di ricette (veniva impostato scorrettamente che si trattava di Mash Design "infusione" se ri-aperte con hobbyBrew)...Home Access Plus+: v4.2: Version 4.2 Added Overrides into the Booking System Some slight CSS changes to the Help Desk Updated the config tool to work anywhere on the LA...Hubble.Net - Open source full-text search database: V0.8.3.0: V0.8.3.0 Show server version in about dialog. Fix a bug of deleting querycache files. V0.8.2.9 Change sql client to support userid and password Ch...IdeaNMR: IdeaNMR Client: This is a client program with an example package.kdar: KDAR 0.0.21: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - signature's bases updated - usability increased - NDIS6 MINIPORT_BLOCK checks addedLightWeight Application Server: 0.4.1: One step further to beta - yet another release for c# developers audience only. Changes: 1. API - added a LWAS.Infrastructure.Storage service to d...Log4net udp logs viewer: UdpLogViewer 1.0: First release of UdpLogViewer, version 1.0.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.11.58370: Fixed minor bugs.Metabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.2 Beta 2: This is the beta release of the Metabolite Enterprise Libraries 1.2 Beta 2 for use with EPiServer 6 and Page Type Builder 1.2 Beta 2.Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework: Version 1.4.3 Installer: Pre-release Installer for Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4 RCSupports both Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 Release NotesFixed null referen...MultipointTUIO: Multipoint SDK v1.5 Release: Rebuilt against v1.5 of the Microsoft Multipoint SDK, this mean Windows 7 support (and 64bit I think!)My Notepad: My Notepad: This is the status of My Notepad until now. This is many built in features but has to undergo a lot of modifications. The release does not include ...New Silverlight XPS Viewer (In Sl4): Silverlight XPS Viewer: Background: During my development last week I was working on a Silverlight based XPS viewer. During this viewer we came to a situation in which the...NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.6: This release includes source code, executable binary, files and example materials.Open Diagram: Open Diagram 5.0 Beta May 2010: This is the first beta release of Open Diagram 5.0. Select Crainiate.Diagramming.Examples.Forms as the startup project to view the current Class D...Pocket Wiki: PC Wiki (zip) 1.0.1: PC Version of Pocket Wiki. Unzip and run. Requires .NET Framework 2.0Pocket Wiki: Pocket Wiki 1.0.1 (cab): Pocket Wiki cab installation - requires DotNet 2.0 or greater. Default wiki language is "slash" - a syntax I created that is easy to type on keyboa...Pocket Wiki: Pocket Wiki.sbp: Pocket Wiki Source Code (version .72) - Basic4PPCPublish to Photo Frame: 1.0.2.0: This version adds: add borders to portrait images, for photo frames that crop them incorrectly.Reflection Studio: Reflection Studio 0.1: First download release, it contains a lot of things but allways in beta version. Hope you will like the preview.SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts & Utilities: PSSP2010 Utils 0.1: This is the initial release with SPInstallUtils.psm1 module. This module includes Get-SPPrerequisites and New-SPInstallPackage cmdlets. Refer to th...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0 v1.1 Beta: Multilevel menus are now supported. Added design time support for the PopupMenuItem elements. The project is now under Subversion.Silverlight flip-down counter: FlipDownCounter v1.0: The final release of the Silverlight flip-down counter. Please refer to the included readme file for information on how to use the counter.Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.0.1: Moved scalable block file system implementation to Stratosphere.FileSystemSystem.AddIn Pipeline Builder: Pipeline Builder 1.2: Lots of improvements from the CTP, version 1.0: - Added dialogue for possible overwrite if the file has changed: possibility of ignoring changes (p...ThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: 1.0.1: Fixed an issue with the regex that parses the incoming notification. This issue would send failure messages when the build was "fixed".ThreadSafeControls: ThreadSafeControls v0.1: This is the first binary release of the ThreadSafeControls library. I'll call it a pre-alpha release.TracerX Logger/Viewer for .NET: 4.0: View this CodeProject article for documentation on how to use the latest version of the Logger. About the DownloadsVersion: 4.0.1005.1163 Changese...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30503.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Lottery Game (Visual C++ 2008): An advanced lottery game made in visual c 2008.VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.1.3: Version 7.1.3 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.1.3 rel...Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 1.0: Features added Conversion of all possible convertible features between Renoise and MOD / XM. FlacBox lib updated (thanks to Yuri) NAudio lib in...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Databasepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySilverlight ToolkitiTuner - The iTunes CompanionWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerAJAX Control Frameworkpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETTinyProjectDambach Linear Algebra Framework

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 07, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 07, 2010New ProjectsAStar.net: AStar.net is a project for compute the A* path finding algorithm. It expose classes and interface that can be used for all purpose with multi-threa...Auto Complete for MOSS 2007: Auto Complete for MOSS 2007 (WSS 3.0) makes it easier for all user to fill list of nessesary string in the field. AutoPoco: AutoPoco is a framework with the purpose of fluently building test data from Plain Old CLR ObjectsBlueProject: BlueProjectColor Picker for MOSS 2007: Color picker for MOSS 2007 (WSS 3.0) makes it easier for some user to choose color in the field. ComBrowser2: ComBrowser2DCommunication: Communication Components and Software By Delphi On Windows.DirST: Allows one to replicate a DIRectory STructure without copying files. Written in C#.Discussion column for MOSS 2007: Discussion column for MOSS 2007/ (WSS 3.0) is a field column for different type lists such as Custom List, Document Library, Issue Tracking, not on...Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio is a visual studio 2008 extension that helps you generate c# classes from effect (*.fx) files for use with Xna...Energon: Energon is a framework to create and run software energy consumption tests. Requires a couple of PC with a TCP connections, a phidgets ammeter and ...Fiansa: Proyecto FiansaFirstSpark: FirstSpark is a sample Spark View Engine projectISOM: Internetowy System Obsługi Magisterek La Carta Mas Alta: La Carta Mas Alta is an open source card game totally written in PHP and HTML. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Li...Near forums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Open source SEO friendly ASP.NET MVC forum engine. Features: Navigation in forums, topics and tags; login with Facebook Connect and Single sign-on;...PEC: Still editingPowershell Zip Export/Import Cmdlet Module: Powershellzip is a powershell module with a set of Cmdlets for zip file export, import and processingProgress bar for MOSS 2007: Progress bar for MOSS 2007 (WSS 3.0) makes it easier for some user to display progress in the field in percent (0-100%). SharePoint Accelerators: This project delivers a number of SharePoint accelerators that make your every-day SharePoint life easier.Shweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pex: Shweet is a simple SharePoint Foundation 2010 application that allows teams to do messaging and subscriptions in the style similar to twitter. De...SilverlightEncoder: Video and audio encoder for Silverlight 4 Out-of-BrowserStarMath: Static Array Math Library: While there are already countless math libraries for performing common matrix/array functions, StarMath is distinguished by its simplicity and flex...StringToNumber: StringToNumber is a .NET library for parsing numbers in their written form into their numeric equivalent. It's developed in C#. It was created to...SubstitutionITIS: <project name="Substitution" language="c-sharp" to="myschool" whatdo="manageSubstitutionTeachers" />TamTam.SharePoint2010.LinkedIn: SP2010 and LinkedIn working togetherThink And Explore: Think my own wayusenet-o-matic: small mobile optimised webscript to search various NZB sources like newzbin and NZBmatrix and send donwloads to your SABnzbd server. Valid HTML5 Templates for VisualStudio: This project will host valid HTML templates for Visual Studio. The primary focus however will be on the newer standard HTML5 and Visual Studio 2010XSS Attack: This tool will simulate an attack on your database and update up to 5000 rows in every table and replace your strings in your database with random ...Yazgelistir Beta: Yazgelistir'in beta sitesiNew ReleasesAStar.net: AStar.net 1.0 downloads: AStar.net 1.0 downloadsAvalaible downloads:Astar.net dll - Runtime library ready to be included in a project. Astar.net source project - The Visu...AutoPoco: 0.1 - Initial Release: This is the initial release, changes pending, lots left to do, check it out though!Bag of Tricks: Bag of Tricks - WPF - Libraries and Sample App: Here is a drop of the Bag of Tricks. It targets the 3.5 Client Profile.Boxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher 1.0.1.4: Taskbar will now be hiddenDesignit Umbraco Newsletter Package: ver 1.0.0 beta1: Please remember this is a beta version. If you have any problems or issues, don't hesitate to use the issue tracker and/or forum on this site. Ple...Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio 2008: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio is a visual studio 2008 extension that helps you generate c# classes from effect (*.fx) files for use with Xna...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.1: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.1 Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) Showcase Application Samples Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextual Tab...GsGrid: gsgrid 1.6.5: gsgrid 1.6.5Home Access Plus+: v3.2.5.2: v3.2.5.1 Release Change Log: Attempt to fix Domain Admin Lookup box File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdbHulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher 1.0.1.4: Will now hide taskbar.Icarus Scene Engine: Icarus Professional 2 Alpha 2a v 1.10.404.936: Alpha release 2 of Icarus Professional. This release includes: IcarusX: The ActiveX-based browser control for rendering IPX projects online. Icaru...kdar: KDAR 0.0.19: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - thread start notifier routine check added - registry callback сheck added - NDIS6 checks added - some bug i...Mobile Device Browser File: Mobile Device Browser File (2010-04-07): The Mobile Browser Definition File contains definitions for individual mobile devices and browsers. At run time, ASP.NET uses the information in th...MvcContrib: a Codeplex Foundation project: Portable Area Template: Use this Visual Studio 2008 Project template to create new portable areas. Drop this file in your Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTe...Office Apps: 0.8.8: new ui for Document.Viewer bug fix'sProtoforma | Tactica Adversa: Skilful 0.3.4.477: RC1ROOT Builder: ROOT Builder 1.41: Simplifies building of ROOT on the windows platform by generating a Visual Studio C make project that will build and run (and debug ROOT). See Inst...SharePoint Accelerators: Search AutoComplete for SharePoint Lists: Search AutoComplete for SharePoint List is a Web Part that allows you to search contents of a SharePoint. Search is interactive and offers you resu...SharePoint Labs: SPLab4002A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4002A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the 2nd best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab La...SharePoint Labs: SPLab4003A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4003A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the 3rd best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab La...SQL Compact data and schema script utility: Version 3.0: This release contains 4 downloadable files: - SSMS 2008 scripting add-in - SQL Server 2005/2008 command line utility to generate a script with sch...StarMath: Static Array Math Library: StarMath Source Files: The source file package includes the main library StarMath.dll (and it's source files), and an example exe project to invoke commands from StarMath.stefvanhooijdonk.com: Powershell Solution Install Script: Powershell Example script to install a SP2010 Solution, which actually waits for the Retraction and Deployment jobs.TamTam.SharePoint2010.LinkedIn: 0.0.0.1: How to use/install Small instruction to use this code/solution step 1 Add the Farm Solution to your SP2010 installation step 2 Go to the MySite H...usenet-o-matic: V 0.2: supports Newzbin and NZBmatrix as index sources and SABnzbd as download serverVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30406.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: E-Z Image To PDF Converter Beta: This simple little program can convert all common image formats into pdfs and can even encrypt the pdf with an encrpytion key.Web and Load Test Plugins for Visual Studio Team Test: Release 2.0: Release 2.0 is targeted at VS 2010. VS 2010 exposes major new extensibility points: 1) Recorder plugins enable you to do custom correlations and o...Wicked Compression ASP.NET HTTP Module: WickedCompressionModule 4.0 Alpha: New Features, New Enhancements! - Visual Studio 2010 Projects! - Support for ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0 - AJAX Support for ASP.NET 3.5 and 4.0 - Bu...x5s - test encodings and character transformations to find XSS hotspots: x5s v1.0.0 beta: This is the v1.0 beta release of x5s. All feedback welcome in planning for the next release. Make sure Fiddler is installed prior to running th...xvanneste: Silverlight SharePoint: Fichiers du webcast sur silverlight: Silverlight OM Silverlight Webpart Silverlight Embedded ressource Silverlight List ViewYet Another Web App Monitoring Tool (YAWAMT): yawamt v0.5: A new release has seen the light :-) I've lowered the release to version 0.5 but changed some major things: - deletion of URLS works - settings can...Zinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher 1.0.1.1: Taskbar will now be hidden Delay to show Zinc was reduced to improve responsiveness.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pexpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNcqrs Framework - The CQRS framework for .NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterAcadsys

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  • Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    There are lots of utilities to recover deleted files, but what if you can’t boot up your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? We’ll show you some tools that will dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole hard drive partitions. We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely. Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so. Our setup To show these tools, we’ve set up a small 1 GB hard drive, with half of the space partitioned as ext2, a file system used in Linux, and half the space partitioned as FAT32, a file system used in older Windows systems. We stored ten random pictures on each hard drive. We then wiped the partition table from the hard drive by deleting the partitions in GParted. Is our data lost forever? Installing the tools All of the tools we’re going to use are in Ubuntu’s universe repository. To enable the repository, open Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left, then Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Click on Settings > Repositories and add a check in the box labelled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close, and then in the main Synaptic Package Manager window, click the Reload button. Once the package list has reloaded, and the search index rebuilt, search for and mark for installation one or all of the following packages: testdisk, foremost, and scalpel. Testdisk includes TestDisk, which can recover lost partitions and repair boot sectors, and PhotoRec, which can recover many different types of files from tons of different file systems. Foremost, originally developed by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, recovers files based on their headers and other internal structures. Foremost operates on hard drives or drive image files generated by various tools. Finally, scalpel performs the same functions as foremost, but is focused on enhanced performance and lower memory usage. Scalpel may run better if you have an older machine with less RAM. Recover hard drive partitions If you can’t mount your hard drive, then its partition table might be corrupted. Before you start trying to recover your important files, it may be possible to recover one or more partitions on your drive, recovering all of your files with one step. Testdisk is the tool for the job. Start it by opening a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typing in: sudo testdisk If you’d like, you can create a log file, though it won’t affect how much data you recover. Once you make your choice, you’re greeted with a list of the storage media on your machine. You should be able to identify the hard drive you want to recover partitions from by its size and label. TestDisk asks you select the type of partition table to search for. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT32, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. Highlight Analyse and press enter. In our case, our small hard drive has previously been formatted as NTFS. Amazingly, TestDisk finds this partition, though it is unable to recover it. It also finds the two partitions we just deleted. We are able to change their attributes, or add more partitions, but we’ll just recover them by pressing Enter. If TestDisk hasn’t found all of your partitions, you can try doing a deeper search by selecting that option with the left and right arrow keys. We only had these two partitions, so we’ll recover them by selecting Write and pressing Enter. Testdisk informs us that we will have to reboot. Note: If your Ubuntu Live CD is not persistent, then when you reboot you will have to reinstall any tools that you installed earlier. After restarting, both of our partitions are back to their original states, pictures and all. Recover files of certain types For the following examples, we deleted the 10 pictures from both partitions and then reformatted them. PhotoRec Of the three tools we’ll show, PhotoRec is the most user-friendly, despite being a console-based utility. To start recovering files, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: sudo photorec To begin, you are asked to select a storage device to search. You should be able to identify the right device by its size and label. Select the right device, and then hit Enter. PhotoRec asks you select the type of partition to search. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. You are given a list of the partitions on your selected hard drive. If you want to recover all of the files on a partition, then select Search and hit enter. However, this process can be very slow, and in our case we only want to search for pictures files, so instead we use the right arrow key to select File Opt and press Enter. PhotoRec can recover many different types of files, and deselecting each one would take a long time. Instead, we press “s” to clear all of the selections, and then find the appropriate file types – jpg, gif, and png – and select them by pressing the right arrow key. Once we’ve selected these three, we press “b” to save these selections. Press enter to return to the list of hard drive partitions. We want to search both of our partitions, so we highlight “No partition” and “Search” and then press Enter. PhotoRec prompts for a location to store the recovered files. If you have a different healthy hard drive, then we recommend storing the recovered files there. Since we’re not recovering very much, we’ll store it on the Ubuntu Live CD’s desktop. Note: Do not recover files to the hard drive you’re recovering from. PhotoRec is able to recover the 20 pictures from the partitions on our hard drive! A quick look in the recup_dir.1 directory that it creates confirms that PhotoRec has recovered all of our pictures, save for the file names. Foremost Foremost is a command-line program with no interactive interface like PhotoRec, but offers a number of command-line options to get as much data out of your had drive as possible. For a full list of options that can be tweaked via the command line, open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: foremost –h In our case, the command line options that we are going to use are: -t, a comma-separated list of types of files to search for. In our case, this is “jpeg,png,gif”. -v, enabling verbose-mode, giving us more information about what foremost is doing. -o, the output folder to store recovered files in. In our case, we created a directory called “foremost” on the desktop. -i, the input that will be searched for files. This can be a disk image in several different formats; however, we will use a hard disk, /dev/sda. Our foremost invocation is: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda Your invocation will differ depending on what you’re searching for and where you’re searching for it. Foremost is able to recover 17 of the 20 files stored on the hard drive. Looking at the files, we can confirm that these files were recovered relatively well, though we can see some errors in the thumbnail for 00622449.jpg. Part of this may be due to the ext2 filesystem. Foremost recommends using the –d command-line option for Linux file systems like ext2. We’ll run foremost again, adding the –d command-line option to our foremost invocation: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –d –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda This time, foremost is able to recover all 20 images! A final look at the pictures reveals that the pictures were recovered with no problems. Scalpel Scalpel is another powerful program that, like Foremost, is heavily configurable. Unlike Foremost, Scalpel requires you to edit a configuration file before attempting any data recovery. Any text editor will do, but we’ll use gedit to change the configuration file. In a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type in: sudo gedit /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf scalpel.conf contains information about a number of different file types. Scroll through this file and uncomment lines that start with a file type that you want to recover (i.e. remove the “#” character at the start of those lines). Save the file and close it. Return to the terminal window. Scalpel also has a ton of command-line options that can help you search quickly and effectively; however, we’ll just define the input device (/dev/sda) and the output folder (a folder called “scalpel” that we created on the desktop). Our invocation is: sudo scalpel /dev/sda –o scalpel Scalpel is able to recover 18 of our 20 files. A quick look at the files scalpel recovered reveals that most of our files were recovered successfully, though there were some problems (e.g. 00000012.jpg). Conclusion In our quick toy example, TestDisk was able to recover two deleted partitions, and PhotoRec and Foremost were able to recover all 20 deleted images. Scalpel recovered most of the files, but it’s very likely that playing with the command-line options for scalpel would have enabled us to recover all 20 images. These tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If your data is on the hard drive somewhere, then one of these tools will track it down! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDUse an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard DriveReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDBackup Your Windows Live Writer SettingsAdding extra Repositories on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 15, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 15, 2010New ProjectsBackup on Build: Backup critical files on each Visual Studio build.CDN Support for EPiServer CMS: This module adds CDN support for EPiServer CMS by modifying outgoing links.Custom WCF Bindings: This project contains some custom WCF LOB SDK bindings I have created including a SalesForce one. I will blog on updates as they occur. Please se...DocIcon for SharePoint 2010: DocIcon for SharePoint re-enables links from document icons in SharePoint 2010. This feature was in previous versions of SharePoint, but was remove...EEG Peak Detection: EEG Peak Detectionemployeemanagement1: employeemanagement1Enables map services on top of existing map providers like Google Maps: Services include Map visualization services, Map decoration services, Spot registration services and Spot naming services.fbprivacy: Tool to assess your Facebook Privacy SettingsfMRI SVM Toolbox: fMRI SVM ToolboxGCMS – using .Net for human CMS: GCMS makes only what you need to do with a CMS and nothing more and it makes it with .NETqjblog: My First Blog.Send2Sharepoint: Office(Word,Excel,Outlook) and windows explorer addin to upload documents to sharepoint document library. SharePoint Find and Replace: SharePoint Find & Replace allows you to replace a specific string within a site collection with a different value. For example, when you change a l...SharePoint Management Studio: This project developed on Visula Studio 2008 and c# language. The main aim is manage your SharePoint 2007 FARM.SharePoint PageController: A SharePoint solution which provides an extensible framework to perform actions on a per-page basis in SharePoint. OOTB functionality allows for f...SilverNotePad: Simple notepad built using MVVM patern.SolidWorks Addin Development: The SolidWorks Addin Development project is dedicated to helping developers and non-developers with creating fully functional addins.Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme is a nearly R4RS-compliant Scheme implementation that supports threading, TCP, UDP, cryptography, and simple graphics and windo...TimeBend: Time tracking gone wild.TinyCMS: Jednostavan CMS s mogućnosti unosa vijesti, linkova i natječaja. CSS je napravljen tek toliko... Aplikacija izrađena za dev4Fun natjecanje.Ujimanet Android: text categorization tool for androidVisual Storm Engine: Visual Storm es un motor para probar nuevas tecnologias orientadas a la creacion de video juegos. Por ahora solo soporta Windows Vista/7 y usa Dire...New ReleasesAjax ASP.Net Forum: developer.insecla.com-forum_v0.1.4: *VERSION: 0.1.4* FEATURES ADDED Rating Threads (Through AjaxCTK (included Ms .DLL in the BIN folder)) Empowered Within AJAX Custom star ima...AlphaGet: Alpha 3: Important: from this release WinGet changes its name to AlphaGet in order to identify it better and make it search-engine friendly. New Features N...Backup on Build: Backup on Build v1.0.0 Initial Release: Initial Release version 1.0.0Boleto.Net: BoletoNet: Última versão estável da BoletoNet.dll. O código fonte dessa versão pode ser encontrado em http://boletonet.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/change...CDN Support for EPiServer CMS: CDN Support v1: See links on start page for information on how to use and install this module.Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET v0.750: Adding support for creating freemium subscription plans Adding preliminary JSON support Adding ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 data embedded in the library ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V38: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...ContainerOne - C# application server: V0.1.3.0: New minor release containing: Infrastructure - core service An installer of a windows service which provides the following: Service registry Even...DocIcon for SharePoint 2010: wwEsp.DocIcon Deployment Package Release 1.0.0: This package installs the DocIcon feature on a SharePoint 2010 server farm. The solution is deployed as a Farm-level feature that can be enabled or...Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Version 1.2.0.0: For the complete list of changes, new features and fixes in the new version, please view the Version History page. Read more about the available te...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.3: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.3), with new features and Mini-Menu UI Changes (1.4). Once you have extracted the file, do not delete ...Hades: Projet Hadès - Official Demo - Version 0.1.1 Beta: Second release correcting some bugs... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Projet Hadès - Official Demo...KooBoo Image Gallery: RC 1: This new Version has this features 1) Refactoring to change the mispelled word galery to gallery 2) Change to use the plugin in the same page of ...LibWowArmory: LibWowArmory 0.3 beta: LibWowArmory 0.3 betaThis release of the LibWowArmory source code matches the WoW Armory as of version 3.3.3. Changes since version 0.2.3:Solution...MailChimp4Umbraco: 0.90 stable: Can be used in productionMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 June 14: This version adds the WebMercator projection and fixes a bug that was causing some perfect spheres to be created as oblate WGS1984 spheroids.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.18.59782: Supported FileServe. Supported SharingMatrix. Fixed minor bugs.MGM - MyGroupManager: MyGroupManager v0.1.5 - Alpha: At this point the application appears feature complete and works pretty well. The code still needs some tweaks (error handling), and a general look...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.4: MvcPager 1.4 source codes and demo projects MvcPager 1.4版源代码及示例文件Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.6): Rx version The "with Rx" versions of Nito.LINQ are built against Rx 1.0.2563.0, released 2010-06-09. Supported Platforms .NET 4.0 Client Profile, ...open gaze and mouse analyzer: Ogama 3.3: This release was published on 14.06.2010 and is a bugfix release. For the list of changes please visit http://www.ogama.net. Only use this installe...patterns & practices: Prism: Prism 4.0 Drop 2: Prism 4.0 Drop 2 Welcome to the second drop of Prism 4.0 (formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). This drop ...Prism Software Factory Light: 0.5 Beta: 4ward Prism Software Factory Light - 0.5 Beta releaseThis is the first public beta release of the 4ward Prism Software Factory Light that allows to...PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT--3.3: Over the last several months, my primary research effort has been directed at producing strictly portable development methods between C and C# . T...qjblog: v1.source: v1.sourceqjblog: v1blog: V1 BlogQuick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4.2: Added 'Move to new window' functionality.Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.90 ALPHA: Added console tree-style visualisation of solution dependencies, as well as some bug fixes. This version should work out of the box with the demons...SEMICO Framework: Version Stable 1.0.0.3: Version Stable 1.0.0.3SharePoint Find and Replace: 1.0.16: Version: 1.0.16 This release is the first stable release of this project, including the Microsoft public license agreement. Fixes: Added about dia...SharePoint Management Studio: v1: v1SharePoint PageController: SharePoint PageController: For SharePoint 2010 and 2007 running on IIS 7Software Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+06: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+06SolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFramework-06.14.2010: R1.SourceGrid: SourceGrid 4.30: Sources are here Note that SourceGrid sources are not hosted on CodePlex. The sources are hosted on bitbucket.org Main Changes Improved hidden ...SSIS Expression Editor & Tester: Expression Editor and Tester v1.0.2.0: Corrected release of expression editor tool, no changes to control. Download and extract the files to get started, no install required. Changes Co...Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme - 20100614 - source and binary: This is the result of building the current source code in Debug mode. The source code is included.TinyCMS: TinyCMS: Source kodVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30614.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVianaNET - Videoanalysis for physical motion: VianaNET 1.2 - beta: This is the VianaNET beta release with some bug fixes. Would like to have some comments on it. Regards, AdrianWorkLogger: Worklogger Beta 1: Simple work logger for Windows in WPFMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeCassandraemonCommunity Forums NNTP bridgedotSpatialjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleUmbraco CMS

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 20, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 20, 2010Popular ReleasesLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.18: Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation. Bug fixes.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4.3: Helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: Improvements for confirm, popup, popup form RenderView controller extension the user experience for crud in live demo has been substantially improved + added search all the features are shown in the live demoSQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 6: 1. add alert target with regexp support 2. fix actitivites not getting current server 3. allow to change connection in query 4. fix problem with open data tableGanttPlanner: GanttPlanner V1.0: GanttPlanner V1.0 include GanttPlanner.dll and also a Demo application.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.5 ALPHA: 2.2.5 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the new...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET Downloader v1.2: A Couple of small changes required to add support for XBMC which requires -trailer be appended to trailer filenames 2. Changed Version Number to 1.2. Leaving it a beta just in case. 3. added assembly.directives.dll (needed that to successfully compile the application. Not sure if it has to be in the distribution package. 4. Leaving Version 1.1N2 CMS: 2.1 release candidate 3: * Web platform installer support available N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) A bunch of bugs were fixed File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the templ...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 6: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 6 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numer...Team Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.1: TFS Administration Tool 2.1, is the first version of the TFS Administration Tool which is built on top of the Team Foundation Server 2010 object model. TFS Administration Tool 2.1 can be installed on machines that are running either Team Explorer 2010, or Team Foundation Server 2010.Hacker Passwords: HackerPasswords.zip: Source code, executable and documentationSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.3: - Added .srt FileAssociation & Win7 ShowRecentCategory feature. - Applied UnifiedYeKe to fix Persian search problems. - Reduced file size of Persian subtitles for uploading @OSDB.Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.0: - Lots of bug fixes - Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. - Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample - Changed internal serialization to use Json.net - BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer support. Use Signed Request instead. Canvas Session has been deprecated by Facebook. - BREAKING CHANGE: Some renames and changes with Authorizer, CanvasAuthorizer, and Authorization ac...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 build 11217.102: Note: this release is slightly newer than RC1, and fixes a couple issues relating to updating packages to newer versions. NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (h...WCF Community Site: WCF Web APIs 10.12.17: Welcome to the second release of WCF Web APIs on codeplex Here is what is new in this release. WCF Support for jQuery - create WCF web services that are easy to consume from JavaScript clients, in particular jQuery. Better support for using JsonValue as dynamic Support for JsonValue change notification events for databinding and other purposes Support for going between JsonValue and CLR types WCF HTTP - create HTTP / REST based web services. This is a minor release which contains fixe...LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.0: This is a working version of the LCSK for Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC 3 (using Razor View Engine). this is still provider based (with 1 provider Sql) and this is still using WebService and Windows Forms operator console. The solution is cleaner, with an installer to create tables etc. You can also install it via nuget (Install-Package lcsk) Let me know your feedbackOrchard Project: Orchard 0.9: Orchard Release Notes Build: 0.9.253 Published: 12/16/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard-Using-Web-PI.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.0.9.253.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orch...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010New Projects.NET Micro Framework Binary Parsing and Processing Extensions: Prototype library and test cases for parsing binary data in the .NET Micro Framework. The goal is to improve processing speed, reduce GC work and simplify code.CarolLib Framework: A common library by Lance Zhang and Carol Xiong Include Helpers, Extensions, Configurations and Windows Service...Copy Document URL to Clipboard: This is a SharePoint 2010 Feature that adds a button in the Ribbon, allowing users to copy document urls (links) to clipboard.exTWEET download: <exTWEET> Download link for application to be downloaded & used from here unless it becomes publicly available. Then, this link will be removed. HandleSpy: Get Object information by its Handle.ibuy: helloLoA: PL: Podstawa gry bez tekstur, modeli, map i skryptów. EN: ---MP3Tunes Locker Windows Phone API: A simple REST client for connecting to your mp3tunes.com locker on your windows mobile phone. You can browse by artist and album and shuffle your songs.Netduino Library: Various useful classes to help develop for netduino.NReports: NReports is a reporting library using RDL file format, aiming at interoperatibility with SQL Reporting Services. It has began as a fork of the latest version 4.1 of fyiReporting (now defunct). Supported platforms are .NET 3.5 (Windows) and Mono 2.6 (Linux).qlink Framework: Qlink FrameWork development application that auto-generates a data layer object model based on your database schema and ...Rapid Image Editor: This is image editor which allows to edit images very rapidly and comfortably. Therefore it's named as Rapid.Serial-test with SHLCN: ?????????????????????????SharePoint Selbstbedienung: This is a project for all Microsoft SharePoint users. Whether you are a developer, administrator or end user, I want to provide you, complete NO-Deployment-solutions to create nice application for SharePoint 2010 or Office 365 plattform easily. TestRepo: test projectUmbraco Live At Education Calendar: Umbraco Live At Education CalendarUSS: Urban Statistical SystemVLBA Web Services: This is our seminar project to demonstrate the implementation and use of web services.Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: Isolated Storage Explorer for Windows Phone 7 emulator or device.Windows Phone 7 Logging Framework: Logging Framework for Windows Phone 7

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  • Looking Back at MIX10

    - by WeigeltRo
    It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 20, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 20, 2011Popular ReleasesBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. Also, please note at this time the Mercurial source code repository on the Source Code tab is having issues, but will be fixed shortly. I...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.40: This is a RTW release which adds new features to v5.0.26 RTW. Support for multiple FacebookMediaObjects in one request. Allow FacebookMediaObjects in batch requests. Removes support for Cassini WebServer (visual studio inbuilt web server). Better support for unit testing and mocking. updated SimpleJson to v0.6 Refer to CHANGES.txt for details. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Multiple file uploads in Batch Requests Faceb...Candescent NUI: Candescent NUI (7774): This is the binary version of the source code in change set 7774.Media Companion: MC 3.408b weekly: Some minor fixes..... Fixed messagebox coming up during batch scrape Added <originaltitle></originaltitle> to movie nfo's - when a new movie is scraped, the original title will be set as the returned title. The end user can of course change the title in MC, however the original title will not change. The original title can be seen by hovering over the movie title in the right pane of the main movie tab. To update all of your current nfo's to add the original title the same as your current ...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: NLog 2.0 Release Candidate: Release notes for NLog 2.0 RC can be found at http://nlog-project.org/nlog-2-rc-release-notesGendering Add-In for Microsoft Office Word 2010: Gendering Add-In: This is the first stable Version of the Gendering Add-In. Unzip the package and start "setup.exe". The .reg file shows how to config an alternate path for suggestion table.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.1 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: This version adds tool tips. Almost every picture box you mouse over will tell you what item is in that box. I have also cleaned up the GUI a little more to make things easier on my end. There are various bug fixes including ones associated with opening different characters in the same instance of the program. As always, please bring any bugs you find to my attention.Kinect Paint: KinectPaint V1.0: This is version 1.0 of Kinect Paint. To run it, follow the steps: Install the Kinect SDK for Windows (available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx) Connect your Kinect device to the computer and to the power. Download the Zip file. Unblock the Zip file by right clicking on it, and pressing the Unblock button in the file properties (if available). Extract the content of the Zip file. Run KinectPaint.exe.CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET - 0.9.7 Beta: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.7Documentation 6738 6503 New 6535 Enhancements 6583 6737DropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.2: Public sub-folders are now monitored for changes as well (thanks to mcm69) Automatic public sync folder detection (thanks to mcm69) Non-Latin and special characters encoded correctly in URLs Pop-ups are now slot-based (use first free slot and will never be overlapped — test it while previewing timeout) Public sync folder setting is hidden when auto-detected Timeout interval is displayed in popup previews A lot of major and minor code refactoring performed .NET Framework 4.0 Client...Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.3.1: Update June 20th Removed "Draw Markers" checkbox from main window because of redundancy/confusing. (Select all or no items from the Settings tab for the same effect.) Fixed Marker preferences not being saved. It is now possible to render more than one map without having to restart the application. World file will not be locked while the world is being rendered. Note: The World Viewer might render an inaccurate map or even crash if Terraria decides to modify the World file during the pro...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseCoding4Fun Kinect Toolkit: Coding4Fun.Kinect Toolkit: Version 1.0Kinect Mouse Cursor: Kinect Mouse Cursor v1.0: The initial release of the Kinect Mouse Cursor project!patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...New Projects.NET Dev Tools Dashboard: .NET Dev Tools Dashboard is a WPF application that implements the Prism 4 standards. Modules can be added at runtime and after install of the base Dashboard shell. The first module is a WPF Gui for NAnt based on Colin Svingen's Gui for NAnt open source app for Windows Forms.Chutzpah - A JavaScript Test Runner: Chutzpah helps you integrate JavaScript unit testing into your website. It enables you to run JavaScript unit tests from the command line and from inside of Visual Studio. It also supports running in the TeamCity continuous integration server.Cow connect: Ziel des Projektes Cow connect, ist es ein Tool zu schrieben das Verschiedene Datenbanken, unterschiedlicher Herdenmanagement Tool z.b: Helm Multikuh, Westfalia C21, Holdi,…. Synchron zu halten. oder eine neue Datenbank zu GenerrierenCqrs CWDNUG Demo: A very simple CQRS demo for a presentation at the Canary Wharf Dot Net User Group. Uses Ncqrs, ASP.NET MVC 3. Not best practices - just something to get your teeth into if you're new to CQRS and Event Sourcing.Down123: down123EssionCalendar: EssionCal EssionCalGuardian: Protects reference type parameters and return values from NULL values.Honest Flex Time Management System: A Japanese time management system to handle worker hourlies. Will include some basic reporting functions as well.iStatServer.NET: Server implementation for iPhone iStat app. Windows analogue to iStat Server on OS x or iStatd on linux/solaris. Keolis Service Wrapper: Keolis Service WrapperKinectContrib: A set of extensions and helpers that will facilitate the use of the Microsoft Kinect motion sensor with the Kinect SDK.kingdomwp7: kingdomwp7Laboratório de Engenharia de Software - Projeto: Criado para estudar e aplicar novas tecnologias web.Multi Touch Digit OCR With Matlab Neural Network Wpf Project: Multi Touch Digit OCR Project is a wpf project that works on multi touch devices but it works well on normal devices , this project uses matlab core , that creates 4 feed forward neural network and train them with Back Propagation Algorithm for detecting numbers that you draw .PhoneGap Extensions - Alpha Version: This project was created to solve some issues about PhoneGap. The first issue to solve is how to reuse HTML code through include files. SABnzbd UI: This application is a Windows 7 enabled UI for SABnzbd, so that you don't have to navigate to the website, but instead you can view a slick UI on your desktop.SP:Social: A community project for providing integration points between SharePoint and other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Live etc.Whisk: An extremely simplistic but cross-platform network rending environment for Blender.Windows phone 7, Game framewok: Windows phone 7, Game framewokWP7 - Multi Select Wrapped ListBox: Its a WP 7.1 project which contains a list box that can wrap listBoxItems and can scroll vertically.

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  • That Escalated Quickly

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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  • Software Engineering Practices &ndash; Different Projects should have different maturity levels

    - by Dylan Smith
    I’ve had a lot of discussions at the office lately about the drastically different sets of software engineering practices used on our various projects, if what we are doing is appropriate, and what factors should you be considering when determining what practices are most appropriate in a given context. I wanted to write up my thoughts in a little more detail on this subject, so here we go: If you compare any two software projects (specifically comparing their codebases) you’ll often see very different levels of maturity in the software engineering practices employed. By software engineering practices, I’m specifically referring to the quality of the code and the amount of technical debt present in the project. Things such as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, proper adherence to the SOLID principles, etc. are all practices that you would expect at the mature end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum would be the quick-and-dirty solutions that are done using something like an Access Database, Excel Spreadsheet, or maybe some quick “drag-and-drop coding”. For this blog post I’m going to refer to this as the Software Engineering Maturity Spectrum (SEMS). I believe there is a time and a place for projects at every part of that SEMS. The risks and costs associated with under-engineering solutions have been written about a million times over so I won’t bother going into them again here, but there are also (unnecessary) costs with over-engineering a solution. Sometimes putting multiple layers, and IoC containers, and abstracting out the persistence, etc is complete overkill if a one-time use Access database could solve the problem perfectly well. A lot of software developers I talk to seem to automatically jump to the very right-hand side of this SEMS in everything they do. A common rationalization I hear is that it may seem like a small trivial application today, but these things always grow and stick around for many years, then you’re stuck maintaining a big ball of mud. I think this is a cop-out. Sure you can’t always anticipate how an application will be used or grow over its lifetime (can you ever??), but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it and evolve the underlying software architecture as necessary (even if that means having to toss the code out and re-write it at some point…maybe even multiple times). My thoughts are that we should be making a conscious decision around the start of each project approximately where on the SEMS we want the project to exist. I believe this decision should be based on 3 factors: 1. Importance - How important to the business is this application? What is the impact if the application were to suddenly stop working? 2. Complexity - How complex is the application functionality? 3. Life-Expectancy - How long is this application expected to be in use? Is this a one-time use application, does it fill a short-term need, or is it more strategic and is expected to be in-use for many years to come? Of course this isn’t an exact science. You can’t say that Project X should be at the 73% mark on the SEMS and expect that to be helpful. My point is not that you need to precisely figure out what point on the SEMS the project should be at then translate that into some prescriptive set of practices and techniques you should be using. Rather my point is that we need to be aware that there is a spectrum, and that not everything is going to be (or should be) at the edges of that spectrum, indeed a large number of projects should probably fall somewhere within the middle; and different projects should adopt a different level of software engineering practices and maturity levels based on the needs of that project. To give an example of this way of thinking from my day job: Every couple of years my company plans and hosts a large event where ~400 of our customers all fly in to one location for a multi-day event with various activities. We have some staff whose job it is to organize the logistics of this event, which includes tracking which flights everybody is booked on, arranging for transportation to/from airports, arranging for hotel rooms, name tags, etc The last time we arranged this event all these various pieces of data were tracked in separate spreadsheets and reconciliation and cross-referencing of all the data was literally done by hand using printed copies of the spreadsheets and several people sitting around a table going down each list row by row. Obviously there is some room for improvement in how we are using software to manage the event’s logistics. The next time this event occurs we plan to provide the event planning staff with a more intelligent tool (either an Excel spreadsheet or probably an Access database) that can track all the information in one location and make sure that the various pieces of data are properly linked together (so for example if a person cancels you only need to delete them from one place, and not a dozen separate lists). This solution would fall at or near the very left end of the SEMS meaning that we will just quickly create something with very little attention paid to using mature software engineering practices. If we examine this project against the 3 criteria I listed above for determining it’s place within the SEMS we can see why: Importance – If this application were to stop working the business doesn’t grind to a halt, revenue doesn’t stop, and in fact our customers wouldn’t even notice since it isn’t a customer facing application. The impact would simply be more work for our event planning staff as they revert back to the previous way of doing things (assuming we don’t have any data loss). Complexity – The use cases for this project are pretty straightforward. It simply needs to manage several lists of data, and link them together appropriately. Precisely the task that access (and/or Excel) can do with minimal custom development required. Life-Expectancy – For this specific project we’re only planning to create something to be used for the one event (we only hold these events every 2 years). If it works well this may change (see below). Let’s assume we hack something out quickly and it works great when we plan the next event. We may decide that we want to make some tweaks to the tool and adopt it for planning all future events of this nature. In that case we should examine where the current application is on the SEMS, and make a conscious decision whether something needs to be done to move it further to the right based on the new objectives and goals for this application. This may mean scrapping the access database and re-writing it as an actual web or windows application. In this case, the life-expectancy changed, but let’s assume the importance and complexity didn’t change all that much. We can still probably get away with not adopting a lot of the so-called “best practices”. For example, we can probably still use some of the RAD tooling available and might have an Autonomous View style design that connects directly to the database and binds to typed datasets (we might even choose to simply leave it as an access database and continue using it; this is a decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis). At Anvil Digital we have aspirations to become a primarily product-based company. So let’s say we use this tool to plan a handful of events internally, and everybody loves it. Maybe a couple years down the road we decide we want to package the tool up and sell it as a product to some of our customers. In this case the project objectives/goals change quite drastically. Now the tool becomes a source of revenue, and the impact of it suddenly stopping working is significantly less acceptable. Also as we hold focus groups, and gather feedback from customers and potential customers there’s a pretty good chance the feature-set and complexity will have to grow considerably from when we were using it only internally for planning a small handful of events for one company. In this fictional scenario I would expect the target on the SEMS to jump to the far right. Depending on how we implemented the previous release we may be able to refactor and evolve the existing codebase to introduce a more layered architecture, a robust set of automated tests, introduce a proper ORM and IoC container, etc. More likely in this example the jump along the SEMS would be so large we’d probably end up scrapping the current code and re-writing. Although, if it was a slow phased roll-out to only a handful of customers, where we collected feedback, made some tweaks, and then rolled out to a couple more customers, we may be able to slowly refactor and evolve the code over time rather than tossing it out and starting from scratch. The key point I’m trying to get across is not that you should be throwing out your code and starting from scratch all the time. But rather that you should be aware of when and how the context and objectives around a project changes and periodically re-assess where the project currently falls on the SEMS and whether that needs to be adjusted based on changing needs. Note: There is also the idea of “spectrum decay”. Since our industry is rapidly evolving, what we currently accept as mature software engineering practices (the right end of the SEMS) probably won’t be the same 3 years from now. If you have a project that you were to assess at somewhere around the 80% mark on the SEMS today, but don’t touch the code for 3 years and come back and re-assess its position, it will almost certainly have changed since the right end of the SEMS will have moved farther out (maybe the project is now only around 60% due to decay). Developer Skills Another important aspect to this whole discussion is around the skill sets of your architects and lead developers. When talking about the progression of a developers skills from junior->intermediate->senior->… they generally start by only being able to write code that belongs on the left side of the SEMS and as they gain more knowledge and skill they become capable of working at a higher and higher level along the SEMS. We all realize that the learning never stops, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you can comfortably develop at the right-end of the SEMS (the exact practices and techniques that translates to is constantly changing, but that’s not the point here). A critical skill that I’d love to see more evidence of in our industry is the most senior guys not only being able to work at the right-end of the SEMS, but more importantly be able to consciously work at any point along the SEMS as project needs dictate. An even more valuable skill would be if you could make the conscious decision to move a projects code further right on the SEMS (based on changing needs) and do so in an incremental manner without having to start from scratch. An exercise that I’m planning to go through with all of our projects here at Anvil in the near future is to map out where I believe each project currently falls within this SEMS, where I believe the project *should* be on the SEMS based on the business needs, and for those that don’t match up (i.e. most of them) come up with a plan to improve the situation.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011Popular ReleasesMosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 252: First public release There are 8 widgets: - Desktop - Gmail - Weather - Control panel - Me - Video - Clock - PicturesUsage Agent: Usage Agent 9.0.8: Latest release. Changes include: - Fixes for Optus - Usage Delta statistic for BigPond - Eliminated the need for UAC prompt at every startupjQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.4.3: Fix item not dropping correctly on Chrome and jQuery 1.6KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.3 [v1.0.5 Compatible]: I have added support for all the new items in Terraria v1.0.5. I have also added the ability to put your character in hardcore mode or take them out via a simple checkbox on the stats tab. If you come across any bugs, please let me know immediately.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9b: Changes: - fix critical issue 262334 (AccessViolationException while using events in a COMAddin) - remove x64 Assemblies (not necessary) Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...MiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? Web ??????????、PIN ????????????????????。??????????????????、???????????????????????????。Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.7b: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.7b. Bug fixes: - BROKEN PLUGIN by upgrading SkyDriveServiceClient version 2.0.1b. Please do not forget to express your opinion of the plugin by rating it! Donate (EUR)SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 2.0.1b (RELOADED): SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly has been RELOADED in version 2.0.1b as a REAL API. It supports the followings: - Creating root and sub folders - Uploading and downloading files - Renaming and deleting folders and files Bug fixes: - BROKEN API (issue 6834) Please do not forget to express your opinion of the assembly by rating it! Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. PK :-]HydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.2.591 Beta Release: 1.2.591 Beta Releasepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...SQL Server HowTo: Version 1.0: Initial ReleaseDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.3: Added "Get links..." dialog, that provides selective public files links copying Get links link added to tray menu as the default option Fixed URL encoding .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at ...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...IronPython: 2.7.1 Beta 1: This is the first beta release of IronPython 2.7. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. The highlights of this release are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio are disabled by default. See http://pytools.codeplex.com for the next generation of Python Visual Studio support. See...New Projects.Net Image Processor: An image processing wrapper around GDI+, allowing you to apply one or more filters against an image source. Out-of-the-box support: * Conversion from one image type to another * Image resizing and various strategies for resolving aspect ratio * Edge detection * GIF support * Chaining filters together to perform complex operations on a single image Filters can be stacked and queued so that they run one after the other in a process queue. The processor can accept filenames, streams o...AsyncGetListSample: Reactive Extensions?????、Twitter??????????????????????????????。Awful for Windows Phone 7: Awful for Windows Phone 7 is a work-in-progress forum reader software for the Something Awful Forums.binzlog2.com: BlogEngine sourceCaffeine Model: A view model framework that specifically targets problems such as change recognition, validation and graph traversal. Provides robust support in these areas and base classes from which to build off of.CxBuild: cxbuildDotNetNuke Scheduler DashboardControl: The DNNSchedulerDashboard control adds a new control to the DotNetNuke Dashboard module that monitors the execution of the tasks in the DNN Scheduler. This control will keep host administrators informed on the tasks that are not executing on time.fkanban: A free Agile tool insist of Product backlog,sprint,Kanban etcKillstone Spycam: A "WebCam Timershot" style application that can take photos from a DirectShow device at a specified interval and save to disk and/or upload via FTP.Live Services for Moodle 1.9: This is a modification to the original Microsoft Live Services for Moodle allowing users to chat through Live Messenger using the web client.MoreEPG: Import of Extern EPG in Windows Media Center (Windows 7)NAntExt: The NAntExt is an extensions library for NAnt. This library includes Tasks and Functions which are much needed in using NAnt, but are not included in NAnt or NAntContrib. The ideal would be to eventually cycle them back into one of these projects. NetSquare - FourSquare C#.NET Open Source Class Library: NetSquare makes it easy to access Foursquare via the new v2 OAuth interface. This will be published as a VS 2010 C# project with associated examples.Power Presenter 2011: Do you want to make a great photo slideshow? Then get Power Presenter the best for showing phothos. Music with a click from the menu of the window. Better for you!!! If you want to join us it is a single rule NO-SEELING & NO-MONEY. It is developed in VB.NET. PowerPackPS: PowerPackPS is a DSV for creating PowerGUI PowerPacks using Powershell instead of the GUI or XML.Resuming Action Results for ASP.NET MVC: Resuming Action Results for MVC provides a similar implementation as the standard FileResult ActionResult objects but with the intelligence to detect range requests and respond appropriately with no need to write a single extra line of code.SoundSwitch: SoundSwitch makes it easier to switch playback devices (sound cards). Normally, to switch a Playback device you need to right click the sound icon in the bottom right corner of your screen (system tray), choose "Playback devices" and then change the default playback device. Every time you want to switch. With SoundSwitch you just configure once between which Playback devices you want to toggle and then you can press Ctrl+Alt+F11 to toggle automatically!StopWatch Plus: This is a simple stopwatch with which you can set a countdown, save and control the various steps imposed by the pause button. The projects will is still under development and not yet possess all the qualities mentioned above, currently is a simple countdown. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Questo è un semplice cronometro col quale si potrà impostare un conto alla rovescia, salvare e tenere sotto controllo i vari step ...TFS Reports: The TFS Reports project is about sharing knowledge around the reporting capabilities in TFS and contains both guidance as well as ready to use reports. TRK ATR: Website for TV/Radio channel UpdateTool: A tool used to update client This project is for personal use. Please do not download in now.Windows Service Helper: Helps by creating a Play/Stop/Pause UI when running with a debugger attached, but also allows the windows service to be installed and run by the Windows Services environment as well. All this with one line of code!XNB filetype plugin for Paint.NET: This plugin allows viewing and editing of XNA compiled textures from inside Paint.NET.

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  • Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

    - by Jialiang
    This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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  • C#: My World Clock

    - by Bruce Eitman
    [Placeholder:  I will post the entire project soon] I have been working on cleaning my office of 8 years of stuff from several engineers working on many projects.  It turns out that we have a few extra single board computers with displays, so at the end of the day last Friday I though why not create a little application to display the time, you know, a clock.  How difficult could that be?  It turns out that it is quite simple – until I decided to gold plate the project by adding time displays for our offices around the world. I decided to use C#, which actually made creating the main clock quite easy.   The application was simply a text box and a timer.  I set the timer to fire a couple of times a second, and when it does use a DateTime object to get the current time and retrieve a string to display. And I could have been done, but of course that gold plating came up.   Seems simple enough, simply offset the time from the local time to the location that I want the time for and display it.    Sure enough, I had the time displayed for UK, Italy, Kansas City, Japan and China in no time at all. But it is October, and for those of us still stuck with Daylight Savings Time, we know that the clocks are about to change.   My first attempt was to simply check to see if the local time was DST or Standard time, then change the offset for China.  China doesn’t have Daylight Savings Time. If you know anything about the time changes around the world, you already know that my plan is flawed – in a big way.   It turns out that the transitions in and out of DST take place at different times around the world.   If you didn’t know that, do a quick search for “Daylight Savings” and you will find many WEB sites dedicated to tracking the time changes dates, and times. Now the real challenge of this application; how do I programmatically find out when the time changes occur and handle them correctly?  After a considerable amount of research it turns out that the solution is to read the data from the registry and parse it to figure out when the time changes occur. Reading Time Change Information from the Registry Reading the data from the registry is simple, using the data is a little more complicated.  First, reading from the registry can be done like:             byte[] binarydata = (byte[])Registry.GetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Time Zones\\Eastern Standard Time", "TZI", null);   Where I have hardcoded the registry key for example purposes, but in the end I will use some variables.   We now have a binary blob with the data, but it needs to be converted to use the real data.   To start we will need a couple of structs to hold the data and make it usable.   We will need a SYSTEMTIME and REG_TZI_FORMAT.   You may have expected that we would need a TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION struct, but we don’t.   The data is stored in the registry as a REG_TZI_FORMAT, which excludes some of the values found in TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION.     struct SYSTEMTIME     {         internal short wYear;         internal short wMonth;         internal short wDayOfWeek;         internal short wDay;         internal short wHour;         internal short wMinute;         internal short wSecond;         internal short wMilliseconds;     }       struct REG_TZI_FORMAT     {         internal long Bias;         internal long StdBias;         internal long DSTBias;         internal SYSTEMTIME StandardStart;         internal SYSTEMTIME DSTStart;     }   Now we need to convert the binary blob to a REG_TZI_FORMAT.   To do that I created the following helper functions:         private void BinaryToSystemTime(ref SYSTEMTIME ST, byte[] binary, int offset)         {             ST.wYear = (short)(binary[offset + 0] + (binary[offset + 1] << 8));             ST.wMonth = (short)(binary[offset + 2] + (binary[offset + 3] << 8));             ST.wDayOfWeek = (short)(binary[offset + 4] + (binary[offset + 5] << 8));             ST.wDay = (short)(binary[offset + 6] + (binary[offset + 7] << 8));             ST.wHour = (short)(binary[offset + 8] + (binary[offset + 9] << 8));             ST.wMinute = (short)(binary[offset + 10] + (binary[offset + 11] << 8));             ST.wSecond = (short)(binary[offset + 12] + (binary[offset + 13] << 8));             ST.wMilliseconds = (short)(binary[offset + 14] + (binary[offset + 15] << 8));         }             private REG_TZI_FORMAT ConvertFromBinary(byte[] binarydata)         {             REG_TZI_FORMAT RTZ = new REG_TZI_FORMAT();               RTZ.Bias = binarydata[0] + (binarydata[1] << 8) + (binarydata[2] << 16) + (binarydata[3] << 24);             RTZ.StdBias = binarydata[4] + (binarydata[5] << 8) + (binarydata[6] << 16) + (binarydata[7] << 24);             RTZ.DSTBias = binarydata[8] + (binarydata[9] << 8) + (binarydata[10] << 16) + (binarydata[11] << 24);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.StandardStart, binarydata, 4 + 4 + 4);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.DSTStart, binarydata, 4 + 16 + 4 + 4);               return RTZ;         }   I am the first to admit that there may be a better way to get the settings from the registry and into the REG_TXI_FORMAT, but I am not a great C# programmer which I have said before on this blog.   So sometimes I chose brute force over elegant. Now that we have the Bias information and the start date information, we can start to make sense of it.   The bias is an offset, in minutes, from local time (if already in local time for the time zone in question) to get to UTC – or as Microsoft defines it: UTC = local time + bias.  Standard bias is an offset to adjust for standard time, which I think is usually zero.   And DST bias is and offset to adjust for daylight savings time. Since we don’t have the local time for a time zone other than the one that the computer is set to, what we first need to do is convert local time to UTC, which is simple enough using:                 DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime(); Then, since we have UTC we need to do a little math to alter the formula to: local time = UTC – bias.  In other words, we need to subtract the bias minutes. I am ahead of myself though, the standard and DST start dates really aren’t dates.   Instead they indicate the month, day of week and week number of the time change.   The dDay member of SYSTEM time will be set to the week number of the date change indicating that the change happens on the first, second… day of week of the month.  So we need to convert them to dates so that we can determine which bias to use, and when to change to a different bias.   To do that, I wrote the following function:         private DateTime SystemTimeToDateTimeStart(SYSTEMTIME Time, int Year)         {             DayOfWeek[] Days = { DayOfWeek.Sunday, DayOfWeek.Monday, DayOfWeek.Tuesday, DayOfWeek.Wednesday, DayOfWeek.Thursday, DayOfWeek.Friday, DayOfWeek.Saturday };             DateTime InfoTime = new DateTime(Year, Time.wMonth, Time.wDay == 1 ? 1 : ((Time.wDay - 1) * 7) + 1, Time.wHour, Time.wMinute, Time.wSecond, DateTimeKind.Utc);             DateTime BestGuess = InfoTime;             while (BestGuess.DayOfWeek != Days[Time.wDayOfWeek])             {                 BestGuess = BestGuess.AddDays(1);             }             return BestGuess;         }   SystemTimeToDateTimeStart gets two parameters; a SYSTEMTIME and a year.   The reason is that we will try this year and next year because we are interested in start dates that are in the future, not the past.  The function starts by getting a new Datetime with the first possible date and then looking for the correct date. Using the start dates, we can then determine the correct bias to use, and the next date that time will change:             NextTimeChange = StandardChange;             CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias + TimezoneSettings.DSTBias;             if (DSTChange.Year != 1 && StandardChange.Year != 1)             {                 if (DSTChange.CompareTo(StandardChange) < 0)                 {                     NextTimeChange = DSTChange;                     CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.StdBias + TimezoneSettings.Bias;                 }             }             else             {                 // I don't like this, but it turns out that China Standard Time                 // has a DSTBias of -60 on every Windows system that I tested.                 // So, if no DST transitions, then just use the Bias without                 // any offset                 CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias;             }   Note that some time zones do not change time, in which case the years will remain set to 1.   Further, I found that the registry settings are actually wrong in that the DST Bias is set to -60 for China even though there is not DST in China, so I ignore the standard and DST bias for those time zones. There is one thing that I have not solved, and don’t plan to solve.  If the time zone for this computer changes, this application will not update the clock using the new time zone.  I tell  you this because you may need to deal with it – I do not because I won’t let the user get to the control panel applet to change the timezone. Copyright © 2012 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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