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• How do I turn on wireless adapter on HP Envy dv6 7200 under Ubuntu (any version)?

  - by Dave B.

  I have a new HP Envy dv6 7200 with dual boot Windows 8 / Ubuntu 12.04. In windows, the F12 key in Windows activates the "airplane mode" switch which enables/disables both on-board (mini PCIe) and USB wireless adapters. In Ubuntu, however, the wireless adapter is turned off by default and cannot be turned back on via the F12 key (or any other combination of F12 and Ctrl, Fn, Shift, etc.). Let me explain the "fixes" I've seen in various forums and explain what did or did not happen. These are listed in no particular order. (Spoiler alert: wireless is still broke). Solution 1? Use HP's "Wireless Assistant" utility to permanently activate the wireless card in Windows, then boot into Ubuntu to happily find it working. Unfortunately, this utility works in Windows 7 but not Windows 8. On the other hand, hardware drivers from HP are only available for Windows 8 for this model. Catch 22 (I could not find a comparable utility for Windows 8). Solution 2? Use a USB wireless adapter to sidestep the on-board device. I purchased such a device from thinkpenguin.com to be sure that it would be Linux-friendly. However, the wireless switch enables / disables all wireless devices including USB. So, there's my $50 donation to the nice folks at thinkpenguin.com, but still no solution. Solution 3? Following the Think Penguin folk's suggestion, modify the mini PCI express adapter following instructions here: http://www.notebookforums.com/t/225429/broken-wireless-hardware-switch-fix Tempting, but I then violate the terms of my warranty mere days after opening the box. This might be a good solution for an older machine that you want to get your geek on with, but not for a new box. Solution 4? rfkill unblock all No effect whatsoever. ubuntu@ubuntu-hp-evny:~$ rfkill unblock all ubuntu@ubuntu-hp-evny:~$ rfkill list all 0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes Solution 5? Re-install drivers. Done and done. Ubuntu recognizes the device - perhaps even without re-installing the drivers? - but cannot turn it on. How do I know this? In the Network Manager drop-down menu, the wireless option is blacked out and a message reads something like: "wireless network is disabled by a hardware switch". Solution 6? Identify a physical switch on the laptop and flip it. There is no such switch on this machine. In fact, walking through Best Buy yesterday, I checked and not a single new laptop PC had a physical switch on it. All of the wireless switches are either the F2 or F12 key ... I wonder if askubuntu will not be plagued by this exact issue in the near future? Additional info - lspci ubuntu@ubuntu-hp-evny:~$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge DRAM Controller (rev 09) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge PCI Express Root Port (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Panther Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev c4) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev c4) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev c4) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point LPC Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Panther Point SMBus Controller (rev 04) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0de9 (rev a1) 08:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5229 (rev 01) 0a:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. Device 539b 0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 07) Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• Trying to implement fling events on an object

  - by Adam Short

  I have a game object, well a bitmap, which I'd like to "fling". I'm struggling to get it to fling ontouchlistener due to it being a bitmap and not sure how to proceed and I'm struggling to find the resources to help. Here's my code so far: https://github.com/addrum/Shapes GameActivity class: package com.main.shapes; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.Context; import android.graphics.Bitmap; import android.graphics.BitmapFactory; import android.graphics.Canvas; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.GestureDetector; import android.view.MotionEvent; import android.view.SurfaceHolder; import android.view.SurfaceView; import android.view.View.OnTouchListener; import android.view.Window; public class GameActivity extends Activity { private GestureDetector gestureDetector; View view; Bitmap ball; float x, y; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); //Remove title bar this.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE); view = new View(this); ball = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.ball); gestureDetector = new GestureDetector(this, new GestureListener()); x = 0; y = 0; setContentView(view); ball.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() { @Override public boolean onTouch(android.view.View v, MotionEvent event) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } }); } @Override protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); view.pause(); } @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); view.resume(); } public class View extends SurfaceView implements Runnable { Thread thread = null; SurfaceHolder holder; boolean canRun = false; public View(Context context) { super(context); holder = getHolder(); } public void run() { while (canRun) { if (!holder.getSurface().isValid()) { continue; } Canvas c = holder.lockCanvas(); c.drawARGB(255, 255, 255, 255); c.drawBitmap(ball, x - (ball.getWidth() / 2), y - (ball.getHeight() / 2), null); holder.unlockCanvasAndPost(c); } } public void pause() { canRun = false; while (true) { try { thread.join(); } catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } break; } thread = null; } public void resume() { canRun = true; thread = new Thread(this); thread.start(); } } } GestureListener class: package com.main.shapes; import android.view.GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener; import android.view.MotionEvent; public class GestureListener extends SimpleOnGestureListener { private static final int SWIPE_MIN_DISTANCE = 120; private static final int SWIPE_THRESHOLD_VELOCITY = 200; @Override public boolean onFling(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float velocityX, float velocityY) { if (e1.getX() - e2.getX() > SWIPE_MIN_DISTANCE && Math.abs(velocityX) > SWIPE_THRESHOLD_VELOCITY) { //From Right to Left return true; } else if (e2.getX() - e1.getX() > SWIPE_MIN_DISTANCE && Math.abs(velocityX) > SWIPE_THRESHOLD_VELOCITY) { //From Left to Right return true; } if (e1.getY() - e2.getY() > SWIPE_MIN_DISTANCE && Math.abs(velocityY) > SWIPE_THRESHOLD_VELOCITY) { //From Bottom to Top return true; } else if (e2.getY() - e1.getY() > SWIPE_MIN_DISTANCE && Math.abs(velocityY) > SWIPE_THRESHOLD_VELOCITY) { //From Top to Bottom return true; } return false; } @Override public boolean onDown(MotionEvent e) { //always return true since all gestures always begin with onDown and<br> //if this returns false, the framework won't try to pick up onFling for example. return true; } }

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• Many Different Things Rolled into a Ball

  - by MOSSLover

  Yeah I know I don’t blog much anymore, because life has taken me places that don’t involve the interwebs unfortunately.  I am in the midst of planning two events, starting a non for profit, creating more sessions for various conferences, submitting to various conferences, working a 40 hour a week job, attempting to hang out with boyfriend/friends/family.  So you can see that list does not include this blog sadly that’s how it goes sometimes.  The bottom piece very important over any of the top pieces.  I haven’t seen St. Louis in a while and I get to go back.  I was gone from home for MVP Summit and Best Practices Conference, so the boyfriend and cat didn’t get to see me either for a bit.  Then you have to add in the whole toilet being broken fiasco this week.  Maintenance really thought it would be cool to turn off the ability to flush.  I mean who does that?  Then when we call the owner he comes by turns it on and we figure it was an accident, because well the next day no one came by to tell us there was a leak.  It was all kinds of strangeness and involved me running to other people’s toilets.  As Dan Usher would say, I was a sad panda for a few days.  So I guess I wanted to post a few thoughts here just because I can.  I do not like multiple content editor webparts embedded with html files in numerous pages doing the same thing.  I will tell you why I don’t like these particular webparts and the way they are being used.  First off if you have a bunch of pages with script includes it’s about time you should just dump them into the masterpage.  Why bother finding all 20 pages and changing those pages when you can just use a single masterpage that already exists? The other thing that is bothering me days is screen scraping.  Just don’t do it, because in 2010 you will find the UI is substantially slower.  I understand you are new and you have no idea what to do.  You are also using 2007 am I right?  So then you need to go to codeplex.com and type in a search for SPServices.  Download it, use it, love it and then have it’s babies (well maybe don’t go so far this is not the GRID in Tron). If you have a ton of constants in your code why did you not go in and create a webpart with a bunch of properties and/or link to a configuration list hidden in the browser?  This type of property and list could help you out in the long run.  The power users and administrators can now change the control without you having to compile it over and over again.  It’s good stuff.  Also, you can change the control without compiling it, especially in 2007 where you have to do a farm solution.  In 2010 you can do a sandbox solution I guess, but shouldn’t you make it as easy and supportable as possible for other users? In conclusion I’m an angry person when it comes to viewing something repeatedly and analyzing it in a system.  Now we will move on to the next topic…MVP Summit…So yeah I can’t really talk about particulars, but I can talk about my experience as a person.  Don’t build something up to be cooler than it is only to be dropped from your 10,000 foot perch.  My experience was great, but the content overall was something to be desired.  It’s ok I got to meet a lot of people I would not have met if I had not gone.  Some of it was surreal, such as product group members showing up and talking to us.  It was pretty neat.  Plus I never had the chance to get to that mythical MS Office in Redmond.  Prior to Summit it was like Rainbow Brites unicorn trying taunting me on television when I was a kid.  So I guess with all that said I give it a B.  It was awesome in some way, but lacking in other ways.  The cool part is that I got to go.  Would I have lived without going? Yes, but it was still cool. I could prattle on about other things and make this post massive, but I’m going to pass and give myself a piece of Sunday to play Rockband and do 800 other things.  I hope the two of you who read this blog are well.  I’ll catch you all at another juncture.  Have a good weekend and varying holidays in between. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MVP Summit,JQuery,Javascript

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client - Part 2

  - by Max

  We will create a few classes now to help us with storing and retrieving user credentials, so that we don't ask for it every time we want to speak with Twitter for getting some information. Now the class to sorting out the credentials. We will have this class as a static so as to ensure one instance of the same. This class is mainly going to include a getter setter for username and password, a method to check if the user if logged in and another one to log out the user. You can get the code here. Now let us create another class to facilitate easy retrieval from twitter xml format results for any queries we make. This basically involves just creating a getter setter for all the values that you would like to retrieve from the xml document returned. You can get the format of the xml document from here. Here is what I've in my Status.cs data structure class. using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes;  namespace MaxTwitter.Classes { public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } } }  Now let us looking into implementing the Login.xaml.cs, first thing here is if the user is already logged in, we need to redirect the user to the homepage, this we can accomplish using the event OnNavigatedTo, which is fired when the user navigates to this particular Login page. Here you utilize the navigate to method of NavigationService to goto a different page if the user is already logged in. if (GlobalVariable.isLoggedin())         this.NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative));  On the submit button click event, add the new event handler, which would save the perform the WebClient request and download the results as xml string. WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);  The following line allows us to create a web client to create a web request to a url and get back the string response. Something that came as a great news with SL 4 for many SL developers.   WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(TwitterUsername.Text, TwitterPassword.Password);  Here in the following line, we add an event that has to be fired once the xml string has been downloaded. Here you can do all your XLINQ stuff.   myService.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(TimelineRequestCompleted);   myService.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml"));  Now let us look at implementing the TimelineRequestCompleted event. Here we are not actually using the string response we get from twitter, I just use it to ensure the user is authenticated successfully and then save the credentials and redirect to home page. public void TimelineRequestCompleted(object sender, System.Net.DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.Error != null) { MessageBox.Show("This application must be installed first"); }  If there is no error, we can save the credentials to reuse it later.   else { GlobalVariable.saveCredentials(TwitterUsername.Text, TwitterPassword.Password); this.NavigationService.Navigate(new System.Uri("/Home", UriKind.Relative)); } } Ok so now login page is done. Now the main thing – running this application. This credentials stuff would only work, if the application is run out of the browser. So we need fiddle with a few Silverlioght project settings to enable this. Here is how:    Right click on Silverlight > properties then check the "Enable running application out of browser".    Then click on Out-Of-Browser settings and check "Require elevated trust…" option. That's it, all done to run. Now press F5 to run the application, fix the errors if any. Then once the application opens up in browser with the login page, right click and choose install.  Once you install, it would automatically run and you can login and can see that you are redirected to the Home page. Here are the files that are related to this posts. We will look at implementing the Home page, etc… in the next post. Please post your comments and feedbacks; it would greatly help me in improving my posts!  Thanks for your time, catch you soon.

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• Implement Tree/Details With Taskflow Regions Using EJB

  - by Deepak Siddappa

  This article describes on Display Tree/Details using taskflow regions.Use Case DescriptionLet us take scenario where we need to display Tree/Details, left region contains category hierarchy with items listed in a tree structure (ex:- Region-Countries-Locations-Departments in tree format) and right region contains the Employees list.In detail, Here User may drills down through categories using a tree until Employees are listed. Clicking the tree node name displays Employee list in the adjacent pane related to particular tree node. Implementation StepsThe script for creating the tables and inserting the data required for this application CreateSchema.sql Lets create a Java EE Web Application with Entities based on Regions, Countries, Locations, Departments and Employees table. Create a Stateless Session Bean and data control for the Stateless Session Bean. Add the below code to the session bean and expose the method in local/remote interface and generate a data control for that.Note:- Here in the below code "em" is a EntityManager. public List<Employees> empFilteredByTreeNode(String treeNodeType, String paramValue) { String queryString = null; try { if (treeNodeType == "null") { queryString = "select * from Employees emp ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (Pattern.matches("[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[[0-9]+]+", treeNodeType)) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept\n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc\n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont\n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id JOIN regions reg\n" + "ON cont.region_id = reg.region_id and reg.region_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_countriesList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept \n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc \n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont \n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id and cont.country_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_locationsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id and loc.city = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.trim().contains("regionsFindAll_bc_departmentsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from Employees emp INNER JOIN Departments dept ON emp.DEPARTMENT_ID = dept.DEPARTMENT_ID and dept.DEPARTMENT_NAME = '" + paramValue + "'"; } } catch (NullPointerException e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()); } return em.createNativeQuery(queryString, Employees.class).getResultList(); } In the ViewController project, create two ADF taskflow with page Fragments and name them as FirstTaskflow and SecondTaskflow respectively. Open FirstTaskflow,from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as TreeList.jsff. Open SeconfTaskflow, from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as EmpList.jsff and create two paramters in its overview parameters tab as shown in below image. Open TreeList.jsff , from data control palette drop regionsFindAll->Tree as ADF Tree. In Edit Tree Binding dialog, for Tree Level Rules select the display attributes as follows:-model.Regions - regionNamemodel.Countries - countryNamemodel.Locations - citymodel.Departments - departmentName In structure panel, click on af:Tree - t1 and select selectionListener with edit property. Create a "TreeBean" managed bean with scope as "session" as shown in below Image. Create new method as getTreeNodeSelectedValue and click ok. Open TreeBean managed bean and add the below code: private String treeNodeType; private String paramValue; public void getTreeNodeSelectedValue(SelectionEvent selectionEvent) { RichTree tree = (RichTree)selectionEvent.getSource(); RowKeySet addedSet = selectionEvent.getAddedSet(); Iterator i = addedSet.iterator(); TreeModel model = (TreeModel)tree.getValue(); model.setRowKey(i.next()); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)tree.getRowData(); //oracle.jbo.Row Row rw = node.getRow(); Object selectedTreeNode = node.getAttribute(0); Object treeListType = node.getBindings(); String treeNodeType = treeListType.toString(); this.setParamValue(selectedTreeNode.toString()); this.setTreeNodeType(treeNodeType); } public void setTreeNodeType(String treeNodeType) { this.treeNodeType = treeNodeType; } public String getTreeNodeType() { return treeNodeType; } public void setParamValue(String paramValue) { this.paramValue = paramValue; } public String getParamValue() { return paramValue; }<br /> Open EmpList.jsff , from data control palette drop empFilteredByTreeNode->Employees->Table as ADF Read-only Table. After selecting the  Employees result set, in Edit Action Binding dialog window pass the pageFlowScope parameters as shown in below Image. In empList.jsff page, click Binding tab and click on Create Executable binding and select Invoke action and follow as shown in below image. Edit executeEmpFiltered invoke action properties and set the Refresh to ifNeeded, So when ever the page needs the method will be executed. Create Main.jspx page with page template as Oracle Three Column Layout. Drop FirstTaskflow as Region in start facet and drop SecondTaskflow as Region in center facet, Edit task Flow Binding dialog window pass the Input Paramters as shown in below Image. Run the Main.jspx, tree will be displayed in left region and emp details will displyaed on the right region. Click on the Americas in tree node, all emp related to the Americas related will be displayed. Click on Americas->United States of America->South San Francisco->Accounting, only employee belongs to the Accounting department will be displayed.

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• .NET Security Part 4

  - by Simon Cooper

  Finally, in this series, I am going to cover some of the security issues that can trip you up when using sandboxed appdomains. DISCLAIMER: I am not a security expert, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you actually are writing security-critical code, then get a proper security audit of your code by a professional. The examples below are just illustrations of the sort of things that can go wrong. 1. AppDomainSetup.ApplicationBase The most obvious one is the issue covered in the MSDN documentation on creating a sandbox, in step 3 – the sandboxed appdomain has the same ApplicationBase as the controlling appdomain. So let’s explore what happens when they are the same, and an exception is thrown. In the sandboxed assembly, Sandboxed.dll (IPlugin is an interface in a partially-trusted assembly, with a single MethodToDoThings on it): public class UntrustedPlugin : MarshalByRefObject, IPlugin { // implements IPlugin.MethodToDoThings() public void MethodToDoThings() { throw new EvilException(); } } [Serializable] internal class EvilException : Exception { public override string ToString() { // show we have read access to C:\Windows // read the first 5 directories Console.WriteLine("Pwned! Mwuahahah!"); foreach (var d in Directory.EnumerateDirectories(@"C:\Windows").Take(5)) { Console.WriteLine(d.FullName); } return base.ToString(); } } And in the controlling assembly: // what can possibly go wrong? AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase } // only grant permissions to execute // and to read the application base, nothing else PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.pathDiscovery, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms); // execute UntrustedPlugin in the sandbox // don't crash the application if the sandbox throws an exception IPlugin o = (IPlugin)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap("Sandboxed.dll", "UntrustedPlugin"); try { o.MethodToDoThings() } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.ToString()); } And the result? Oops. We’ve allowed a class that should be sandboxed to execute code with fully-trusted permissions! How did this happen? Well, the key is the exact meaning of the ApplicationBase property: The application base directory is where the assembly manager begins probing for assemblies. When EvilException is thrown, it propagates from the sandboxed appdomain into the controlling assembly’s appdomain (as it’s marked as Serializable). When the exception is deserialized, the CLR finds and loads the sandboxed dll into the fully-trusted appdomain. Since the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory contains the sandboxed assembly, the CLR finds and loads the assembly into a full-trust appdomain, and the evil code is executed. So the problem isn’t exactly that the sandboxed appdomain’s ApplicationBase is the same as the controlling appdomain’s, it’s that the sandboxed dll was in such a place that the controlling appdomain could find it as part of the standard assembly resolution mechanism. The sandbox then forced the assembly to load in the controlling appdomain by throwing a serializable exception that propagated outside the sandbox. The easiest fix for this is to keep the sandbox ApplicationBase well away from the ApplicationBase of the controlling appdomain, and don’t allow the sandbox permissions to access the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory. If you do this, then the sandboxed assembly can’t be accidentally loaded into the fully-trusted appdomain, and the code can’t be executed. If the plugin does try to induce the controlling appdomain to load an assembly it shouldn’t, a SerializationException will be thrown when it tries to load the assembly to deserialize the exception, and no damage will be done. 2. Loading the sandboxed dll into the application appdomain As an extension of the previous point, you shouldn’t directly reference types or methods in the sandboxed dll from your application code. That loads the assembly into the fully-trusted appdomain, and from there code in the assembly could be executed. Instead, pull out methods you want the sandboxed dll to have into an interface or class in a partially-trusted assembly you control, and execute methods via that instead (similar to the example above with the IPlugin interface). If you need to have a look at the assembly before executing it in the sandbox, either examine the assembly using reflection from within the sandbox, or load the assembly into the Reflection-only context in the application’s appdomain. The code in assemblies in the reflection-only context can’t be executed, it can only be reflected upon, thus protecting your appdomain from malicious code. 3. Incorrectly asserting permissions You should only assert permissions when you are absolutely sure they’re safe. For example, this method allows a caller read-access to any file they call this method with, including your documents, any network shares, the C:\Windows directory, etc: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static string GetFileText(string filePath) { new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, filePath).Assert(); return File.ReadAllText(filePath); } Be careful when asserting permissions, and ensure you’re not providing a loophole sandboxed dlls can use to gain access to things they shouldn’t be able to. Conclusion Hopefully, that’s given you an idea of some of the ways it’s possible to get past the .NET security system. As I said before, this post is not exhaustive, and you certainly shouldn’t base any security-critical applications on the contents of this blog post. What this series should help with is understanding the possibilities of the security system, and what all the security attributes and classes mean and what they are used for, if you were to use the security system in the future.

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• Agile Executives

  - by Robert May

  Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams. Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable. Unfortunately, most of the software industry followed this same style of management. Many of today’s senior managers learned how to manage companies before software was a significant influence on how the company did business. Software development is a very creative process, but too many managers have treated it like an assembly line. Idea’s go in, working software comes out, and we just have to figure out how to make sure that the ideas going in are perfect, then the software will be perfect. Lean Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, Lean manufacturing has revolutionized Henry Ford’s assembly line. Derived from the Toyota process, Lean places emphasis on always providing value for the customer. Anything the customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is wasteful. Agile is based on similar principles. We’re building software for people, and anything that isn’t useful to them doesn’t add value. Waterfall development would have teams build reams and reams of documentation about how the software should work. Agile development dispenses with this work because excessive documentation doesn’t add value. Instead, teams focus on building documentation only when it truly adds value to the customer. Many other Agile principals are similar. Playing Catch-up Just like in the manufacturing industry, many managers in the software industry have yet to understand the value of the principles of Lean and Agile. They think they can wrap the uncertainties of software development up in a nice little package and then just execute, usually followed by failure. They spend a great deal of time and money trying to exactly predict the future. That expenditure of time and money doesn’t add value to the customer. Managers that understand that Agile know that there is a better way. They will instead focus on the priorities of the near term in detail, and leave the future to take care of itself. They have very detailed two week plans with less detailed quarterly plans. These plans are guided by a general corporate strategy that doesn’t focus on the exact implementation details. These managers also think in smaller features rather than large functionality. This adds a great deal of value to customers, since the features that matter most are the ones that the team focuses on in the near term and then are able to deliver to the customers that are paying for them. Agile managers also realize that stale software is very costly. They know that keeping the technology in their software current is much less expensive and risky than large rewrites that occur infrequently and schedule time in each release for refactoring of the existing software. Agile Executives Even though Agile is a better way, I’ve still seen failures using the Agile process. While some of these failures can be attributed to the team, most of them are caused by managers, not the team. Managers fail to understand what Agile is, how it works, and how to get the information that they need to make good business decisions. I think this is a shame. I’m very pleased that Veracity understands this problem and is trying to do something about it. Veracity is a key sponsor of Agile Executives. In fact, Galen is this year’s acting president for Agile Executives. The purpose of Agile Executives is to help managers better manage Agile teams and see better success. Agile Executives is trying to build a community of executives that range from managers interested in Agile to managers that have successfully adopted Agile. Together, these managers can form a community of support and ideas that will help make Agile teams more successful. Helping Your Team You can help too! Talk with your manager and get them involved in Agile Executives. Help Veracity build the community. If your manager understands Agile better, he’ll understand how to help his teams, which will result in software that adds more value for customers. If you have any questions about how you can be involved, please let me know. Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Executives

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• BizTalk &ndash; Routing failure on Delivery Notifications (BizTalk 2006 R2 to 2013)

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/11/11/biztalk-routing-failure-on-delivery-notifications.aspxThis is a detailed explanation of a something I posted a few month ago on stackoverflow, concerning a weird behavior (a bug, really…) of the delivery notifications in BizTalk. Reminder: what are delivery notifications Mechanism BizTalk has the ability to automatically publish positive acknowledgments (ACK) when it has succeeded transmitting a message or negative acknowledgments (NACK) in case of a transmission failure. Orchestrations can use delivery notifications to subscribe to those ACKs and NACKs in order to know if a message sent on a one-way send port has been successfully transmitted. Delivery Notifications can be “activated” in two ways: The most common and easy way is to set the Delivery Notification property of a logical send port (in the orchestration designer) to Transmitted: Another way is to set the BTS.AckRequired context property of the message to be sent to true: NOTE: fundamentally, those methods are strictly equivalent since the fact of setting the Delivery Notification to Transmitted on the send port only tells BizTalk the BTS.AckRequired context property has to be set to true on the outgoing message. Related context properties ACKs and NACKs have a common set of propoted context properties, which are : Propriété Description AckType Equals ACK when successful or NACK otherwise AckID MessageID of the message concerned by the acknowledgment AckOwnerID InstanceID of the instance associated with the acknowledgment AckSendPortID ID of the send port AckSendPortName Name of the send port AckOutboundTransportLocation URI of the send port AckReceivePortID ID of the port the message came from AckReceivePortName Name of the port the message came from AckInboundTransportLocation URI of the port the message came from Detailed behavior The way Delivery Notifications are handled by BizTalk is peculiar compared to the standard behavior of the Message Box: if no active subscription exists for the acknowledgment, it is simply discarded. The direct consequence of this is that there can be no routing failure for an acknowledgment, and an acknowledgment cannot be suspended. Moreover, when a message is sent to a send port where Delivery Notification = Transmitted, a correlation set is initialized and a correlation token is attached to the message (Context property: CorrelationToken). This correlation token will also be attached to the acknowledgment. So when the acknowledgment is issued, it is automatically routed to the source orchestration. Finally, when a NACK is received by the source orchestration, a DeliveryFailureException is thrown, which can be caught in Catch section. Context of the problem Consider this scenario: In an orchestration, Delivery Notifications are activated on a One-Way send port In case of a transmission failure, the messaging instance is suspended and the orchestration catches an exception (DeliveryFailureException). When the exception is caught, the orchestration does some logging and then terminates (thanks to a Terminate shape). So that leaves only the suspended messaging instance, waiting to be resumed. Symptoms Once the problem that caused the transmission failure is solved, the messaging instance is resumed. Considering what was said in the reminder, we would expect the instance to complete, leaving no active or suspended instance. Nevertheless, the result is that the messaging instance is once more suspended, this time because of a routing failure: The routing failure report shows that the suspended message has the following attached properties: Explanation Those properties clearly indicate that the message being suspended is an acknowledgment (ACK in this case), which was published in the message box and was supended because no subscribers were found. This makes sense, since the source orchestration was terminated before we resumed the messaging instance. So its subscription to the acknowledgments was no longer active when the ACK was published, which explains the routing failure. But this behavior is in direct contradiction with what was said earlier: an acknowledgment must be discarded when no subscriber is found and therefore should not be suspended. Cause It is indeed an outright bug, which appeared with the SP1 of BizTalk 2006 R2 and was never corrected since then: not in the next 4 CUs, not in BizTalk 2009, not in 2010 and not event in 2013 – though I haven’t tested CU1 and CU2 for this last edition, but I bet there is nothing to be expected from those CUs (on this particular point). Side effects This bug can have pretty nasty side effects: this behavior can be propagated to other ports, due to routing mechanisms. For instance: you have configured the ESB Toolkit and have activated the “Enable routing failure for failed messages”. The result will be that the ESB Exception SQL send port will also try and publish ACKs or NACKs concerning its own messaging instances. In itself, this is already messy, but remember that those acknowledgments will also have the source correlation token attached to them… See how far it goes? Well, actually there is more: in SQL send ports, transactions will be rolled back because of the routing failure (I guess it also happens with other adapters - like Oracle, but I haven’t tested them). Again, think of what happens when the send port is the ESB Exception send port: your BizTalk box is going mad, but you have no idea since no exception can be written in the exception database! All of this can be tricky to diagnose, I can tell you that… Solution There is no real solution, only a work-around, but it won’t solve all of the problems and side effects. The idea is to create an orchestration which subscribes to all acknowledgments. That is to say: The message type of the incoming message will be XmlDocument The BTS.AckType property exists The logical receive port will use direct binding By doing so, all acknowledgments will be consumed by an instance of this orchestration, thus avoiding the routing failure. Here is an example of what this orchestration could look like: In order not to pollute the HAT and the DTA Db (after all, this orchestration is only meant to be a palliative to some faulty internal BizTalk mechanism, so there should be no trace of its execution), all tracking must be deactivated:

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• WebSocket API 1.1 released!

  - by Pavel Bucek

  Its my please to announce that JSR 356 – Java API for WebSocket maintenance release ballot vote finished with majority of “yes” votes (actually, only one eligible voter did not vote, all other votes were “yeses”). New release is maintenance release and it addresses only one issue:  WEBSOCKET_SPEC-226. What changed in the 1.1? Version 1.1 is fully backwards compatible with version 1.0, there are only two methods added to javax.websocket.Session: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 /** * Register to handle to incoming messages in this conversation. A maximum of one message handler per * native websocket message type (text, binary, pong) may be added to each Session. I.e. a maximum * of one message handler to handle incoming text messages a maximum of one message handler for * handling incoming binary messages, and a maximum of one for handling incoming pong * messages. For further details of which message handlers handle which of the native websocket * message types please see {@link MessageHandler.Whole} and {@link MessageHandler.Partial}. * Adding more than one of any one type will result in a runtime exception. * * @param clazz   type of the message processed by message handler to be registered. * @param handler whole message handler to be added. * @throws IllegalStateException if there is already a MessageHandler registered for the same native *                               websocket message type as this handler. */ public void addMessageHandler(Class<T> clazz, MessageHandler.Whole<T> handler); /** * Register to handle to incoming messages in this conversation. A maximum of one message handler per * native websocket message type (text, binary, pong) may be added to each Session. I.e. a maximum * of one message handler to handle incoming text messages a maximum of one message handler for * handling incoming binary messages, and a maximum of one for handling incoming pong * messages. For further details of which message handlers handle which of the native websocket * message types please see {@link MessageHandler.Whole} and {@link MessageHandler.Partial}. * Adding more than one of any one type will result in a runtime exception. * * * @param clazz   type of the message processed by message handler to be registered. * @param handler partial message handler to be added. * @throws IllegalStateException if there is already a MessageHandler registered for the same native *                               websocket message type as this handler. */ public void addMessageHandler(Class<T> clazz, MessageHandler.Partial<T> handler); Why do we need to add those methods? Short and not precise version: to support Lambda expressions as MessageHandlers. Longer and slightly more precise explanation: old Session#addMessageHandler method (which is still there and works as it worked till now) does rely on getting the generic parameter during the runtime, which is not (always) possible. The unfortunate part is that it works for some common cases and the expert group did not catch this issue before 1.0 release because of that. The issue is really clearly visible when Lambdas are used as message handlers: 1 2 3 session.addMessageHandler(message -> { System.out.println("### Received: " + message); }); There is no way for the JSR 356 implementation to get the type of the used Lambda expression, thus this call will always result in an exception. Since all modern IDEs do recommend to use Lambda expressions when possible and MessageHandler interfaces are single method interfaces, it basically just scream “use Lambdas” all over the place but when you do that, the application will fail during runtime. Only solution we currently have is to explicitly provide the type of registered MessageHandler. (There might be another sometime in the future when generic type reification is introduced, but that is not going to happen soon enough). So the example above will then be: 1 2 3 session.addMessageHandler(String.class, message -> { System.out.println("### Received: " + message); }); and voila, it works. There are some limitations – you cannot do 1 List<String>.class , so you will need to encapsulate these types when you want to use them in MessageHandler implementation (something like “class MyType extends ArrayList<String>”). There is no better way how to solve this issue, because Java currently does not provide good way how to describe generic types. The api itself is available on maven central, look for javax.websocket:javax.websocket-api:1.1. The reference implementation is project Tyrus, which implements WebSocket API 1.1 from version 1.8.

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• Career guidance/advice for Junior-level Software Engineer [closed]

  - by John Do

  I have quite a few questions on my mind, so please bare with me. Please don't feel obligated to answer all of them, any as you choose will do. I'd appreciate if you could share some insight on any of these. Before I begin, some context: I currently have almost two years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, mainly developing software in Java. At this point, I feel that I have reached the peak in my career growth at the current company I am at and therefore I am looking for a new job, ideally again, as a Software Engineer. I have been interviewing for the past few months casually but have not had luck with companies I have a passion for. So, in no particular order - 1) In general, what are your thoughts on having graduate degrees in CS / Software Engineering. How much does it influence a salary increase, and do you think it's beneficial when working on real-world problems? I get the sense that a graduate degree in the field is trivial unless you really have a passion for research. 2) In general, in professional practice, how often had you have to write your own data structures and "complex" algorithms from scratch? In my own work, I have found myself relying mainly on third-party frameworks and the Java standard library to implement solutions as per business requirements. What are your thoughts on this? 3) In terms of resume, I feel the most ambivalent here. I want to be able to "blemish" my resume to a certain extent so that it stands out from others', but at the same time I do not want to over-exagerate my abilities. How do you strike a balance here? For example: I say that I am proficient in Java with data structures and algorithms. This is obviously a subjective and relative statement. I've taken the classes in my undergrad, and I've applied it in my work experience. What I feel as "prociency" can be seen as junior-level to others. How do you know what to say? Most of the time, recruiters (with no technical background) will be looking for keywords that stand out. This leads me to my next question (4). 4) Just from interviewing for the past few months (and getting plenty of rejections), I've come to realize that I may not be as proficient in data structures and algorithms as I thought I was. Do you think it's a good idea to remove the "proficient in java/data structure and algorithms"? I feel that being too hoenst on the resume will impede me from scoring opportunities to even have an interview with top-notch companies. What are your thoughts? 5) What is the absolute "must-have" knowledge going into a technical interview? I've been practicing several algorithmic and data sturcture problems now, and I feel that my abilities to solve arbitrary problems efficiently has not gotten significantly better. Do you think these abilities are something innate - it's either you have in you, or you don't? How can you teach yourself to learn, if you will? 6) How easy is it to go from industry/function to the next? I work mainly with backend technologies and I'm now interested in working with the frontend, i.e javascript,jquery,php or even mobile development. In your own experience, how did you not get pidgeon holed in your career? I feel that the choices you make now ultimately decide your future. As cliche as it sounds, I think it may be true. Here's what I mean: you've worked mainly as a backend engineer, people are interested in you doing the same thing since you've already accumulated experience in that function. How do get experience in a new function if people won't accept you because you don't already have it? It's a catch 22, you see... Are side projects the only real way to help you move from one function to another that you're truly interested in? For example: I could start writing my own mobile applications, even though I've worked mainly on the backend. Thanks so much for the long read. As a relatively new engineer to the real world, I am very humble and would like those who are experienced to shed some light. Thank you so much.

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• Defaulting the HLSL Vertex and Pixel Shader Levels to Feature Level 9_1 in VS 2012

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I love Visual Studio 2012. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about tweaking one particular parameter that I’ve found a bit annoying. Disclaimer: You will be modifying important MSBuild files. If you screw up you will break your build tools. And maybe your computer will catch fire. I’m not responsible. No warranties or guaranties of any sort. This info is provided “as is”. By default, if you add a new vertex shader or pixel shader item to a project, it will be set to build with shader profile 4.0_level_9_3. If you need 9_3 functionality, this is all well and good. But (especially for Windows Store apps) you really want to target the lowest shader profile possible so that your game will run on as many computers as possible. So it’s a good idea to default to 9_1. To do this you could add in new HLSL files via “Add->New Item->Visual C++->HLSL->______ Shader File (.hlsl)” and then edit the shader files’ properties to set them manually to use 9_1 via “Properties->HLSL Compiler->General->Shader Model”. This is fine unless you forget to do this once and then submit your game with 9_3 shaders instead of 9_1 shaders to the Windows Store or to some other game store. Then you’d wind up with either rejection or angry “this doesn’t work on my computer! ripoff!” messages. There’s another option though. In “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VC\HLSL\1033\VertexShader” (note the path might vary slightly for you if you are using a 32-bit system or have a non-ENU version of Visual Studio 2012) you will find a “VertexShader.vstemplate” file. If you open this file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++), then inside the CustomParameters tag within the TemplateContent tag you should see a CustomParameter tag for the ShaderType, i.e.: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/> On a new line, we are going to add another CustomParameter tag to the CustomParameters tag. It will look like this: <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/> such that we now have:     <CustomParameters>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderType$" Value="Vertex"/>       <CustomParameter Name="$ShaderModel$" Value="4.0_level_9_1"/>     </CustomParameters> You can then save the file (you will need to be an Administrator or have Administrator access). Back in the 1033 directory (or whatever the number is for your language), go into the “PixelShader” directory. Edit the “PixelShader.vstemplate” file and make the same change (note that this time $ShaderType$ is “Pixel” not “Vertex”; you shouldn’t be changing that line anyway, but if you were to just copy and replace the above four lines then you will wind up creating pixel shaders that the HLSL compiler would try to compile as vertex shaders, with all sort of weird errors as a result). Once you’ve added the $ShaderModel$ line to “PixelShader.vstemplate” and have saved it, everything should be done. Since Feature Level 9_1 and 9_3 don’t support any of the other shader types, those are set to default to their appropriate minimums already (Compute and Geometry are set to “4.0” and Domain and Hull are set to “5.0”, which are their respective minimums (though not all 4.0 cards support Compute shaders; they were an optional feature added with DirectX 10.1 and only became required for DirectX 11 hardware). In case you are wondering where these magic values come from, you can find them all in the “fxc.xml” file in the “\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft.CPP\v4.0\V110\1033” directory (or whatever your language number is; 1033 is ENU and various other product languages have their own respective numbers (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964664.aspx ) such that Japanese is 1041 (for example), though for all I know MSBuild tasks might be 1033 for everyone). If, like me, you installed VS 2012 to a drive other than the C:\ drive, you will find the vstemplate files in the drive to which you installed VS 2012 (D:\ in my case) but you will find the fxc.xml file on the C:\ drive. You should not edit fxc.xml. You will almost definitely break things by doing that; it’s just something you can look through to see all the other options that the FXC task takes such that you could, if needed, add further CustomParameter tags if you wanted to default to other supported options. I haven’t tried any others though so I don’t have any advice on how to set them.

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• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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• Seven Random Thoughts on JavaOne

  - by HecklerMark

  As most people reading this blog may know, last week was JavaOne. There are a lot of summary/recap articles popping up now, and while I didn't want to just "add to pile", I did want to share a few observations. Disclaimer: I am an Oracle employee, but most of these observations are either externally verifiable or based upon a collection of opinions from Oracle and non-Oracle attendees alike. Anyway, here are a few take-aways: The Java ecosystem is alive and well, with a breadth and depth that is impossible to adequately describe in a short post...or a long post, for that matter. If there is any one area within the Java language or JVM that you would like to - or need to - know more about, it's well-represented at J1. While there are several IDEs that are used to great effect by the developer community, NetBeans is on a roll. I lost count how many sessions mentioned or used NetBeans, but it was by far the dominant IDE in use at J1. As a recent re-convert to NetBeans, I wasn't surprised others liked it so well, only how many. OpenJDK, OpenJFX, etc. Many developers were understandably concerned with the change of sponsorship/leadership when Java creator and longtime steward Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. The read I got from attendees regarding Oracle's stewardship was almost universally positive, and the push for "openness" is deep and wide within the current Java environs. Few would probably have imagined it to be this good, this soon. Someone observed that "Larry (Ellison) is competitive, and he wants to be the best...so if he wants to have a community, it will be the best community on the planet." Like any company, Oracle is bound to make missteps, but leadership seems to be striking an excellent balance between embracing open efforts and innovating in competitive paid offerings. JavaFX (2.x) isn't perfect or comprehensive, but a great many people (myself included) see great potential, are developing for it, and are really excited about where it is and where it may be headed. This is another part of the Java ecosystem that has impressive depth for being so new (JavaFX 1.x aside). If you haven't kicked the tires yet, give it a try! You'll be surprised at how capable and versatile it is, and you'll probably catch yourself smiling while coding again.  :-) JavaEE is everywhere. Not exactly a newsflash, but there is a lot of buzz around EE still/again/anew. Sessions ranged from updated component specs/technologies to Websockets/HTML5, from frameworks to profiles and application servers. Programming "server-side" Java isn't confined to the server (as you no doubt realize), and if you still consider JavaEE a cumbersome beast, you clearly haven't been using the last couple of versions. Download GlassFish or the WebLogic Zip distro (or another JavaEE 6 implementation) and treat yourself. JavaOne is not inexpensive, but to paraphrase an old saying, "If you think that's expensive, you should try ignorance." :-) I suppose it's possible to attend J1 and learn nothing, but you'd have to really work at it! Attending even a single session is bound to expand your horizons and make you approach your code, your problem domain, differently...even if it's a session about something you already know quite well. The various presenters offer vastly different perspectives and challenge you to re-think your own approach(es). And finally, if you think the scheduled sessions are great - and make no mistake, most are clearly outstanding - wait until you see what you pick up from what I like to call the "hallway sessions". Between the presentations, people freely mingle in the hallways, go to lunch and dinner together, and talk. And talk. And talk. Ideas flow freely, sparking other ideas and the "crowdsourcing" of knowledge in a way that is hard to imagine outside of a conference of this magnitude. Consider this the "GO" part of a "BOGO" (Buy One, Get One) offer: you buy the ticket to the "structured" part of JavaOne and get the hallway sessions at no additional charge. They're really that good. If you weren't able to make it to JavaOne this year, you can still watch/listen to the sessions online by visiting the JavaOne course catalog and clicking the media link(s) in the right column - another demonstration of Oracle's commitment to the Java community. But make plans to be there next year to get the full benefit! You'll be glad you did. All the best,Mark P.S. - I didn't mention several other exciting developments in areas like the embedded space and the "internet of things" (M2M), robotics, optimization, and the cloud (among others), but I think you get the idea. JavaOne == brainExpansion;  Hope to see you there next year!

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• NetBeans, JSF, and MySQL Primary Keys using AUTO_INCREMENT

  - by MarkH

  I recently had the opportunity to spin up a small web application using JSF and MySQL. Having developed JSF apps with Oracle Database back-ends before and possessing some small familiarity with MySQL (sans JSF), I thought this would be a cakewalk. Things did go pretty smoothly...but there was one little "gotcha" that took more time than the few seconds it really warranted. The Problem Every DBMS has its own way of automatically generating primary keys, and each has its pros and cons. For the Oracle Database, you use a sequence and point your Java classes to it using annotations that look something like this: @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator="POC_ID_SEQ") @SequenceGenerator(name="POC_ID_SEQ", sequenceName="POC_ID_SEQ", allocationSize=1) Between creating the actual sequence in the database and making sure you have your annotations right (watch those typos!), it seems a bit cumbersome. But it typically "just works", without fuss. Enter MySQL. Designating an integer-based field as PRIMARY KEY and using the keyword AUTO_INCREMENT makes the same task seem much simpler. And it is, mostly. But while NetBeans cranks out a superb "first cut" for a basic JSF CRUD app, there are a couple of small things you'll need to bring to the mix in order to be able to actually (C)reate records. The (RUD) performs fine out of the gate. The Solution Omitting all design considerations and activity (!), here is the basic sequence of events I followed to create, then resolve, the JSF/MySQL "Primary Key Perfect Storm": Fire up NetBeans. Create JSF project. Create Entity Classes from Database. Create JSF Pages from Entity Classes. Test run. Try to create record and hit error. It's a simple fix, but one that was fun to find in its completeness. :-) Even though you've told it what to do for a primary key, a MySQL table requires a gentle nudge to actually generate that new key value. Two things are needed to make the magic happen. First, you need to ensure the following annotation is in place in your Java entity classes: @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) All well and good, but the real key is this: in your controller class(es), you'll have a create() function that looks something like this, minus the comment line and the setId() call in bold red type:     public String create() {         try {             // Assign 0 to ID for MySQL to properly auto_increment the primary key.             current.setId(0);             getFacade().create(current);             JsfUtil.addSuccessMessage(ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("CategoryCreated"));             return prepareCreate();         } catch (Exception e) {             JsfUtil.addErrorMessage(e, ResourceBundle.getBundle("/Bundle").getString("PersistenceErrorOccured"));             return null;         }     } Setting the current object's primary key attribute to zero (0) prior to saving it tells MySQL to get the next available value and assign it to that record's key field. Short and simple…but not inherently obvious if you've never used that particular combination of NetBeans/JSF/MySQL before. Hope this helps! All the best, Mark

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• Get coordinates of arraylist

  - by opiop65

  Here's my map class: public class map{ public static final int CLEAR = 0; public static final ArrayList<Integer> STONE = new ArrayList<Integer>(); public static final int GRASS = 2; public static final int DIRT = 3; public static final int WIDTH = 32; public static final int HEIGHT = 24; public static final int TILE_SIZE = 25; // static int[][] map = new int[WIDTH][HEIGHT]; ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>> map = new ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>>(WIDTH * HEIGHT); enum tiles { air, grass, stone, dirt } Image air, grass, stone, dirt; Random rand = new Random(); public Map() { /* default map */ /*for(int y = 0; y < WIDTH; y++){ map[y][y] = (rand.nextInt(2)); System.out.println(map[y][y]); }*/ /*for (int y = 18; y < HEIGHT; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { map[x][y] = STONE; } } for (int y = 18; y < 19; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { map[x][y] = GRASS; } } for (int y = 19; y < 20; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { map[x][y] = DIRT; } }*/ for (int y = 0; y < HEIGHT; y++) { for(int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++){ map.set(x * WIDTH + y, STONE); } } try { init(null, null); } catch (SlickException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } render(null, null, null); } public void init(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg) throws SlickException { air = new Image("res/air.png"); grass = new Image("res/grass.png"); stone = new Image("res/stone.png"); dirt = new Image("res/dirt.png"); } public void render(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg, Graphics g) { for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < HEIGHT; y++) { switch (map.get(x * WIDTH + y)) { case CLEAR: air.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case STONE: stone.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case GRASS: grass.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case DIRT: dirt.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; } } } } public static boolean blocked(float x, float y) { return map[(int) x][(int) y] == STONE; } public static Rectangle blockBounds(int x, int y) { return (new Rectangle(x, y, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE)); } } Specifically I am looking at this: for (int x = 0; x < WIDTH; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < HEIGHT; y++) { switch (map.get(x * WIDTH + y).intValue()) { case CLEAR: air.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case STONE: stone.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case GRASS: grass.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; case DIRT: dirt.draw(x * TILE_SIZE, y * TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE, TILE_SIZE); break; } } } How can I access the coordinates of my arraylist map and then draw the tiles to the screen? Thanks!

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• WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010: Tips for delaying the Visual Upgrade

  - by Kelly Jones

  My most recent project has been to migrate a bunch of sites from WSS 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010.  The users are currently working with WSS 3.0 and Office 2003, so the new ribbon based UI in 2010 will be completely new.  My client wants to avoid the new SharePoint 2010 look and feel until they’ve had time to train their users, so we’ve been testing the upgrades by keeping them with the 2007 user interface. Permission to perform the Visual Upgrade One of the first things we noticed was the default permissions for who was allowed to switch the UI from 2007 to 2010.  By default, site collection administrators and site owners can do this.  Since we wanted to more tightly control the timing of the new UI, I added a few lines to the PowerShell script that we are using to perform the migration.  This script creates the web application, sets the User Policy, and then does a Mount-SPDatabase to attach the old 2007 content database to the 2010 farm.  I added the following steps after the Mount-SPDatabase step: #Remove the visual upgrade option for site owners # it remains for Site Collection administrators foreach ($sc in $WebApp.Sites){ foreach ($web in $sc.AllWebs){ #Visual Upgrade permissions for the site/subsite (web) $web.UIversionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $web.Update(); } } These script steps loop through each Site Collection in a particular web application ($WebApp) and then it loops through each subsite ($web) in the Site Collection ($sc) and disables the Site Owner’s permission to perform the Visual Upgrade. This is equivalent to going to the Site Collection administrator settings page –> Visual Upgrade and selecting “Hide Visual Upgrade”. Since only IT people have Site Collection administrator privileges, this will allow IT to control the timing of the new 2010 UI rollout. Newly created subsites Our next issue was brought to our attention by SharePoint Joel’s blog post last week (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=524 ).  In it, he lists some updates about the 2010 upgrade, and his fourth point was one that I hadn’t seen yet: 4. If a 2007 upgraded site has not been visually upgraded, the sites created underneath it will look like 2010 sites – While this is something I’ve been aware of, I think many don’t realize how this impacts common look and feel for master pages, and how it impacts good navigation and UI. As well depending on your patch level you may see hanging behavior in the list picker. The site and list creation Silverlight control in Internet Explorer is looking for resources that don’t exist in the galleries in the 2007 site, and hence it continues to spin and spin and eventually time out. The work around is to upgrade to SP1, or use Chrome or Firefox which won’t attempt to render the Silverlight control. When the root site collection is a 2007 site and has it’s set of galleries and the children are 2010 sites there is some strange behavior linked to the way that the galleries work and pull from the parent. Our production SharePoint 2010 Farm has SP1 installed, as well as the December 2011 Cumulative Update, so I think the “hanging behavior” he mentions won’t affect us. However, since we want to control the roll out of the UI, we are concerned that new subsites will have the 2010 look and feel, no matter what the parent site has. Ok, time to dust off my developer skills. I first looked into using feature stapling, but I couldn’t get that to work (although I’m pretty sure I had everything wired up correctly).  Then I stumbled upon SharePoint 2010’s web events – a great way to handle this. Using Visual Studio 2010, I created a new SharePoint project and added a Web Event Receiver: In the Event Receiver class, I used the WebProvisioned method to check if the parent site is a 2007 site (UIVersion = 3), and if so, then set the newly created site to 2007:   /// <summary> /// A site was provisioned. /// </summary> public override void WebProvisioned(SPWebEventProperties properties) { base.WebProvisioned(properties);   try { SPWeb curweb = properties.Web;   if (curweb.ParentWeb != null) {   //check if the parent website has the 2007 look and feel if (curweb.ParentWeb.UIVersion == 3) { //since parent site has 2007 look and feel // we'll apply that look and feel to the current web curweb.UIVersion = 3; curweb.Update(); } } } catch (Exception) { //TODO: Add logging for errors } }   This event is part of a Feature that is scoped to the Site Level (Site Collection).  I added a couple of lines to my migration PowerShell script to activate the Feature for any site collections that we migrate. Plan Going Forward The plan going forward is to perform the visual upgrade after the users for a particular site collection have gone through 2010 training. If we need to do several site collections at once, we’ll use a PowerShell script to loop through each site collection to update the sites to 2010.  If it’s just one or two, we’ll be using the “Update All Sites” button on the Visual Upgrade page for Site Collection Administrators. The custom code for newly created sites won’t need to be changed, since it relies on the UI version of the parent site.  If the parent is 2010, then the new site will look 2010.

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• Thread.Interrupt Is Evil

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use (I know I am one of the very few fans of it).  After a quick analysis I did find that the main thread already had exited and the thread with the crash was stuck in a Monitor.Wait. Strange Indeed. Running the application a few thousand times under the debugger would potentially not have shown me what the reason was so I decided to what I call constructive debugging. I did create a simple Console application project and try to simulate the exact circumstances when the crash did happen from the information I have via memory dump and source code reading. The thread that was  crashing was actually MS code from an old version of the Microsoft Caching Application Block. From reading the code I could conclude that the main thread did call the Dispose method on the CacheManger class which did call Thread.Interrupt on the cache scavenger thread which was just waiting for work to do. My first version of the repro looked like this   static void Main(string[] args) { Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); } static void ThreadFunc() { while (true) { object value = Dequeue(); // block until unblocked or awaken via ThreadInterruptedException } } static object WaitObject = new object(); static object Dequeue() { object lret = "got value"; try { lock (WaitObject) { } } catch (ThreadInterruptedException) { Console.WriteLine("Got ThreadInterruptException"); lret = null; } return lret; } I do start a background thread and call Thread.Interrupt on it and then directly let the application terminate. The thread in the meantime does plenty of Monitor.Enter/Leave calls to simulate work on it. This first version did not crash. So I need to dig deeper. From the memory dump I did know that the finalizer thread was doing just some critical finalizers which were closing file handles. Ok lets add some long running finalizers to the sample. class FinalizableObject : CriticalFinalizerObject { ~FinalizableObject() { Console.WriteLine("Hi we are waiting to finalize now and block the finalizer thread for 5s."); Thread.Sleep(5000); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { FinalizableObject fin = new FinalizableObject(); Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); GC.KeepAlive(fin); // prevent finalizing it too early // After leaving main the other thread is woken up via Thread.Abort // while we are finalizing. This causes a stackoverflow in the CLR ThreadAbortException handling at this time. } With this changed Main method and a blocking critical finalizer I did get my crash just like the real application. The funny thing is that this is actually a CLR bug. When the main method is left the CLR does suspend all threads except the finalizer thread and declares all objects as garbage. After the normal finalizers were called the critical finalizers are executed to e.g. free OS handles (usually). Remember that I did call Thread.Interrupt as one of the last methods in the Main method. The Interrupt method is actually asynchronous and does wake a thread up and throws a ThreadInterruptedException only once unlike Thread.Abort which does rethrow the exception when an exception handling clause is left. It seems that the CLR does not expect that a frozen thread does wake up again while the critical finalizers are executed. While trying to raise a ThreadInterrupedException the CLR goes down with an stack overflow. Ups not so nice. Why has this nobody noticed for years is my next question. As it turned out this error does only happen on the CLR for .NET 4.0 (x86 and x64). It does not show up in earlier or later versions of the CLR. I have reported this issue on connect here but so far it was not confirmed as a CLR bug. But I would be surprised if my console application was to blame for a stack overflow in my test thread in a Monitor.Wait call. What is the moral of this story? Thread.Abort is evil but Thread.Interrupt is too. It is so evil that even the CLR of .NET 4.0 contains a race condition during the CLR shutdown. When the CLR gurus can get it wrong the chances are high that you get it wrong too when you use this constructs. If you do not believe me see what Patrick Smacchia does blog about Thread.Abort and List.Sort. Not only the CLR creators can get it wrong. The BCL writers do sometimes have a hard time with correct exception handling as well. If you do tell me that you use Thread.Abort frequently and never had problems with it I do suspect that you do not have looked deep enough into your application to find such sporadic errors.

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• Airline mess - what a journey

  - by Mike Dietrich

  What a day, what a journey ... Flew this noon from Munich to Zuerich for catch my ongoing flight to San Francisco with Swiss. And that day did start very well as Lufthansa messed up the connection flight by 42 minutes for a 35 minute flight. And as I was obviously the only passenger connection to San Francisco nobody picked me up at the airplane to bring me directly to my connection as Swiss did for the 8 passengers connection to Miami. So I missed my flight. What a start - and many thanks to Lufthansa. I was not the only one missing a connection as Lufthansa/Swiss had canceled the flight before due to "technical problems". In Zuerich Swiss did rebook me via Frankfurt with Lufthansa to board a United Airlines flight to San Francisco. "Ouch" I thought. I had my share of experience with United already as they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco some years ago and it took them five (!!!) days to fly my bag over and deliver it. But actually it was the only option today. So I said "Yes". A big mistake as I've learned later on. The Frankfurt flight was delayed as well "due to a late incoming aircraft". But there was plenty of time. And I went to the Swiss counter at the gate and let them check if my baggage is on that flight to Frankfurt. They've said "Yes". Boarding the plane with a delay of 45 minutes (the typical Lufthansa delay these days) I spotted my Rimowa trolley right next to the plane on the airfield. So I was sure that it will be send to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I went to the United counter once it did open - had to go through the passport check they do for US flights as well - and they've said "Yes, your luggage is with us". Well ... Arriving in San Francisco with just a bit of a some minutes delay and a very fast immigration procedure I saw the first bags with Priority tags getting pushed to the baggage claim - but mine was not there. I did wait ... and wait ... and wait. Well, thanks United, you did it again!!! I flew twice in the past years United Airlines - and in both cases they've messed up my luggage on the way to San Francisco. How lovely is that ... Now the real fun started again as the lady at the "Lost and Found" counter for luggage spotted my luggage in her system in Zuerich - and told me it's supposed to be sent with LH1191 to Frankfurt on Sept 27. But this was yesterday in Europe - it's already Sept 28 - and I saw my luggage in front of the airplane. So I'd suppose it's in Frankfurt already. But what could she do? Nothing but doing the awful paperwork. And "No Mr Dietrich, we don't call international numbers". Thank you, United. Next time I'll try to get a contract for a US land line in advance. They can't even tell you which plane will bring your luggage. It may be tomorrow with UA flight arriving around 4pm in SFO. I'm looking forward to some hours in the wonderful United Airlines call center waiting line. Last time I did spend 60-90 minutes every day until I got my luggage. If it takes again that long then OOW will be over by then. I love airline travel - and especially with United Airlines. And by the way ... they gave us these nice fancy packages during the flight:  That looks good - what's in that box??? Yes, really ... a bag of potato chips. Pure fat - very healthy.  I doubt that I'll ever fly United Airlines again!!!

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• How to Inspect Javascript Object

  - by Madhan ayyasamy

  You can inspect any JavaScript objects and list them as indented, ordered by levels.It shows you type and property name. If an object property can't be accessed, an error message will be shown.Here the snippets for inspect javascript object.function inspect(obj, maxLevels, level){  var str = '', type, msg;    // Start Input Validations    // Don't touch, we start iterating at level zero    if(level == null)  level = 0;    // At least you want to show the first level    if(maxLevels == null) maxLevels = 1;    if(maxLevels < 1)             return '<font color="red">Error: Levels number must be > 0</font>';    // We start with a non null object    if(obj == null)    return '<font color="red">Error: Object <b>NULL</b></font>';    // End Input Validations    // Each Iteration must be indented    str += '<ul>';    // Start iterations for all objects in obj    for(property in obj)    {      try      {          // Show "property" and "type property"          type =  typeof(obj[property]);          str += '<li>(' + type + ') ' + property +                  ( (obj[property]==null)?(': <b>null</b>'):('')) + '</li>';          // We keep iterating if this property is an Object, non null          // and we are inside the required number of levels          if((type == 'object') && (obj[property] != null) && (level+1 < maxLevels))          str += inspect(obj[property], maxLevels, level+1);      }      catch(err)      {        // Is there some properties in obj we can't access? Print it red.        if(typeof(err) == 'string') msg = err;        else if(err.message)        msg = err.message;        else if(err.description)    msg = err.description;        else                        msg = 'Unknown';        str += '<li><font color="red">(Error) ' + property + ': ' + msg +'</font></li>';      }    }      // Close indent      str += '</ul>';    return str;}Method Call:function inspect(obj [, maxLevels [, level]]) Input Vars * obj: Object to inspect * maxLevels: Optional. Number of levels you will inspect inside the object. Default MaxLevels=1 * level: RESERVED for internal use of the functionReturn ValueHTML formatted string containing all values of inspected object obj.

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• Existential CAML - does an item exist?

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved More CAML and existence. In “SharePoint List Issues” and “Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL we saw how to use CAML to return a subset of a list and also how to check the existence of lists, fields, defaults, and values.   Here is a general function that may be used to get a subset of a list by comparing a “text” type field to a given value.  The function is pretty smart. It can be used to check existence or to return a collection of items that may be further processed. It handles non existing fields and replaces them with the ubiquitous “Title”, but only once!  /// Build an SPQuery that returns a selected set of columns from a List /// titleField must be a "Text" type field /// When the titleField parameter is empty ("") "Title" is assumed /// When the title parameter is empty ("") All is assumed /// When the columnNames parameter is null, the query returns all the fields /// When the rowLimit parameter is 0, the query return all the items. /// with a non-zero, the query returns at most rowLimits /// /// usage: to check if an item titled "Blah" exists in your list, do: /// colNames = {"Title"} /// col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(myList, "", "Blah", colNames, 1) /// Check the col.Count. if > 0 the item exists and is in the collection private static SPListItemCollection GetListItemColumnByTitle(SPList list, string titleField, string title, string[] columnNames, uint rowLimit) {   try   {     char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34);     SPQuery query = new SPQuery();     if (title != "")     {       string tf = titleField;       if (titleField == "") tf = "Title";       tf = CAMLThisName(list, tf, "Title");        StringBuilder titleQuery = new StringBuilder  ("<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name=");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append(tf);       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append("/><Value Type=");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append("Text");       titleQuery.Append(QT);       titleQuery.Append(">");       titleQuery.Append(title);       titleQuery.Append("</Value></Eq></Where>");       query.Query = titleQuery.ToString();     }     if (columnNames.Length != 0)     {       StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("");       bool TitleAlreadyIncluded = false;       foreach (string columnName in columnNames)       {         string tst = CAMLThisName(list, columnName, "Title");         //Allow Title only once         if (tst != "Title" || !TitleAlreadyIncluded)         {           sb.Append("<FieldRef Name=");           sb.Append(QT);           sb.Append(tst);           sb.Append(QT);           sb.Append("/>");           if (tst == "Title") TitleAlreadyIncluded = true;         }       }       query.ViewFields = sb.ToString();     }     if (rowLimit > 0)     {        query.RowLimit = rowLimit;     }     SPListItemCollection col = list.GetItems(query);     return col;   }   catch (Exception ex)   {     //Console.WriteLine("GetListItemColumnByTitle" + ex.ToString());     //sw.WriteLine("GetListItemColumnByTitle" + ex.ToString());     return null;   } } Here I called it for a list in which “Author” (it is the internal name for “Created”) and “Blah” do not exist. The list of column names is:  string[] columnNames = {"Test Column1", "Title", "Author", "Allow Multiple Ratings", "Blah"};  So if I use this call, I get all the items for which “01-STD MIL_some” has the value of 1. the fields returned are: “Test Column1”, “Title”, and “Allow Multiple Ratings”. Because “Title” was already included and the default for non exixsting is “Title”, it was not replicated for the 2 non-existing fields.  SPListItemCollection col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(masterList, "01-STD MIL_some", "1", columnNames, 0); The following call checks if there are any items where “01-STD MIL_some” has the value of “1”. Note that I limited the number of returned items to 1.  SPListItemCollection col = GetListItemColumnByTitle(masterList, "01-STD MIL_some", "1", columnNames, 1); The code also uses the CAMLThisName function that checks for an existence of a field and returns its InternalName. This is yet another useful function that I use again and again.  /// <summary> /// return a fields internal name (CAMLName)  /// or the "default" name that you passed. /// To check existence pass "" or some funny name like "mud in your eye" /// </summary> public static string CAMLThisName(SPList list, string name, string def) {   String CAMLName = def;   SPField fld = GetFieldByName(list, name);   if (fld != null)   {      CAMLName = fld.InternalName;   }   return CAMLName; } That’s all folks?!

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• BizTalk 2009 - Custom Functoid Wizard

  - by StuartBrierley

  When creating BizTalk maps you may find that there are times when you need perform tasks that the standard functoids do not cover.  At other times you may find yourself reapeating a pattern of standard functoids over and over again, adding visual complexity to an otherwise simple process.  In these cases you may find it preferable to create your own custom functoids.  In the past I have created a number of custom functoids from scratch, but recently I decided to try out the Custom Functoid Wizard for BizTalk 2009. After downloading and installing the wizard you should start Visual Studio and select to create a new BizTalk Server Functoid Project. Following the splash screen you will be presented with the General Properties screen, where you can set the classname, namespace, assembly name and strong name key file. The next screen is the first set of properties for the functoid.  First of all is the fuctoid ID; this must be a value above 6000. You should also then set the name, tooltip and description of the functoid.  The name will appear in the visual studio toolbox and the tooltip on hover over in the toolbox.  The descrition will be shown when you configure the functoid inputs when using it in a map; as such it should provide a decent level of information to allow the functoid to be used. Next you must set the category, exception mesage, icon and implementation language.  The category will affect the positioning of the functoid within the toolbox and also some of the behaviours of the functoid. We must then define the parameters and connections for our new functoid.  Here you can define the names and types of your input parameters along with the minimum and maximum number of input connections.  You will also need to define the types of connections accepted and the output type of the functoid. Finally you can click finish and your custom functoid project will be created. The results of this process can be seen in the solution explorer, where you will see that a project, functoid class file and a resource file have been created for you. If you open the class file you will see that the following code has been created for you: The "base" function sets all the properties that you previsouly detailed in the custom functoid wizard.  public TestFunctoids():base()  {    int functoidID;    // This has to be a number greater than 6000    functoidID = System.Convert.ToInt32(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidId"));    this.ID = functoidID;    // Set Resource strings, bitmaps    SetupResourceAssembly(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    SetName("FunctoidName");                     SetTooltip("FunctoidToolTip");    SetDescription("FunctoidDescription");    SetBitmap("FunctoidBitmap");    // Minimum and maximum parameters that the functoid accepts    this.SetMinParams(2);    this.SetMaxParams(2);    /// Function name that needs to be called when this Functoid is invoked.    /// Put this in GAC.    SetExternalFunctionName(GetType().Assembly.FullName,     "MyCompany.BizTalk.Functoids.TestFuntoids.TestFunctoids", "Execute");    // Category for this functoid.    this.Category = FunctoidCategory.String;    // Input and output Connection type    this.OutputConnectionType = ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord;    AddInputConnectionType(ConnectionType.AllExceptRecord);   } The "Execute" function provides a skeleton function that contains the code to be executed by your new functoid.  The inputs and outputs should match those you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard.   public System.Int32 Execute(System.Int32 Cool)   {    ResourceManager resmgr = new ResourceManager(ResourceName, Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());    try    {     // TODO: Implement Functoid Logic    }    catch (Exception e)    {     throw new Exception(resmgr.GetString("FunctoidException"), e);    }   } Opening the resource file you will see some of the various string values that you defined in the Custom Functoid Wizard - Name, Tooltip, Description and Exception. You can also select to look at the image resources.  This will display the embedded icon image for the functoid.  To change this right click the icon and select "Import from File". Once you have completed the skeleton code you can then look at trying out your functoid. To do this you will need to build the project, copy the compiled DLL to C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\Developer Tools\Mapper Extensions and then refresh the toolbox in visual studio.

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• How to Implement Single Sign-On between Websites

  - by hmloo

  Introduction Single sign-on (SSO) is a way to control access to multiple related but independent systems, a user only needs to log in once and gains access to all other systems. a lot of commercial systems that provide Single sign-on solution and you can also choose some open source solutions like Opensso, CAS etc. both of them use centralized authentication and provide more robust authentication mechanism, but if each system has its own authentication mechanism, how do we provide a seamless transition between them. Here I will show you the case. How it Works The method we’ll use is based on a secret key shared between the sites. Origin site has a method to build up a hashed authentication token with some other parameters and redirect the user to the target site. variables Status Description ssoEncode required hash(ssoSharedSecret + , + ssoTime + , + ssoUserName) ssoTime required timestamp with format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS used to prevent playback attacks ssoUserName required unique username; required when a user is logged in Note : The variables will be sent via POST for security reasons Building a Single Sign-On Solution Origin Site has function to 1. Create the URL for your Request. 2. Generate required authentication parameters 3. Redirect to target site. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string postbackUrl = "http://www.targetsite.com/sso.aspx"; string ssoTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"); string ssoUserName = User.Identity.Name; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string ssoHash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); string value = string.Format("{0}:{1},{2}", ssoHash,ssoTime, ssoUserName); Response.Clear(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<html>"); sb.AppendFormat(@"<body onload='document.forms[""form""].submit()'>"); sb.AppendFormat("<form name='form' action='{0}' method='post'>", postbackUrl); sb.AppendFormat("<input type='hidden' name='t' value='{0}'>", value); sb.Append("</form>"); sb.Append("</body>"); sb.Append("</html>"); Response.Write(sb.ToString()); Response.End(); } } Target Site has function to 1. Get authentication parameters. 2. Validate the parameters with shared secret. 3. If the user is valid, then do authenticate and redirect to target page. 4. If the user is invalid, then show errors and return. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx"); } } if (Request.Params.Get("t") != null) { string ticket = Request.Params.Get("t"); char[] delimiters = new char[] { ':', ',' }; string[] ssoVariable = ticket.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.None); string ssoHash = ssoVariable[0]; string ssoTime = ssoVariable[1]; string ssoUserName = ssoVariable[2]; DateTime appTime = DateTime.MinValue; int offsetTime = 60; // get this from config or similar try { appTime = DateTime.ParseExact(ssoTime, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", null); } catch { //show error return; } if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } bool isValid = false; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); if (string.Compare(ssoHash, hash, true) == 0) { if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } else { isValid = true; } } if (isValid) { //Do authenticate; } else { //show error return; } } else { //show error } } } Summary This is a very simple and basic SSO solution, and its main advantage is its simplicity, only needs to add a single page to do SSO authentication, do not need to modify the existing system infrastructure.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 4): Script Configuration

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've had a chance to play around with the Schema Compare for Oracle beta, you may have come across this screen in the synchronization wizard: This screen is one of the few screens that, along with the project configuration form, doesn't come from SQL Compare. This screen was designed to solve a couple of issues that, although aren't specific to Oracle, are much more of a problem than on SQL Server: Datatype conversions and NOT NULL columns. 1. Datatype conversions SQL Server is generally quite forgiving when it comes to datatype conversions using ALTER TABLE. For example, you can convert from a VARCHAR to INT using ALTER TABLE as long as all the character values are parsable as integers. Oracle, on the other hand, only allows ALTER TABLE conversions that don't change the internal data format. Essentially, every change that requires an actual datatype conversion has to be done using a rebuild with a conversion function. That's OK, as we can simply hard-code the various conversion functions for the valid datatype conversions and insert those into the rebuild SELECT list. However, as there always is with Oracle, there's a catch. Have a look at the NUMTODSINTERVAL function. As well as specifying the value (or column) to convert, you have to specify an interval_unit, which tells oracle how to interpret the input number. We can't hardcode a default for this parameter, as it is entirely dependent on the user's data context! So, in order to convert NUMBER to INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND/INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH, we need to have feedback from the user as to what to put in this parameter while we're generating the sync script - this requires a new step in the engine action/script generation to insert these values into the script, as well as new UI to allow the user to specify these values in a sensible fashion. In implementing the engine and UI infrastructure to allow this it made much more sense to implement it for any rebuild datatype conversion, not just NUMBER to INTERVALs. For conversions which we can do, we pre-fill the 'value' box with the appropriate function from the documentation. The user can also type in arbitary SQL expressions, which allows the user to specify optional format parameters for the relevant conversion functions, or indeed call their own functions to convert between values that don't have a built-in conversion defined. As the value gets inserted as-is into the rebuild SELECT list, any expression that is valid in that context can be specified as the conversion value. 2. NOT NULL columns Another problem that is solved by the new step in the sync wizard is adding a NOT NULL column to a table. If the table contains data (as most database tables do), you can't just add a NOT NULL column, as Oracle doesn't know what value to put in the new column for existing rows - the DDL statement will fail. There are actually 3 separate scenarios for this problem that have separate solutions within the engine: Adding a NOT NULL column to a table without a rebuild Here, the workaround is to add a column default with an appropriate value to the column you're adding: ALTER TABLE tbl1 ADD newcol NUMBER DEFAULT <value> NOT NULL; Note, however, there is something to bear in mind about this solution; once specified on a column, a default cannot be removed. To 'remove' a default from a column you change it to have a default of NULL, hence there's code in the engine to treat a NULL default the same as no default at all. Adding a NOT NULL column to a table, where a separate change forced a table rebuild Fortunately, in this case, a column default is not required - we can simply insert the default value into the rebuild SELECT clause. Changing an existing NULL to a NOT NULL column To implement this, we run an UPDATE command before the ALTER TABLE to change all the NULLs in the column to the required default value. For all three, we need some way of allowing the user to specify a default value to use instead of NULL; as this is essentially the same problem as datatype conversion (inserting values into the sync script), we can re-use the UI and engine implementation of datatype conversion values. We also provide the option to alter the new column to allow NULLs, or to ignore the problem completely. Note that there is the same (long-running) problem in SQL Compare, but it is much more of an issue in Oracle as you cannot easily roll back executed DDL statements if the script fails at some point during execution. Furthermore, the engine of SQL Compare is far less conducive to inserting user-supplied values into the generated script. As we're writing the Schema Compare engine from scratch, we used what we learnt from the SQL Compare engine and designed it to be far more modular, which makes inserting procedures like this much easier.

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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