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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Auto blocking attacking IP address

  - by dong

  This is to share my PowerShell code online. I original asked this question on MSDN forum (or TechNet?) here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserversecurity/thread/f950686e-e3f8-4cf2-b8ec-2685c1ed7a77 In short, this is trying to find attacking IP address then add it into Firewall block rule. So I suppose: 1, You are running a Windows Server 2008 facing the Internet. 2, You need to have some port open for service, e.g. TCP 21 for FTP; TCP 3389 for Remote Desktop. You can see in my code I’m only dealing with these two since that’s what I opened. You can add further port number if you like, but the way to process might be different with these two. 3, I strongly suggest you use STRONG password and follow all security best practices, this ps1 code is NOT for adding security to your server, but reduce the nuisance from brute force attack, and make sys admin’s life easier: i.e. your FTP log won’t hold megabytes of nonsense, your Windows system log will not roll back and only can tell you what happened last month. 4, You are comfortable with setting up Windows Firewall rules, in my code, my rule has a name of “MY BLACKLIST”, you need to setup a similar one, and set it to BLOCK everything. 5, My rule is dangerous because it has the risk to block myself out as well. I do have a backup plan i.e. the DELL DRAC5 so that if that happens, I still can remote console to my server and reset the firewall. 6, By no means the code is perfect, the coding style, the use of PowerShell skills, the hard coded part, all can be improved, it’s just that it’s good enough for me already. It has been running on my server for more than 7 MONTHS. 7, Current code still has problem, I didn’t solve it yet, further on this point after the code. :)    #Dong Xie, March 2012  #my simple code to monitor attack and deal with it  #Windows Server 2008 Logon Type  #8: NetworkCleartext, i.e. FTP  #10: RemoteInteractive, i.e. RDP    $tick = 0;  "Start to run at: " + (get-date);    $regex1 = [regex] "192\.168\.100\.(?:101|102):3389\s+(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)";  $regex2 = [regex] "Source Network Address:\t(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)";    while($True) {   $blacklist = @();     "Running... (tick:" + $tick + ")"; $tick+=1;    #Port 3389  $a = @()  netstat -no | Select-String ":3389" | ? { $m = $regex1.Match($_); `    $ip = $m.Groups[1].Value; if ($m.Success -and $ip -ne "10.0.0.1") {$a = $a + $ip;} }  if ($a.count -gt 0) {    $ips = get-eventlog Security -Newest 1000 | Where-Object {$_.EventID -eq 4625 -and $_.Message -match "Logon Type:\s+10"} | foreach { `      $m = $regex2.Match($_.Message); $ip = $m.Groups[1].Value; $ip; } | Sort-Object | Tee-Object -Variable list | Get-Unique    foreach ($ip in $a) { if ($ips -contains $ip) {      if (-not ($blacklist -contains $ip)) {        $attack_count = ($list | Select-String $ip -SimpleMatch | Measure-Object).count;        "Found attacking IP on 3389: " + $ip + ", with count: " + $attack_count;        if ($attack_count -ge 20) {$blacklist = $blacklist + $ip;}      }      }    }  }      #FTP  $now = (Get-Date).AddMinutes(-5); #check only last 5 mins.     #Get-EventLog has built-in switch for EventID, Message, Time, etc. but using any of these it will be VERY slow.  $count = (Get-EventLog Security -Newest 1000 | Where-Object {$_.EventID -eq 4625 -and $_.Message -match "Logon Type:\s+8" -and `              $_.TimeGenerated.CompareTo($now) -gt 0} | Measure-Object).count;  if ($count -gt 50) #threshold  {     $ips = @();     $ips1 = dir "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\FPTSVC2" | Sort-Object -Property LastWriteTime -Descending `       | select -First 1 | gc | select -Last 200 | where {$_ -match "An\+error\+occured\+during\+the\+authentication\+process."} `        | Select-String -Pattern "(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)" | select -ExpandProperty Matches | select -ExpandProperty value | Group-Object `        | where {$_.Count -ge 10} | select -ExpandProperty Name;       $ips2 = dir "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\FTPSVC3" | Sort-Object -Property LastWriteTime -Descending `       | select -First 1 | gc | select -Last 200 | where {$_ -match "An\+error\+occured\+during\+the\+authentication\+process."} `        | Select-String -Pattern "(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)" | select -ExpandProperty Matches | select -ExpandProperty value | Group-Object `        | where {$_.Count -ge 10} | select -ExpandProperty Name;     $ips += $ips1; $ips += $ips2; $ips = $ips | where {$_ -ne "10.0.0.1"} | Sort-Object | Get-Unique;         foreach ($ip in $ips) {       if (-not ($blacklist -contains $ip)) {        "Found attacking IP on FTP: " + $ip;        $blacklist = $blacklist + $ip;       }     }  }        #Firewall change <# $current = (netsh advfirewall firewall show rule name="MY BLACKLIST" | where {$_ -match "RemoteIP"}).replace("RemoteIP:", "").replace(" ","").replace("/255.255.255.255",""); #inside $current there is no \r or \n need remove. foreach ($ip in $blacklist) { if (-not ($current -match $ip) -and -not ($ip -like "10.0.0.*")) {"Adding this IP into firewall blocklist: " + $ip; $c= 'netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="MY BLACKLIST" new RemoteIP="{0},{1}"' -f $ip, $current; Invoke-Expression $c; } } #>    foreach ($ip in $blacklist) {    $fw=New-object –comObject HNetCfg.FwPolicy2; # http://blogs.technet.com/b/jamesone/archive/2009/02/18/how-to-manage-the-windows-firewall-settings-with-powershell.aspx    $myrule = $fw.Rules | where {$_.Name -eq "MY BLACKLIST"} | select -First 1; # Potential bug here?    if (-not ($myrule.RemoteAddresses -match $ip) -and -not ($ip -like "10.0.0.*"))      {"Adding this IP into firewall blocklist: " + $ip;         $myrule.RemoteAddresses+=(","+$ip);      }  }    Wait-Event -Timeout 30 #pause 30 secs    } # end of top while loop.   Further points: 1, I suppose the server is listening on port 3389 on server IP: 192.168.100.101 and 192.168.100.102, you need to replace that with your real IP. 2, I suppose you are Remote Desktop to this server from a workstation with IP: 10.0.0.1. Please replace as well. 3, The threshold for 3389 attack is 20, you don’t want to block yourself just because you typed your password wrong 3 times, you can change this threshold by your own reasoning. 4, FTP is checking the log for attack only to the last 5 mins, you can change that as well. 5, I suppose the server is serving FTP on both IP address and their LOG path are C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\FPTSVC2 and C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\FPTSVC3. Change accordingly. 6, FTP checking code is only asking for the last 200 lines of log, and the threshold is 10, change as you wish. 7, the code runs in a loop, you can set the loop time at the last line. To run this code, copy and paste to your editor, finish all the editing, get it to your server, and open an CMD window, then type powershell.exe –file your_powershell_file_name.ps1, it will start running, you can Ctrl-C to break it. This is what you see when it’s running: This is when it detected attack and adding the firewall rule: Regarding the design of the code: 1, There are many ways you can detect the attack, but to add an IP into a block rule is no small thing, you need to think hard before doing it, reason for that may include: You don’t want block yourself; and not blocking your customer/user, i.e. the good guy. 2, Thus for each service/port, I double check. For 3389, first it needs to show in netstat.exe, then the Event log; for FTP, first check the Event log, then the FTP log files. 3, At three places I need to make sure I’m not adding myself into the block rule. –ne with single IP, –like with subnet.   Now the final bit: 1, The code will stop working after a while (depends on how busy you are attacked, could be weeks, months, or days?!) It will throw Red error message in CMD, don’t Panic, it does no harm, but it also no longer blocking new attack. THE REASON is not confirmed with MS people: the COM object to manage firewall, you can only give it a list of IP addresses to the length of around 32KB I think, once it reaches the limit, you get the error message. 2, This is in fact my second solution to use the COM object, the first solution is still in the comment block for your reference, which is using netsh, that fails because being run from CMD, you can only throw it a list of IP to 8KB. 3, I haven’t worked the workaround yet, some ideas include: wrap that RemoteAddresses setting line with error checking and once it reaches the limit, use the newly detected IP to be the list, not appending to it. This basically reset your block rule to ground zero and lose the previous bad IPs. This does no harm as it sounds, because given a certain period has passed, any these bad IPs still not repent and continue the attack to you, it only got 30 seconds or 20 guesses of your password before you block it again. And there is the benefit that the bad IP may turn back to the good hands again, and you are not blocking a potential customer or your CEO’s home pc because once upon a time, it’s a zombie. Thus the ZEN of blocking: never block any IP for too long. 4, But if you insist to block the ugly forever, my other ideas include: You call MS support, ask them how can we set an arbitrary length of IP addresses in a rule; at least from my experiences at the Forum, they don’t know and they don’t care, because they think the dynamic blocking should be done by some expensive hardware. Or, from programming perspective, you can create a new rule once the old is full, then you’ll have MY BLACKLIST1, MY  BLACKLIST2, MY BLACKLIST3, … etc. Once in a while you can compile them together and start a business to sell your blacklist on the market! Enjoy the code! p.s. (PowerShell is REALLY REALLY GREAT!)

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• Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code

  - by DigiMortal

  Code contracts and unit tests are not replacements for each other. They both have different purpose and different nature. It does not matter if you are using code contracts or not – you still have to write tests for your code. In this posting I will show you how to unit test code with contracts. In my previous posting about code contracts I showed how to avoid ContractExceptions that are defined in code contracts runtime and that are not accessible for us in design time. This was one step further to make my randomizer testable. In this posting I will complete the mission. Problems with current code This is my current code. public class Randomizer {     public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           var rnd = new Random();         return rnd.Next(min, max);     } } As you can see this code has some problems: randomizer class is static and cannot be instantiated. We cannot move this class between components if we need to, GetRandomFromRangeContracted() is not fully testable because we cannot currently affect random number generator output and therefore we cannot test post-contract. Now let’s solve these problems. Making randomizer testable As a first thing I made Randomizer to be class that must be instantiated. This is simple thing to do. Now let’s solve the problem with Random class. To make Randomizer testable I define IRandomGenerator interface and RandomGenerator class. The public constructor of Randomizer accepts IRandomGenerator as argument. public interface IRandomGenerator {     int Next(int min, int max); }   public class RandomGenerator : IRandomGenerator {     private Random _random = new Random();       public int Next(int min, int max)     {         return _random.Next(min, max);     } } And here is our Randomizer after total make-over. public class Randomizer {     private IRandomGenerator _generator;       private Randomizer()     {         _generator = new RandomGenerator();     }       public Randomizer(IRandomGenerator generator)     {         _generator = generator;     }       public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           return _generator.Next(min, max);     } } It seems to be inconvenient to instantiate Randomizer now but you can always use DI/IoC containers and break compiled dependencies between the components of your system. Writing tests for randomizer IRandomGenerator solved problem with testing post-condition. Now it is time to write tests for Randomizer class. Writing tests for contracted code is not easy. The main problem is still ContractException that we are not able to access. Still it is the main exception we get as soon as contracts fail. Although pre-conditions are able to throw exceptions with type we want we cannot do much when post-conditions will fail. We have to use Contract.ContractFailed event and this event is called for every contract failure. This way we find ourselves in situation where supporting well input interface makes it impossible to support output interface well and vice versa. ContractFailed is nasty hack and it works pretty weird way. Although documentation sais that ContractFailed is good choice for testing contracts it is still pretty painful. As a last chance I got tests working almost normally when I wrapped them up. Can you remember similar solution from the times of Visual Studio 2008 unit tests? Cannot understand how Microsoft was able to mess up testing again. [TestClass] public class RandomizerTest {     private Mock<IRandomGenerator> _randomMock;     private Randomizer _randomizer;     private string _lastContractError;       public TestContext TestContext { get; set; }       public RandomizerTest()     {         Contract.ContractFailed += (sender, e) =>         {             e.SetHandled();             e.SetUnwind();               throw new Exception(e.FailureKind + ": " + e.Message);         };     }       [TestInitialize()]     public void RandomizerTestInitialize()     {         _randomMock = new Mock<IRandomGenerator>();         _randomizer = new Randomizer(_randomMock.Object);         _lastContractError = string.Empty;     }       #region InputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_not_less_than_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(100, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_equal_to_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(10, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_work_when_min_is_less_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 50;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(minValue, maxValue))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           var result = _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);           _randomMock.Verify();         Assert.AreEqual<int>(returnValue, result);     }     #endregion       #region OutputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_less_than_min()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 7;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_more_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 102;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }     #endregion        } Although these tests are pretty awful and contain hacks we are at least able now to make sure that our code works as expected. Here is the test list after running these tests. Conclusion Code contracts are very new stuff in Visual Studio world and as young technology it has some problems – like all other new bits and bytes in the world. As you saw then making our contracted code testable is easy only to the point when pre-conditions are considered. When we start dealing with post-conditions we will end up with hacked tests. I hope that future versions of code contracts will solve error handling issues the way that testing of contracted code will be easier than it is right now.

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• Stop Spinning Your Wheels&hellip; Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

  - by Mark Rackley

  So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day.  It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”.  Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off…  make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development.  97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”.  “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain.  I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service.  Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!!  Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that?  oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?”   Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there.  So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later.  How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.”  Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.”  Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available.  So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• MonologFX: FLOSS JavaFX Dialogs for the Taking

  - by HecklerMark

  Some time back, I was searching for basic dialog functionality within JavaFX and came up empty. After finding a decent open-source offering on GitHub that almost fit the bill, I began using it...and immediately began thinking of ways to "do it differently."  :-)  Having a weekend to kill, I ended up creating DialogFX and releasing it on GitHub (hecklerm/DialogFX) for anyone who might find it useful. Shortly thereafter, it was incorporated into JFXtras (jfxtras.org) as well. Today I'm sharing a different, more flexible and capable JavaFX dialog called MonologFX that I've been developing and refining over the past few months. The summary of its progression thus far is pretty well captured in the README.md file I posted with the project on GitHub: After creating the DialogFX library for JavaFX, I received several suggestions and requests for additional or different functionality, some of which ran counter to the interfaces and/or intent of the DialogFX "way of doing things". Great ideas, but not completely compatible with the existing functionality. Wanting to incorporate these capabilities, I started over...incorporating some parts of DialogFX into the new MonologFX, as I called it, but taking it in a different direction when it seemed sensible to do so. In the meantime, the OpenJFX team has released dialog code that will be refined and eventually incorporated into JavaFX and OpenJFX. Rather than just scrap the MonologFX code or hoard it, I'm releasing it here on GitHub with the hope that someone may find it useful, interesting, or entertaining. You may never need it, but regardless, MonologFX is there for the taking. Things of Note So, what are some features of MonologFX? Four kinds of dialog boxes: ACCEPT (check mark icon), ERROR (red 'x'), INFO (blue "i"), and QUESTION (blue question mark) Button alignment configurable by developer: LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER Skins/stylesheets support Shortcut key/mnemonics support (Alt-<key>) Ability to designate default (RETURN-key) and cancel (ESCAPE-key) buttons Built-in button types and labels for OK, CANCEL, ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE, YES, and NO Custom button types: CUSTOM1, CUSTOM2, CUSTOM3 Internationalization (i18n) built in. Currently, files are provided for English/US and Spanish/Spain locales; please share others and I'll add them! Icon support for your buttons, with or without text labels Fully Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), with latest source code & .jar always available at GitHub Quick Usage Overview Having an intense distaste for rough edges and gears flying when things break (!), I've tried to provide defaults for everything and "fail-safes" to avoid messy outcomes if some property isn't specified, etc. This also feeds the goal of making MonologFX as easy to use as possible, while retaining the library's full flexibility. Or at least that's the plan.  :-) You can hand-assemble your buttons and dialogs, but I've also included Builder classes to help move that along as well. Here are a couple examples:         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.OK)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.CANCEL)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Please feel free to try it out and share your thoughts.")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.CENTER)                .build();         MonologFXButton.Type retval = mono.showDialog();         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.YES)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.NO)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .type(MonologFX.Type.QUESTION)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Does this look like it might be useful?")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.RIGHT)                .build(); Extra Credit Thanks to everyone who offered ideas for improvement and/or extension to the functionality contained within DialogFX. The JFXtras team welcomed it into the fold, and while I doubt there will be a need to include MonologFX in JFXtras, team members Gerrit Grunwald & Jose Peredas Llamas volunteered templates and i18n expertise to make MonologFX what it is. Thanks for the push, guys! Where to Get (Git!) It If you'd like to check it out, point your browser to the MonologFX repository on GitHub. Full source code is there, along with the current .jar file. Please give it a try and share your thoughts! I'd love to hear from you. All the best,Mark

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• Simplex Noise Help

  - by Alex Larsen

  Im Making A Minecraft Like Gae In XNA C# And I Need To Generate Land With Caves This Is The Code For Simplex I Have /// <summary> /// 1D simplex noise /// </summary> /// <param name="x"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static float Generate(float x) { int i0 = FastFloor(x); int i1 = i0 + 1; float x0 = x - i0; float x1 = x0 - 1.0f; float n0, n1; float t0 = 1.0f - x0 * x0; t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[i0 & 0xff], x0); float t1 = 1.0f - x1 * x1; t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[i1 & 0xff], x1); // The maximum value of this noise is 8*(3/4)^4 = 2.53125 // A factor of 0.395 scales to fit exactly within [-1,1] return 0.395f * (n0 + n1); } /// <summary> /// 2D simplex noise /// </summary> /// <param name="x"></param> /// <param name="y"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static float Generate(float x, float y) { const float F2 = 0.366025403f; // F2 = 0.5*(sqrt(3.0)-1.0) const float G2 = 0.211324865f; // G2 = (3.0-Math.sqrt(3.0))/6.0 float n0, n1, n2; // Noise contributions from the three corners // Skew the input space to determine which simplex cell we're in float s = (x + y) * F2; // Hairy factor for 2D float xs = x + s; float ys = y + s; int i = FastFloor(xs); int j = FastFloor(ys); float t = (float)(i + j) * G2; float X0 = i - t; // Unskew the cell origin back to (x,y) space float Y0 = j - t; float x0 = x - X0; // The x,y distances from the cell origin float y0 = y - Y0; // For the 2D case, the simplex shape is an equilateral triangle. // Determine which simplex we are in. int i1, j1; // Offsets for second (middle) corner of simplex in (i,j) coords if (x0 > y0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; } // lower triangle, XY order: (0,0)->(1,0)->(1,1) else { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; } // upper triangle, YX order: (0,0)->(0,1)->(1,1) // A step of (1,0) in (i,j) means a step of (1-c,-c) in (x,y), and // a step of (0,1) in (i,j) means a step of (-c,1-c) in (x,y), where // c = (3-sqrt(3))/6 float x1 = x0 - i1 + G2; // Offsets for middle corner in (x,y) unskewed coords float y1 = y0 - j1 + G2; float x2 = x0 - 1.0f + 2.0f * G2; // Offsets for last corner in (x,y) unskewed coords float y2 = y0 - 1.0f + 2.0f * G2; // Wrap the integer indices at 256, to avoid indexing perm[] out of bounds int ii = i % 256; int jj = j % 256; // Calculate the contribution from the three corners float t0 = 0.5f - x0 * x0 - y0 * y0; if (t0 < 0.0f) n0 = 0.0f; else { t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[ii + perm[jj]], x0, y0); } float t1 = 0.5f - x1 * x1 - y1 * y1; if (t1 < 0.0f) n1 = 0.0f; else { t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[ii + i1 + perm[jj + j1]], x1, y1); } float t2 = 0.5f - x2 * x2 - y2 * y2; if (t2 < 0.0f) n2 = 0.0f; else { t2 *= t2; n2 = t2 * t2 * grad(perm[ii + 1 + perm[jj + 1]], x2, y2); } // Add contributions from each corner to get the final noise value. // The result is scaled to return values in the interval [-1,1]. return 40.0f * (n0 + n1 + n2); // TODO: The scale factor is preliminary! } public static float Generate(float x, float y, float z) { // Simple skewing factors for the 3D case const float F3 = 0.333333333f; const float G3 = 0.166666667f; float n0, n1, n2, n3; // Noise contributions from the four corners // Skew the input space to determine which simplex cell we're in float s = (x + y + z) * F3; // Very nice and simple skew factor for 3D float xs = x + s; float ys = y + s; float zs = z + s; int i = FastFloor(xs); int j = FastFloor(ys); int k = FastFloor(zs); float t = (float)(i + j + k) * G3; float X0 = i - t; // Unskew the cell origin back to (x,y,z) space float Y0 = j - t; float Z0 = k - t; float x0 = x - X0; // The x,y,z distances from the cell origin float y0 = y - Y0; float z0 = z - Z0; // For the 3D case, the simplex shape is a slightly irregular tetrahedron. // Determine which simplex we are in. int i1, j1, k1; // Offsets for second corner of simplex in (i,j,k) coords int i2, j2, k2; // Offsets for third corner of simplex in (i,j,k) coords /* This code would benefit from a backport from the GLSL version! */ if (x0 >= y0) { if (y0 >= z0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 1; k2 = 0; } // X Y Z order else if (x0 >= z0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 0; k2 = 1; } // X Z Y order else { i1 = 0; j1 = 0; k1 = 1; i2 = 1; j2 = 0; k2 = 1; } // Z X Y order } else { // x0<y0 if (y0 < z0) { i1 = 0; j1 = 0; k1 = 1; i2 = 0; j2 = 1; k2 = 1; } // Z Y X order else if (x0 < z0) { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; k1 = 0; i2 = 0; j2 = 1; k2 = 1; } // Y Z X order else { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 1; k2 = 0; } // Y X Z order } // A step of (1,0,0) in (i,j,k) means a step of (1-c,-c,-c) in (x,y,z), // a step of (0,1,0) in (i,j,k) means a step of (-c,1-c,-c) in (x,y,z), and // a step of (0,0,1) in (i,j,k) means a step of (-c,-c,1-c) in (x,y,z), where // c = 1/6. float x1 = x0 - i1 + G3; // Offsets for second corner in (x,y,z) coords float y1 = y0 - j1 + G3; float z1 = z0 - k1 + G3; float x2 = x0 - i2 + 2.0f * G3; // Offsets for third corner in (x,y,z) coords float y2 = y0 - j2 + 2.0f * G3; float z2 = z0 - k2 + 2.0f * G3; float x3 = x0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; // Offsets for last corner in (x,y,z) coords float y3 = y0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; float z3 = z0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; // Wrap the integer indices at 256, to avoid indexing perm[] out of bounds int ii = i % 256; int jj = j % 256; int kk = k % 256; // Calculate the contribution from the four corners float t0 = 0.6f - x0 * x0 - y0 * y0 - z0 * z0; if (t0 < 0.0f) n0 = 0.0f; else { t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[ii + perm[jj + perm[kk]]], x0, y0, z0); } float t1 = 0.6f - x1 * x1 - y1 * y1 - z1 * z1; if (t1 < 0.0f) n1 = 0.0f; else { t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[ii + i1 + perm[jj + j1 + perm[kk + k1]]], x1, y1, z1); } float t2 = 0.6f - x2 * x2 - y2 * y2 - z2 * z2; if (t2 < 0.0f) n2 = 0.0f; else { t2 *= t2; n2 = t2 * t2 * grad(perm[ii + i2 + perm[jj + j2 + perm[kk + k2]]], x2, y2, z2); } float t3 = 0.6f - x3 * x3 - y3 * y3 - z3 * z3; if (t3 < 0.0f) n3 = 0.0f; else { t3 *= t3; n3 = t3 * t3 * grad(perm[ii + 1 + perm[jj + 1 + perm[kk + 1]]], x3, y3, z3); } // Add contributions from each corner to get the final noise value. // The result is scaled to stay just inside [-1,1] return 32.0f * (n0 + n1 + n2 + n3); // TODO: The scale factor is preliminary! } private static byte[] perm = new byte[512] { 151,160,137,91,90,15, 131,13,201,95,96,53,194,233,7,225,140,36,103,30,69,142,8,99,37,240,21,10,23, 190, 6,148,247,120,234,75,0,26,197,62,94,252,219,203,117,35,11,32,57,177,33, 88,237,149,56,87,174,20,125,136,171,168, 68,175,74,165,71,134,139,48,27,166, 77,146,158,231,83,111,229,122,60,211,133,230,220,105,92,41,55,46,245,40,244, 102,143,54, 65,25,63,161, 1,216,80,73,209,76,132,187,208, 89,18,169,200,196, 135,130,116,188,159,86,164,100,109,198,173,186, 3,64,52,217,226,250,124,123, 5,202,38,147,118,126,255,82,85,212,207,206,59,227,47,16,58,17,182,189,28,42, 223,183,170,213,119,248,152, 2,44,154,163, 70,221,153,101,155,167, 43,172,9, 129,22,39,253, 19,98,108,110,79,113,224,232,178,185, 112,104,218,246,97,228, 251,34,242,193,238,210,144,12,191,179,162,241, 81,51,145,235,249,14,239,107, 49,192,214, 31,181,199,106,157,184, 84,204,176,115,121,50,45,127, 4,150,254, 138,236,205,93,222,114,67,29,24,72,243,141,128,195,78,66,215,61,156,180, 151,160,137,91,90,15, 131,13,201,95,96,53,194,233,7,225,140,36,103,30,69,142,8,99,37,240,21,10,23, 190, 6,148,247,120,234,75,0,26,197,62,94,252,219,203,117,35,11,32,57,177,33, 88,237,149,56,87,174,20,125,136,171,168, 68,175,74,165,71,134,139,48,27,166, 77,146,158,231,83,111,229,122,60,211,133,230,220,105,92,41,55,46,245,40,244, 102,143,54, 65,25,63,161, 1,216,80,73,209,76,132,187,208, 89,18,169,200,196, 135,130,116,188,159,86,164,100,109,198,173,186, 3,64,52,217,226,250,124,123, 5,202,38,147,118,126,255,82,85,212,207,206,59,227,47,16,58,17,182,189,28,42, 223,183,170,213,119,248,152, 2,44,154,163, 70,221,153,101,155,167, 43,172,9, 129,22,39,253, 19,98,108,110,79,113,224,232,178,185, 112,104,218,246,97,228, 251,34,242,193,238,210,144,12,191,179,162,241, 81,51,145,235,249,14,239,107, 49,192,214, 31,181,199,106,157,184, 84,204,176,115,121,50,45,127, 4,150,254, 138,236,205,93,222,114,67,29,24,72,243,141,128,195,78,66,215,61,156,180 }; private static int FastFloor(float x) { return (x > 0) ? ((int)x) : (((int)x) - 1); } private static float grad(int hash, float x) { int h = hash & 15; float grad = 1.0f + (h & 7); // Gradient value 1.0, 2.0, ..., 8.0 if ((h & 8) != 0) grad = -grad; // Set a random sign for the gradient return (grad * x); // Multiply the gradient with the distance } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y) { int h = hash & 7; // Convert low 3 bits of hash code float u = h < 4 ? x : y; // into 8 simple gradient directions, float v = h < 4 ? y : x; // and compute the dot product with (x,y). return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -2.0f * v : 2.0f * v); } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y, float z) { int h = hash & 15; // Convert low 4 bits of hash code into 12 simple float u = h < 8 ? x : y; // gradient directions, and compute dot product. float v = h < 4 ? y : h == 12 || h == 14 ? x : z; // Fix repeats at h = 12 to 15 return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -v : v); } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y, float z, float t) { int h = hash & 31; // Convert low 5 bits of hash code into 32 simple float u = h < 24 ? x : y; // gradient directions, and compute dot product. float v = h < 16 ? y : z; float w = h < 8 ? z : t; return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -v : v) + ((h & 4) != 0 ? -w : w); } This Is My World Generation Code Block[,] BlocksInMap = new Block[1024, 256]; public bool IsWorldGenerated = false; Random r = new Random(); private void RunThread() { for (int BH = 0; BH <= 256; BH++) { for (int BW = 0; BW <= 1024; BW++) { Block b = new Block(); if (BH >= 192) { } BlocksInMap[BW, BH] = b; } } IsWorldGenerated = true; } public void GenWorld() { new Thread(new ThreadStart(RunThread)).Start(); } And This Is A Example Of How I Set Blocks Block b = new Block(); b.BlockType = = Block.BlockTypes.Air; This Is A Example Of How I Set Models foreach (Block b in MyWorld) { switch(b.BlockType) { case Block.BlockTypes.Dirt: b.Model = DirtModel; break; ect. } } How Would I Use These To Generate To World (The Block Array) And If Possible Thread It More? btw It's 1024 Wide And 256 Tall

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 13, 2012Popular ReleasesSymphony Framework: Symphony Framework v2.0.0.6: Symphony Framework version 2.0.0.6. has just been released General note: If you install Symphony Framework 2.0.0.6 you must re-generate all your code-generated source files, resource files, controls and windows. Failure to regenerate will cause your applications to fail. Symphony Framework requires at least version 4.2.3 of CodeGen due to some new functionality that has been added. Please ensure that you download and install the latest version of CodeGen. You can review the full release ...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.2.1: Version 1.2.1 Changes: Improved collage image distribution to overlap older images first. Set default collage background blur distance to 4 (provides a more gradual effect). Fixed issue where wallpaper not displayed on Windows Vista when Cross-Fade transitions enabled. Fixed issue with duplicated themes not updating history view correctly.????: ???? 1.0: ????ALinq Dynamic (Entity SQL for Linq to SQL): ALinq Dynamic v1.1: 1. Fix a few bugs about aggregate function. 2. Supports more functions. 3. Append more samples.Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office ??? ?????、Unicode IVS?????????????????Unicode IVS???????????????。??、??????????????、?????????????????????????????。Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.74: fix for issue #18836 - sometimes throws null-reference errors in ActivationObject.AnalyzeScope method. add back the Context object's 8-parameter constructor, since someone has code that's using it. throw a low-pri warning if an expression statement is == or ===; warn that the developer may have meant an assignment (=). if window.XXXX or window"XXXX" is encountered, add XXXX (as long as it's a valid JavaScript identifier) to the known globals so subsequent references to XXXX won't throw ...Home Access Plus+: v8.3: Changes: Fixed: A odd scroll bar showing up for no reason Changed: Added some code to hopefully sort out the details view when there is a small number of files Fixed: Where the details toolbar shows in the wrong place until you scroll Fixed: Where the Help Desk live tile shows all open tiles, instead of user specific tiles (admins still see all) Added: Powerpoint Files Filter Added: Print style for Booking System Added: Silent check for the logon tracker Updated: Logon Tracker I...???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releaseVidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...SQL Server Partitioned Table Framework: Partitioned Table Framework Release 1.0: SQL Server 2012 ReleaseSharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...New Projects3jidi IPTV App: 3jidi IPTV application on microsoft mediaroomAX 2012 Custom Operating Units: With this tool, non technical users can create custom operating units, link them with existing org model, model custom units as financial dimensions etc.BASE32 Encoder: This awesome app let you convert all your music, pictures and video to brand new BASE32 encoding! BilgeAdam.ChannelShow: BilgeAdam.ChannelShowBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Bubble Trouble: This is a game where you are trapped in a room with lethal bubbles bouncing around the rooms. You must use your special vine gun to shoot and pop the bubbles!ClomibepASP (Suspended): PL: Zaawansowany system zarzadzania trescia ClomibepASP. EN: Advenced content managment system ClomibepASP.CoBaS - Contract Based Serializer: The serialization framework that cares for bits and speed :)DelegateDuck: New stub library for C#. You can build with it any object using delegates and such an object can be casted to any compatible interface.Demir Yayincilik: Ulusal arastirmacilarin ana dilleri ile yaptiklari yayinlarin kolay dagitilmasi ve izlenmesi gereksiniminden hareketle kurulan Demir yayincilik...DNN LiveEvents: DotNetNuke Live Events ModuleFamFamFam Silk Icons Atlas (CSS Sprites): A CSS/Image generator for CSS Sprites (Atlas) for FamFamFam Silk iconsGuid Finder Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Guid Finder Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. This Solution helps to find any record "GUID" across all entities in Dynamics CRM. hyd: a game demoJogo do Galo: JOGO DO GALO REGRAS •O tabuleiro é a matriz de três linhas em três colunas. •Dois jogadores escolhem três peças cada um. •Os jogadores jogam alternadamente, uma peça de cada vez, num espaço que esteja vazio. •O objectivo é conseguir três peças iguais em linha, quer horizontal, vjQCalendarPart: jQCalendarPart is a JS application which when added to a CEWP in SP 2010 will display a jQuery Calendar control with the upcoming events from the Calendar list.Kinect Table Tennis: A 2D Top-down Kinect table tennis game! Booyeah!MathNullable: The example of the Nullable Mathematics.Metro Launch: Metro Launch is a new Start menu inspired by Windows 8's.Monoxide.Diagnostics: This is Systems.Diagnostics source code extracted from Mono so that people on any platform (Windows, too!) can extend more of the tracing framework.new1325: hellonew1327: helloPizza-Service: School Project of a Pizza-Service application.ProjectOnElance: SomeProjectOnElanceRemote Controller for Trackmania: Evzrecon is a remote controller for Trackmania Forever dedicated servers, much like XASECO but written in Java.SoftRenderer: a software rendererStripeOne ShortenUrl: Projeto de estudo para encurtar urls, com cms para o usuário (caso seja registrado ou por sessão) e cms administrativo com estatisticas de urls mais usadas.testtom11122012git01: htesttom11122012hg01: fdstesttom11122012tfs01: fdstesttom11122012tfs03: rewThe new Basecamp API C# Wrapper: This project aims to be a complete C# wrapper around the new Basecamp API. Direct API call support in addition to convenience methods are provided.TVendas: Este projeto surgiu com a necessidade de se ter um software de gerenciamento de vendas web e gratuito. Então surgiu o TVendas.WDTVHUBLIVE Companion: Intitial summary : This is a project to learn C# and to create an application to manage media on a WDTVLiveHub. WordTrending: ECE 275 Assignment #4Yet another SharePoint 2010 Deployment Script: The following PowerShell script is intended to help operations staff as well as developers to automate the base installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. Zytonic Hotkeys: Zytonic Hotkeys Is a User Library That Aims to defeat The hassle of creating User Hotkeys for your .NET Applications.????: ????

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• A jQuery Plug-in to monitor Html Element CSS Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's a scenario I've run into on a few occasions: I need to be able to monitor certain CSS properties on an HTML element and know when that CSS element changes. The need for this arose out of wanting to build generic components that could 'attach' themselves to other objects and monitor changes on the ‘parent’ object so the dependent object can adjust itself accordingly. What I wanted to create is a jQuery plug-in that allows me to specify a list of CSS properties to monitor and have a function fire in response to any change to any of those CSS properties. The result are the .watch() and .unwatch() jQuery plug-ins. Here’s a simple example page of this plug-in that demonstrates tracking changes to an element being moved with draggable and closable behavior: http://www.west-wind.com/WestWindWebToolkit/samples/Ajax/jQueryPluginSamples/WatcherPlugin.htm Try it with different browsers – IE and FireFox use the DOM event handlers and Chrome, Safari and Opera use setInterval handlers to manage this behavior. It should work in all of them but all but IE and FireFox will show a bit of lag between the changes in the main element and the shadow. The relevant HTML for this example is this fragment of a main <div> (#notebox) and an element that is to mimic a shadow (#shadow). <div class="containercontent"> <div id="notebox" style="width: 200px; height: 150px;position: absolute; z-index: 20; padding: 20px; background-color: lightsteelblue;"> Go ahead drag me around and close me! </div> <div id="shadow" style="background-color: Gray; z-index: 19;position:absolute;display: none;"> </div> </div> The watcher plug in is then applied to the main <div> and shadow in sync with the following plug-in code: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { var counter = 0; $("#notebox").watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); var sh = $("#shadow"); var propChanged = data.props[i]; var valChanged = data.vals[i]; counter++; showStatus("Prop: " + propChanged + " value: " + valChanged + " " + counter); var pos = el.position(); var w = el.outerWidth(); var h = el.outerHeight(); sh.css({ width: w, height: h, left: pos.left + 5, top: pos.top + 5, display: el.css("display"), opacity: el.css("opacity") }); }) .draggable() .closable() .css("left", 10); }); </script> When you run this page as you drag the #notebox element the #shadow element will maintain and stay pinned underneath the #notebox element effectively keeping the shadow attached to the main element. Likewise, if you hide or fadeOut() the #notebox element the shadow will also go away – show the #notebox element and the shadow also re-appears because we are assigning the display property from the parent on the shadow. Note we’re attaching the .watch() plug-in to the #notebox element and have it fire whenever top,left,height,width,opacity or display CSS properties are changed. The passed data element contains a props[] and vals[] array that holds the properties monitored and their current values. An index passed as the second parm tells you which property has changed and what its current value is (propChanged/valChanged in the code above). The rest of the watcher handler code then deals with figuring out the main element’s position and recalculating and setting the shadow’s position using the jQuery .css() function. Note that this is just an example to demonstrate the watch() behavior here – this is not the best way to create a shadow. If you’re interested in a more efficient and cleaner way to handle shadows with a plug-in check out the .shadow() plug-in in ww.jquery.js (code search for fn.shadow) which uses native CSS features when available but falls back to a tracked shadow element on browsers that don’t support it, which is how this watch() plug-in came about in the first place :-) How does it work? The plug-in works by letting the user specify a list of properties to monitor as a comma delimited string and a handler function: el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) {}, 100, id) You can also specify an interval (if no DOM event monitoring isn’t available in the browser) and an ID that identifies the event handler uniquely. The watch plug-in works by hooking up to DOMAttrModified in FireFox, to onPropertyChanged in Internet Explorer, or by using a timer with setInterval to handle the detection of changes for other browsers. Unfortunately WebKit doesn’t support DOMAttrModified consistently at the moment so Safari and Chrome currently have to use the slower setInterval mechanism. In response to a changed property (or a setInterval timer hit) a JavaScript handler is fired which then runs through all the properties monitored and determines if and which one has changed. The DOM events fire on all property/style changes so the intermediate plug-in handler filters only those hits we’re interested in. If one of our monitored properties has changed the specified event handler function is called along with a data object and an index that identifies the property that’s changed in the data.props/data.vals arrays. The jQuery plugin to implement this functionality looks like this: (function($){ $.fn.watch = function (props, func, interval, id) { /// <summary> /// Allows you to monitor changes in a specific /// CSS property of an element by polling the value. /// when the value changes a function is called. /// The function called is called in the context /// of the selected element (ie. this) /// </summary> /// <param name="prop" type="String">CSS Properties to watch sep. by commas</param> /// <param name="func" type="Function"> /// Function called when the value has changed. /// </param> /// <param name="interval" type="Number"> /// Optional interval for browsers that don't support DOMAttrModified or propertychange events. /// Determines the interval used for setInterval calls. /// </param> /// <param name="id" type="String">A unique ID that identifies this watch instance on this element</param> /// <returns type="jQuery" /> if (!interval) interval = 100; if (!id) id = "_watcher"; return this.each(function () { var _t = this; var el$ = $(this); var fnc = function () { __watcher.call(_t, id) }; var data = { id: id, props: props.split(","), vals: [props.split(",").length], func: func, fnc: fnc, origProps: props, interval: interval, intervalId: null }; // store initial props and values $.each(data.props, function (i) { data.vals[i] = el$.css(data.props[i]); }); el$.data(id, data); hookChange(el$, id, data); }); function hookChange(el$, id, data) { el$.each(function () { var el = $(this); if (typeof (el.get(0).onpropertychange) == "object") el.bind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.bind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else data.intervalId = setInterval(data.fnc, interval); }); } function __watcher(id) { var el$ = $(this); var w = el$.data(id); if (!w) return; var _t = this; if (!w.func) return; // must unbind or else unwanted recursion may occur el$.unwatch(id); var changed = false; var i = 0; for (i; i < w.props.length; i++) { var newVal = el$.css(w.props[i]); if (w.vals[i] != newVal) { w.vals[i] = newVal; changed = true; break; } } if (changed) w.func.call(_t, w, i); // rebind event hookChange(el$, id, w); } } $.fn.unwatch = function (id) { this.each(function () { var el = $(this); var data = el.data(id); try { if (typeof (this.onpropertychange) == "object") el.unbind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.unbind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else clearInterval(data.intervalId); } // ignore if element was already unbound catch (e) { } }); return this; } })(jQuery); Note that there’s a corresponding .unwatch() plug-in that can be used to stop monitoring properties. The ID parameter is optional both on watch() and unwatch() – a standard name is used if you don’t specify one, but it’s a good idea to use unique names for each element watched to avoid overlap in event ids especially if you’re monitoring many elements. The syntax is: $.fn.watch = function(props, func, interval, id) props A comma delimited list of CSS style properties that are to be watched for changes. If any of the specified properties changes the function specified in the second parameter is fired. func The function fired in response to a changed styles. Receives this as the element changed and an object parameter that represents the watched properties and their respective values. The first parameter is passed in this structure: { id: watcherId, props: [], vals: [], func: thisFunc, fnc: internalHandler, origProps: strPropertyListOnWatcher }; A second parameter is the index of the changed property so data.props[i] or data.vals[i] gets the property and changed value. interval The interval for setInterval() for those browsers that don't support property watching in the DOM. In milliseconds. id An optional id that identifies this watcher. Required only if multiple watchers might be hooked up to the same element. The default is _watcher if not specified. It’s been a Journey I started building this plug-in about two years ago and had to make many modifications to it in response to changes in jQuery and also in browser behaviors. I think the latest round of changes made should make this plug-in fairly future proof going forward (although I hope there will be better cross-browser change event notifications in the future). One of the big problems I ran into had to do with recursive change notifications – it looks like starting with jQuery 1.44 and later, jQuery internally modifies element properties on some calls to some .css()  property retrievals and things like outerHeight/Width(). In IE this would cause nasty lock up issues at times. In response to this I changed the code to unbind the events when the handler function is called and then rebind when it exits. This also makes user code less prone to stack overflow recursion as you can actually change properties on the base element. It also means though that if you change one of the monitors properties in the handler the watch() handler won’t fire in response – you need to resort to a setTimeout() call instead to force the code to run outside of the handler: $("#notebox") el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); … // this makes el changes work setTimeout(function () { el.css("top", 10) },10); }) Since I’ve built this component I’ve had a lot of good uses for it. The .shadow() fallback functionality is one of them. Resources The watch() plug-in is part of ww.jquery.js and the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. You’re free to use this code here or the code from the toolkit. West Wind Web Toolkit Latest version of ww.jquery.js (search for fn.watch) watch plug-in documentation © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  JavaScript  jQuery  

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• Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

  - by Roger Hart

  Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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• obiee memory usage

  - by user554629

  Heap memory is a frequent customer topic. Here's the quick refresher, oriented towards AIX, but the principles apply to other unix implementations. 1. 32-bit processes have a maximum addressability of 4GB; usable application heap size of 2-3 GB.  On AIX it is controlled by an environment variable: export LDR_CNTRL=....=MAXDATA=0x080000000   # 2GB ( The leading zero is deliberate, not required )   1a. It is  possible to get 3.25GB  heap size for a 32-bit process using @DSA (Discontiguous Segment Allocation)     export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0xd0000000@DSA  # 3.25 GB 32-bit only        One side-effect of using AIX segments "c" and "d" is that shared libraries will be loaded privately, and not shared.        If you need the additional heap space, this is worth the trade-off.  This option is frequently used for 32-bit java.   1b. 64-bit processes have no need for the @DSA option. 2. 64-bit processes can double the 32-bit heap size to 4GB using: export LDR_CNTRL=....=MAXDATA=0x100000000  # 1 with 8-zeros    2a. But this setting would place the same memory limitations on obiee as a 32-bit process    2b. The major benefit of 64-bit is to break the binds of 32-bit addressing.  At a minimum, use 8GB export LDR_CNTRL=....=MAXDATA=0x200000000  # 2 with 8-zeros    2c.  Many large customers are providing extra safety to their servers by using 16GB: export LDR_CNTRL=....=MAXDATA=0x400000000  # 4 with 8-zeros There is no performance penalty for providing virtual memory allocations larger than required by the application.  - If the server only uses 2GB of space in 64-bit ... specifying 16GB just provides an upper bound cushion.    When an unexpected user query causes a sudden memory surge, the extra memory keeps the server running. 3.  The next benefit to 64-bit is that you can provide huge thread stack sizes for      strange queries that might otherwise crash the server.      nqsserver uses fast recursive algorithms to traverse complicated control structures.    This means lots of thread space to hold the stack frames.    3a. Stack frames mostly contain register values;  64-bit registers are twice as large as 32-bit          At a minimum you should  quadruple the size of the server stack threads in NQSConfig.INI          when migrating from 32- to 64-bit, to prevent a rogue query from crashing the server.           Allocate more than is normally necessary for safety.    3b. There is no penalty for allocating more stack size than you need ...           it is just virtual memory;   no real resources  are consumed until the extra space is needed.    3c. Increasing thread stack sizes may require the process heap size (MAXDATA) to be increased.          Heap space is used for dynamic memory requests, and for thread stacks.          No performance penalty to run with large heap and thread stack sizes.           In a 32-bit world, this safety would require careful planning to avoid exceeding 2GM usable storage.     3d. Increasing the number of threads also may require additional heap storage.          Most thread stack frames on obiee are allocated when the server is started,          and the real memory usage increases as threads run work. Does 2.8GB sound like a lot of memory for an AIX application server? - I guess it is what you are accustomed to seeing from "grandpa's applications". - One of the primary design goals of obiee is to trade memory for services ( db, query caches, etc) - 2.8GB is still well under the 4GB heap size allocated with MAXDATA=0x100000000 - 2.8GB process size is also possible even on 32-bit Windows applications - It is not unusual to receive a sudden request for 30MB of contiguous storage on obiee.- This is not a memory leak;  eventually the nqsserver storage will stabilize, but it may take days to do so. vmstat is the tool of choice to observe memory usage.  On AIX vmstat will show  something that may be  startling to some people ... that available free memory ( the 2nd column ) is always  trending toward zero ... no available free memory.  Some customers have concluded that "nearly zero memory free" means it is time to upgrade the server with more real memory.   After the upgrade, the server again shows very little free memory available. Should you be concerned about this?   Many customers are !!  Here is what is happening: - AIX filesystems are built on a paging model.   If you read/write a  filesystem block it is paged into memory ( no read/write system calls ) - This filesystem "page" has its own "backing store" on disk, the original filesystem block.   When the system needs the real memory page holding the file block, there is no need to "page out".    The page can be stolen immediately, because the original is still on disk in the filesystem. - The filesystem  pages tend to collect ... every filesystem block that was ever seen since    system boot is available in memory.  If another application needs the file block, it is retrieved with no physical I/O. What happens if the system does need the memory ... to satisfy a 30MB heap request by nqsserver, for example? - Since the filesystem blocks have their own backing store ( not on a paging device )   the kernel can just steal any filesystem block ... on a least-recently-used basis   to satisfy a new real memory request for "computation pages". No cause for alarm.   vmstat is accurately displaying whether all filesystem blocks have been touched, and now reside in memory.   Back to nqsserver:  when should you be worried about its memory footprint? Answer:  Almost never.   Stop monitoring it ... stop fussing over it ... stop trying to optimize it. This is a production application, and nqsserver uses the memory it requires to accomplish the job, based on demand. C'mon ... never worry?   I'm from New York ... worry is what we do best. Ok, here is the metric you should be watching, using vmstat: - Are you paging ... there are several columns of vmstat outputbash-2.04$ vmstat 3 3 System configuration: lcpu=4 mem=4096MB kthr    memory              page              faults        cpu    ----- ------------ ------------------------ ------------ -----------  r  b    avm   fre  re  pi  po  fr   sr  cy  in   sy  cs us sy id wa  0  0 208492  2600   0   0   0   0    0   0  13   45  73  0  0 99  0  0  0 208492  2600   0   0   0   0    0   0   9   12  77  0  0 99  0  0  0 208492  2600   0   0   0   0    0   0   9   40  86  0  0 99  0 avm is the "available free memory" indicator that trends toward zerore   is "re-page".  The kernel steals a real memory page for one process;  immediately repages back to original processpi  "page in".   A process memory page previously paged out, now paged back in because the process needs itpo "page out" A process memory block was paged out, because it was needed by some other process Light paging activity ( re, pi, po ) is not a concern for worry.   Processes get started, need some memory, go away. Sustained paging activity  is cause for concern.   obiee users are having a terrible day if these counters are always changing. Hang on ... if nqsserver needs that memory and I reduce MAXDATA to keep the process under control, won't the nqsserver process crash when the memory is needed? Yes it will.   It means that nqsserver is configured to require too much memory and there are  lots of options to reduce the real memory requirement.  - number of threads  - size of query cache  - size of sort But I need nqsserver to keep running. Real memory is over-committed.    Many things can cause this:- running all application processes on a single server    ... DB server, web servers, WebLogic/WebSphere, sawserver, nqsserver, etc.   You could move some of those to another host machine and communicate over the network  The need for real memory doesn't go away, it's just distributed to other host machines. - AIX LPAR is configured with too little memory.     The AIX admin needs to provide more real memory to the LPAR running obiee. - More memory to this LPAR affects other partitions. Then it's time to visit your friendly IBM rep and buy more memory.

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• Oracle Solaris: Zones on Shared Storage

  - by Jeff Victor

  Oracle Solaris 11.1 has several new features. At oracle.com you can find a detailed list. One of the significant new features, and the most significant new feature releated to Oracle Solaris Zones, is casually called "Zones on Shared Storage" or simply ZOSS (rhymes with "moss"). ZOSS offers much more flexibility because you can store Solaris Zones on shared storage (surprise!) so that you can perform quick and easy migration of a zone from one system to another. This blog entry describes and demonstrates the use of ZOSS. ZOSS provides complete support for a Solaris Zone that is stored on "shared storage." In this case, "shared storage" refers to fiber channel (FC) or iSCSI devices, although there is one lone exception that I will demonstrate soon. The primary intent is to enable you to store a zone on FC or iSCSI storage so that it can be migrated from one host computer to another much more easily and safely than in the past. With this blog entry, I wanted to make it easy for you to try this yourself. I couldn't assume that you have a SAN available - which is a good thing, because neither do I! What could I use, instead? [There he goes, foreshadowing again... -Ed.] Developing this entry reinforced the lesson that the solution to every lab problem is VirtualBox. Oracle VM VirtualBox (its formal name) helps here in a couple of important ways. It offers the ability to easily install multiple copies of Solaris as guests on top of any popular system (Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Solaris, Oracle Linux (and other Linuxes) etc.). It also offers the ability to create a separate virtual disk drive (VDI) that appears as a local hard disk to a guest. This virtual disk can be moved very easily from one guest to another. In other words, you can follow the steps below on a laptop or larger x86 system. Please note that the ability to use ZOSS to store a zone on a local disk is very useful for a lab environment, but not so useful for production. I do not suggest regularly moving disk drives among computers. In the method I describe below, that virtual hard disk will contain the zone that will be migrated among the (virtual) hosts. In production, you would use FC or iSCSI LUNs instead. The zonecfg(1M) man page details the syntax for each of the three types of devices. Why Migrate? Why is the migration of virtual servers important? Some of the most common reasons are: Moving a workload to a different computer so that the original computer can be turned off for extensive maintenance. Moving a workload to a larger system because the workload has outgrown its original system. If the workload runs in an environment (such as a Solaris Zone) that is stored on shared storage, you can restore the service of the workload on an alternate computer if the original computer has failed and will not reboot. You can simplify lifecycle management of a workload by developing it on a laptop, migrating it to a test platform when it's ready, and finally moving it to a production system. Concepts For ZOSS, the important new concept is named "rootzpool". You can read about it in the zonecfg(1M) man page, but here's the short version: it's the backing store (hard disk(s), or LUN(s)) that will be used to make a ZFS zpool - the zpool that will hold the zone. This zpool: contains the zone's Solaris content, i.e. the root file system does not contain any content not related to the zone can only be mounted by one Solaris instance at a time Method Overview Here is a brief list of the steps to create a zone on shared storage and migrate it. The next section shows the commands and output. You will need a host system with an x86 CPU (hopefully at least a couple of CPU cores), at least 2GB of RAM, and at least 25GB of free disk space. (The steps below will not actually use 25GB of disk space, but I don't want to lead you down a path that ends in a big sign that says "Your HDD is full. Good luck!") Configure the zone on both systems, specifying the rootzpool that both will use. The best way is to configure it on one system and then copy the output of "zonecfg export" to the other system to be used as input to zonecfg. This method reduces the chances of pilot error. (It is not necessary to configure the zone on both systems before creating it. You can configure this zone in multiple places, whenever you want, and migrate it to one of those places at any time - as long as those systems all have access to the shared storage.) Install the zone on one system, onto shared storage. Boot the zone. Provide system configuration information to the zone. (In the Real World(tm) you will usually automate this step.) Shutdown the zone. Detach the zone from the original system. Attach the zone to its new "home" system. Boot the zone. The zone can be used normally, and even migrated back, or to a different system. Details The rest of this shows the commands and output. The two hostnames are "sysA" and "sysB". Note that each Solaris guest might use a different device name for the VDI that they share. I used the device names shown below, but you must discover the device name(s) after booting each guest. In a production environment you would also discover the device name first and then configure the zone with that name. Fortunately, you can use the command "zpool import" or "format" to discover the device on the "new" host for the zone. The first steps create the VirtualBox guests and the shared disk drive. I describe the steps here without demonstrating them. Download VirtualBox and install it using a method normal for your host OS. You can read the complete instructions. Create two VirtualBox guests, each to run Solaris 11.1. Each will use its own VDI as its root disk. Install Solaris 11.1 in each guest.Install Solaris 11.1 in each guest. To install a Solaris 11.1 guest, you can either download a pre-built VirtualBox guest, and import it, or install Solaris 11.1 from the "text install" media. If you use the latter method, after booting you will not see a windowing system. To install the GUI and other important things, login and run "pkg install solaris-desktop" and take a break while it installs those important things. Life is usually easier if you install the VirtualBox Guest Additions because then you can copy and paste between the host and guests, etc. You can find the guest additions in the folder matching the version of VirtualBox you are using. You can also read the instructions for installing the guest additions. To create the zone's shared VDI in VirtualBox, you can open the storage configuration for one of the two guests, select the SATA controller, and click on the "Add Hard Disk" icon nearby. Choose "Create New Disk" and specify an appropriate path name for the file that will contain the VDI. The shared VDI must be at least 1.5 GB. Note that the guest must be stopped to do this. Add that VDI to the other guest - using its Storage configuration - so that each can access it while running. The steps start out the same, except that you choose "Choose Existing Disk" instead of "Create New Disk." Because the disk is configured on both of them, VirtualBox prevents you from running both guests at the same time. Identify device names of that VDI, in each of the guests. Solaris chooses the name based on existing devices. The names may be the same, or may be different from each other. This step is shown below as "Step 1." Assumptions In the example shown below, I make these assumptions. The guest that will own the zone at the beginning is named sysA. The guest that will own the zone after the first migration is named sysB. On sysA, the shared disk is named /dev/dsk/c7t2d0 On sysB, the shared disk is named /dev/dsk/c7t3d0 (Finally!) The Steps Step 1) Determine the name of the disk that will move back and forth between the systems. root@sysA:~# format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c7t0d0 /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0 1. c7t2d0 /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@2,0 Specify disk (enter its number): ^D Step 2) The first thing to do is partition and label the disk. The magic needed to write an EFI label is not overly complicated. root@sysA:~# format -e c7t2d0 selecting c7t2d0 [disk formatted] FORMAT MENU: ... format fdisk No fdisk table exists. The default partition for the disk is: a 100% "SOLARIS System" partition Type "y" to accept the default partition, otherwise type "n" to edit the partition table. n SELECT ONE OF THE FOLLOWING: ... Enter Selection: 1 ... G=EFI_SYS 0=Exit? f SELECT ONE... ... 6 format label ... Specify Label type[1]: 1 Ready to label disk, continue? y format quit root@sysA:~# ls /dev/dsk/c7t2d0 /dev/dsk/c7t2d0 Step 3) Configure zone1 on sysA. root@sysA:~# zonecfg -z zone1 Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone. zonecfg:zone1 create create: Using system default template 'SYSdefault' zonecfg:zone1 set zonename=zone1 zonecfg:zone1 set zonepath=/zones/zone1 zonecfg:zone1 add rootzpool zonecfg:zone1:rootzpool add storage dev:dsk/c7t2d0 zonecfg:zone1:rootzpool end zonecfg:zone1 exit root@sysA:~# oot@sysA:~# zonecfg -z zone1 info zonename: zone1 zonepath: /zones/zone1 brand: solaris autoboot: false bootargs: file-mac-profile: pool: limitpriv: scheduling-class: ip-type: exclusive hostid: fs-allowed: anet: ... rootzpool: storage: dev:dsk/c7t2d0 Step 4) Install the zone. This step takes the most time, but you can wander off for a snack or a few laps around the gym - or both! (Just not at the same time...) root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 install Created zone zpool: zone1_rpool Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T163634Z.zone1.install Image: Preparing at /zones/zone1/root. AI Manifest: /tmp/manifest.xml.RXaycg SC Profile: /usr/share/auto_install/sc_profiles/enable_sci.xml Zonename: zone1 Installation: Starting ... Creating IPS image Startup linked: 1/1 done Installing packages from: solaris origin: http://pkg.us.oracle.com/support/ DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 183/183 33556/33556 222.2/222.2 2.8M/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 46825/46825 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Installation: Succeeded Note: Man pages can be obtained by installing pkg:/system/manual done. Done: Installation completed in 1696.847 seconds. Next Steps: Boot the zone, then log into the zone console (zlogin -C) to complete the configuration process. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/zone1/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T163634Z.zone1.install Step 5) Boot the Zone. root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 boot Step 6) Login to zone's console to complete the specification of system information. root@sysA:~# zlogin -C zone1 Answer the usual questions and wait for a login prompt. Then you can end the console session with the usual "~." incantation. Step 7) Shutdown the zone so it can be "moved." root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 shutdown Step 8) Detach the zone so that the original global zone can't use it. root@sysA:~# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - zone1 installed /zones/zone1 solaris excl root@sysA:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 17.6G 11.2G 6.47G 63% 1.00x ONLINE - zone1_rpool 1.98G 484M 1.51G 23% 1.00x ONLINE - root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 detach Exported zone zpool: zone1_rpool Step 9) Review the result and shutdown sysA so that sysB can use the shared disk. root@sysA:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 17.6G 11.2G 6.47G 63% 1.00x ONLINE - root@sysA:~# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - zone1 configured /zones/zone1 solaris excl root@sysA:~# init 0 Step 10) Now boot sysB and configure a zone with the parameters shown above in Step 1. (Again, the safest method is to use "zonecfg ... export" on sysA as described in section "Method Overview" above.) The one difference is the name of the rootzpool storage device, which was shown in the list of assumptions, and which you must determine by booting sysB and using the "format" or "zpool import" command. When that is done, you should see the output shown next. (I used the same zonename - "zone1" - in this example, but you can choose any valid zonename you want.) root@sysB:~# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - zone1 configured /zones/zone1 solaris excl root@sysB:~# zonecfg -z zone1 info zonename: zone1 zonepath: /zones/zone1 brand: solaris autoboot: false bootargs: file-mac-profile: pool: limitpriv: scheduling-class: ip-type: exclusive hostid: fs-allowed: anet: linkname: net0 ... rootzpool: storage: dev:dsk/c7t3d0 Step 11) Attaching the zone automatically imports the zpool. root@sysB:~# zoneadm -z zone1 attach Imported zone zpool: zone1_rpool Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T184034Z.zone1.attach Installing: Using existing zone boot environment Zone BE root dataset: zone1_rpool/rpool/ROOT/solaris Cache: Using /var/pkg/publisher. Updating non-global zone: Linking to image /. Processing linked: 1/1 done Updating non-global zone: Auditing packages. No updates necessary for this image. Updating non-global zone: Zone updated. Result: Attach Succeeded. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/zone1/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T184034Z.zone1.attach root@sysB:~# zoneadm -z zone1 boot root@sysB:~# zlogin zone1 [Connected to zone 'zone1' pts/2] Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.1 September 2012 Step 12) Now let's migrate the zone back to sysA. Create a file in zone1 so we can verify it exists after we migrate the zone back, then begin migrating it back. root@zone1:~# ls /opt root@zone1:~# touch /opt/fileA root@zone1:~# ls -l /opt/fileA -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 22 14:47 /opt/fileA root@zone1:~# exit logout [Connection to zone 'zone1' pts/2 closed] root@sysB:~# zoneadm -z zone1 shutdown root@sysB:~# zoneadm -z zone1 detach Exported zone zpool: zone1_rpool root@sysB:~# init 0 Step 13) Back on sysA, check the status. Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.1 September 2012 root@sysA:~# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - zone1 configured /zones/zone1 solaris excl root@sysA:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 17.6G 11.2G 6.47G 63% 1.00x ONLINE - Step 14) Re-attach the zone back to sysA. root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 attach Imported zone zpool: zone1_rpool Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T190441Z.zone1.attach Installing: Using existing zone boot environment Zone BE root dataset: zone1_rpool/rpool/ROOT/solaris Cache: Using /var/pkg/publisher. Updating non-global zone: Linking to image /. Processing linked: 1/1 done Updating non-global zone: Auditing packages. No updates necessary for this image. Updating non-global zone: Zone updated. Result: Attach Succeeded. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/zone1/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20121022T190441Z.zone1.attach root@sysA:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 17.6G 11.2G 6.47G 63% 1.00x ONLINE - zone1_rpool 1.98G 491M 1.51G 24% 1.00x ONLINE - root@sysA:~# zoneadm -z zone1 boot root@sysA:~# zlogin zone1 [Connected to zone 'zone1' pts/2] Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.1 September 2012 root@zone1:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 1.98G 538M 1.46G 26% 1.00x ONLINE - Step 15) Check for the file created on sysB, earlier. root@zone1:~# ls -l /opt total 1 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 22 14:47 fileA Next Steps Here is a brief list of some of the fun things you can try next. Add space to the zone by adding a second storage device to the rootzpool. Make sure that you add it to the configurations of both zones! Create a new zone, specifying two disks in the rootzpool when you first configure the zone. When you install that zone, or clone it from another zone, zoneadm uses those two disks to create a mirrored pool. (Three disks will result in a three-way mirror, etc.) Conclusion Hopefully you have seen the ease with which you can now move Solaris Zones from one system to another.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 03, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 03, 2011Popular ReleasesMedia Companion: MC 3.404b Weekly: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! *** Due to an issue where the date added & the full genre information was not being read into the Movie cache, it is highly recommended that you perform a Rebuild Movies when first running this latest version. This will read in the information from the nfo's & repopulate the cache used by MC during operation. Fi...Terraria Map Generator: TerrariaMapTool 1.0.0.4 Beta: 1) Fixed the generated map.html file so that the file:/// is included in the base path. 2) Added the ability to use parallelization during generation. This will cause the program to use as many threads as there are physical cores. 3) Fixed some background overdraw.DotRas: DotRas v1.2 (Version 1.2.4168): This release includes compiled (and signed) versions of the binaries, PDBs, CHM help documentation, along with both C# and VB.NET examples. Please don't forget to rate the release! If you find a bug, please open a work item and give as much description as possible. Stack traces, which operating system(s) you're targeting, and build type is also very helpful for bug hunting. If you find something you believe to be a bug but are not sure, create a new discussion on the discussions board. Thank...Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.21: Fixed issues #15949 and #15868. Tweaked output in multi-line (pretty-print) mode so that var-statements in the initializer of for-statements break multiple variables onto multiple lines. Added TreeModification flag (and can now therefore turn off) the behavior of removing quotes around object literal property names if the names can be valid identifiers. Convert true literals to !0 and false literals to !1. Added a Visitor class approach to iterating over a generated abstract syntax tree to he...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight and WP7 made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.1 RTW: Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies Samples Changes.txt License.txt Release Highlights For WP7A new Tombstoning API based on ideas from Fluent NHibernate A new Launcher/Chooser API Strongly typed Navigation SimpleContainer included The full phone lifecycle is made easy to work with ie. we figure out whether your app is actually Resurrecting or just Continuing for you For WPFSupport for the Client Profile Better support for WinForms integration All PlatformsA power...VidCoder: 0.9.1: Added color coding to the Log window. Errors are highlighted in red, HandBrake logs are in black and VidCoder logs are in dark blue. Moved enqueue button to the right with the other control buttons. Added logic to report failures when errors are logged during the encode or when the encode finishes prematurely. Added Copy button to Log window. Adjusted audio track selection box to always show the full track name. Changed encode job progress bar to also be colored yellow when the enco...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.1: - Fixed a small bug in Auto Login - Fixed the updaterEPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server: EPPlus 2.9.0.1: EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server This version has been updated to .Net Framework 3.5 New Features Data Validation. PivotTables (Basic functionalliy...) Support for worksheet data sources. Column, Row, Page and Data fields. Date and Numeric grouping Build in styles. ...and more And some minor new features... Ranges Text-Property|Get the formated value AutofitColumns-method to set the column width from the content of the range LoadFromCollection-metho...jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls: Version 1.4.0.0: Version 1.4.0.0 contains the following additions: Upgraded to MVC 3.0 Upgraded to jQuery 1.6.1 (Though the project supports all jQuery version from 1.4.x onwards) Upgraded to jqGrid 3.8 Better Razor View-Engine support Better Pager support, includes support for custom pagers Added jqGrid toolbar buttons support Search module refactored, with full suport for multiple filters and ordering And Code cleanup, bug-fixes and better controller configuration support.Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v6.0: Version 6.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Authentication using Membership Provider for SQL Server and MySql Spam prevention: Flood Control Moderation: Flag messages Content management: Pages: Create pages (about us/contact/texts) through web administration Allow nearforums to run as an IIS subapp Migrated Facebook Connect to OAuth 2.0 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.8b: Changes: - fix critical issue 15922(AccessViolationException) once and for all ...update is strongly recommended Known Issues: - some addin ribbon examples has a COM Register function with missing codebase entry(win32 registry) ...the problem is only affected to c# examples. fixed in latest source code. NetOffice\ReleaseTags\NetOffice Release 0.8.rar Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:...................Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.5.4186: Updates the API in response to Facebook's recent change of policy: All Graph Api accessing feeds or posts must provide a AccessToken.Serviio for Windows Home Server: Beta Release 0.5.2.0: Ready for widespread beta. Synchronized build number to Serviio version to avoid confusion.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta4: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta4 2011-5-31?? ???Bilibili.us????? ???? ?? ???"????" ???Bilibili.us??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ???????? ?? ?? ???Bilibili.us?????(??????????????????) ??????(6.cn)?????(????) ?? ?????Acfun?????????? ?????????????? ???QQ???????? ????????????Discussion...CodeCopy Auto Code Converter: Code Copy v0.1: Full add-in, setup project source code and setup fileWordpress Theme 'Windows Metro': v1.00.0017: v1.00.0017 Dies ist eine Vorab-Version aus der Entwickler-Phase. This is a preview version from the development phase.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.4.1: Added Piggy Bank editor and fixed some minor bugs.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.02: Updated the Kooboo_CMS.zip at 2011-06-02 11:44 GMT 1.Fixed: Adding data rule issue on page. 2.Fixed: Caching issue for higher performance. Updated the Kooboo_CMS.zip at 2011-06-01 10:00 GMT 1. Fixed the published package throwed a compile error under WebSite mode. 2. Fixed the ContentHelper.NewMediaFolderObject return TextFolder issue. 3. Shorten the name of ContentHelper API. NewMediaFolderObject=>MediaFolder, NewTextFolderObject=> TextFolder, NewSchemaObject=>Schema. Also update the C...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.6: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2366-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Terraria World Creator: Terraria World Creator: Version 1.01 Fixed a bug that would cause the application to crash. Re-named the Application.New Projects"Background Transfer Service Sample" From WP7 Sample: This project is an extension to existing Windows Phone7 sample available from MS sight ("Background Transfer Service Sample"). This project extends functionality to display the background downloaded item to verify download conten. Agile project and development management dashboard - Meter Console: Agile project and development management dashboard application. The focus of this application to bridge the gap between the management, clients and developer and chive best possible transparency. Ajax Multi-ListBox: Ajax Multi-ListBox is .NET C# written user control with a dual listbox that uses ajax to move items from left to right and vice versa.aLOG : Asynchronous logging (Logging Library): aLog is an asynchronous logging component built on Microsoft Enterprise Exception handling and Logging Component block. It allows application to asynchronously log the data in multiple data sources such as file system, database , XML. Application Base Component Library: Application Base Component LibraryConcise Service Bus: A compact but comprehensive WCF service bus framework.Contour provider for Umbraco Courier: Transfer Umbraco Contour forms between Umbraco instances with Courier.CoveyNet MidWest: CoveyNet MidWestCSharp Samples: This contain C#- wpf, wcf, linqtosql, some basic oops stuff etc.DotNet1: DotNet1FireWeb: fefaesfrafasGeoCoder: Basic server side GeoCoder which accesses Google, YAHOO etc. This is developed in C# and is a mix of language styles, just depended what I was doing that week. All the libraries include tests which can be used to check if the libraries still work, it's worth doing this as the consumed webservices may change from time to time. GrandReward: GrandReward is designed to help young and old people to learn by answer questions. It is easy to use and the community can design own topic files for own questions to learn. The project is develop in C# and contains some WPF views. The project homepage is: http://grand-reward.com/helferlein: The helferlein library contains some web controls and tools I used in other projects.helferlein_BabelFish: helferlein_BabelFish is a DNN module to support multilingual features for other helferlein modules. It is developed in C#.helferlein_Form: helferlein_Form is an easy-to-use module for DotNetNuke that allows creating forms. The submissions can be sent by e-mail and/or stored in a database. It's developed in C#.ILSpy/Silverlight — Proof Of Concept: ILSpy refactoring (dire hacking) to make it work in Silverlight.ISGProject: ISGProjectMarcelo Rocha: Trabalhos acadêmicos, Apresentações, Projetos e outras Invencionices de Marcelo Rocha.MosquitoOnline: MosquitoOnline ProjectNET.Studio: Ein kleines Visual Studio für die SchuleOmegle Desktop Client: A desktop client for the anonymous chat site, Omegle. Designed to combat some of the shortcomings of the webpage, the desktop client will have no adverts, and be able to flash the taskbar window, and play a sound on message received. Online PHP IDE: Free Open Source online editor for working with files on FTP. Free and easy deployment.Open JGL: A utillity library using OpenGL, which focus' on graphics and vertex control.Open Tokenization Server: Open Tokenization Server is a simplistic implementation of a tokenization data security service. It allows users to create and retrieve tokens that represent sensitive information.OurCodeNights: Just some small projects we "work" on at our codenights. A good excuse to meet and have a good time ;)Raple: Raple is simple programming languageSea: Set of C# Extension libraries that make life easier.Shai Chi: Shai ChiSharePoint Sandbox Logging: SharePoint Sandbox Logging enables developers and solution designers to easily log events to logging list in your site collection, allowing you to easily trace errors on custom solutions within your site collection, with no need for server access. Perfect for sandbox / Office365. This project contains one sandbox solution with a site collection logging feature. When feature is active - it creates the list and logs. If it is not active - it does not log. Simple. It also contains a sampl...SharePoint Stock Ticker: SharePoint Stock Ticker is a SharePoint 2010 project which consists of a SharePoint Stock Ticker Web Part driven off of Google's Stock API. The width of this Web Part was developed to fit within the default SharePoint 2010 Quick Launch navigation. This has also been tested to run over http and https SharePoint 2010 farms and will not throw a mixed content warning with Internet Explorer.SharpLinx: SharpLinx is an open source social networking application on ASP.Net.Single.Net - less Copy & Paste,less code lines,more easier: make your code life easierSqlMyAdmin: A projecto to create a PHPMyAdmin clone app that access Sql Server.TDB: TDB is a NOSQL Key-value store entirely designed to run in windows environment. It's directly inspired by Redis project and use Redis' command sematincs and Redis' communication protocol to maintain a base compatibility with it.Tomasulo: A simulator of Tomasulo CDB dynamic instruction scheduling algorithm in Java. Authors: Mengyu Zhou @J85 Zhenyao Zhu @J85 Jun Li @J81 @Tsinghua UniversityTransport Broker Management System: Transport Management system will serve the small freight brokers manage the carriers and orders. It has features like manage truck owners, carriers, source, destination, orders. Verification system for MCBS: Verification system for mobile communication base station.VietCard: VietCardVkontakte File converter: ????????? ?????? ??? ???????? ?? ? "?????????" vkontakte.ru. VSGesture for Visual Studio: VSGesture can execute command via mouse gestures within Visual Studio2010. If you have any feedback, please send me an email to powerumc at gmail.com.WCF-Silverlight Helper: Class library to generate WCF DataContractSerializer-serializable and Silverlight (SL) -compatible classes. Useful, for example, if you have an assembly with classes that fail to serialize with DataContractSerializer. T4 Templates are used to auto-generate code.Windows Phone eBook Samples: Windows Phone eBook Samples is a collection of samples associated with the Windows Phone eBoom community initiative.WinPreciousMetal: WinPreciousMetal helps people know the precious metal's states. Because I am a Chinese, my soft mainly focus at the price of metal in RMB.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 14, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 14, 2011Popular ReleasesSizeOnDisk: 1.0.9.0: Can handle Right-To-Left languages (issue 316) About box (issue 310) New language: Deutsch (thanks to kyoka) Fix: file and folder context menuTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.6: This is a temporary release so that people can edit their characters for the newest version of Terraria. It does not include the newest items or the ability to add social slot items. Those will come in TerrariViewer v3.0, which I am currently working on.DropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.1: Added different popup descriptions for actions (copy/append/update/remove) Added popup timeout control (with live preview) Added option to overwrite clipboard with the last link only Notification popup closes on user click Notification popup default timeout increased to 3 sec. Added codeplex link to about .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredMobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.4.1: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation is the best way to detect and redirect mobile devices and their capabilities on ASP.NET and is being used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re highly confident in our software and we recommend all users update to this version. Changes to Version 1.0.4.1Changed the BlackberryHandler and BlackberryVersion6Handler to have equal CONFIDENCE values to ensure they both get a chance at detecting BlackBerry version 4&5 and version 6 devices. Prior to thi...Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak Beta 3 - Clean: Some critical bug solved and dependecy problems There's 3 package : - The first, contains the cli server and the graphical server. - The second, only the cli server - The third, only the graphical client. It's a beta release, so don't hesitate to emmit issue ;pRawr: Rawr 4.1.06: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta6: ??AcDown?????????????，?????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta6 ?????(imanhua.com)????? ???? ?? ??"????","?????","?????","????"?????? "????"?????"????????"?? ??????????? ?????????????? ?????????????/???? ?? ????Windows 7???????????? ????????? ?? ????????????? ???????/??????????? ???????????? ?? ?? ?????(imanh...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.22: Added lots of optimizations related to expression optimization. Combining adjacent expression statements into a single statement means more if-, for-, and while-statements can get rid of the curly-braces. Then more if-statements can be converted to expressions, and more expressions can be combined with return- and for-statements. Moving functions to the top of their scopes, followed by var-statements, provides more opportunities for expression-combination. Added command-line option to remove ...Pulse: Pulse Beta 2: - Added new wallpapers provider http://wallbase.cc. Supports english search, multiple keywords* - Improved font rendering in Options window - Added "Set wallpaper as logon background" option* - Fixed crashes if there is no internet connection - Fixed: Rewalls downloads empty images sometimes - Added filters* Note 1: wallbase provider supports only english search. Rewalls provider supports only russian search but Pulse automatically translates your english keyword into russian using Google Tr...???? (Internet Go Game for Android): goapp.3.0.apk: Refresh UI and bugfixPhalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.1 (June 2011) for .NET 4.0: Release of Phalanger 2.1 - the opensource PHP compiler for .NET framework 4.0. Installation package also includes basic version of Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio 2010. This allows you to easily create, build and debug Phalanger web or application inside this ultimate integrated development environment. You can even install the tools into the free Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated). To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phala...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & Refactoring32feet.NET: 3.2: 32feet.NET v3.2 - Personal Area Networking for .NET Build 3.2.0609.0 9th June 2011 This library provides a .NET networking API for devices and desktop computers running the Microsoft or Broadcom/Widcomm Bluetooth stacks, Microsoft Windows supported IrDA devices and associated Object Exchange (OBEX) services for both these mediums. Online documentation is integrated into your Visual Studio help. The object model has been designed to promote consistency between Bluetooth, IrDA and traditional ...Media Companion: MC 3.406b weekly: With this version change a movie rebuild is required when first run -else MC will lock up on exit. Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you find MC not displaying movie data properly, please try a 'movie rebuild' to reload the data from the nfo's into MC's cache. Fixes Movies Readded movie preference to rename invalid or scene nfo's to info ext...Windows Azure VM Assistant: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5 (Debug) - Test Release VersionNetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9: Changes: - fix examples (include issue 16026) - add new examples - 32Bit/64Bit Walkthrough is now available in technical Documentation. Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...Reusable Library: V1.1.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.New ProjectsASP.NET MVC / Windows Workflow Foundation Integration: This project will product libraries, activities and examples that demonstrate how you can use Windows Workflow Foundation with ASP.NET MVCBing Maps Spatial Data Service Loader: Bing Maps Spatial Data Service Loader is a simple tool that helps you to load your set of data (CSV) into the Spatial Data Service included in Bing Maps licensing.Blend filter and Pencil sketch effect in C#: This project contains a filter for blending one image over an other using effects like Color Dodge, Lighten, Darken, Difference, etc. And an example of how to use that to do a Pencil Sketch effect in C# using AForge frameworkBugStoryV2: student project !CAIXA LOTERIAS: Projeto destinado a integrar resultado dos sorteios da Caixa em VB.NET, C#, ASP.NETCSReports: Report authoring tool. It supports dinamyc grouping, scripting formulas in vbscript, images from db and sub-sections. The report definition is saved to file in xml format and can be exported to pdf, doc and xls format.EasyLibrary: EasyLibraryFreetime Development Platform: Freetime Development Platform is a set of reusable design used to develop Web and Desktop based applications. IISProcessScheduler: Schedule processes from within IIS.LitleChef: LitleChefLLBLGen ANGTE (ASP.Net GUI Templates Extended): LLBLGen ANGTE (ASP.Net GUI Templates Extended) makes possible to use LLBLGen template system to generate a reasonable ASP.Net GUI that you can use as the base of your project or just as a prototyping tool. It generates APS.Net code with C# as code behind using .Net 2.0Memory: Memory Game for AndroidNCU - Book store: Educational project for a software engineering bootcamp at Northern Caribbean UniversityOrderToList Extension for IEnumerable: An extension method for IEnumerable<T> that will sort the IEnumerable based on a list of keys. Suppose you have a list of IDs {10, 5, 12} and want to use LINQ to retrieve all People from the DB with those IDs in that order, you want this extension. Sort is binary so it's fastp301: Old project.Pang: A new pong rip off; including some power ups. Will be written in C# using XNA.Ring2Park Online: Ring2Park is a fully working ASP.NET reference application that simulates the online purchase and management of Vehicle Parking sessions. It is developed using the latest ASP.NET MVC 3 patterns and capabilities. It includes a complete set of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) assets, including requirements, test and deployment.rITIko: Questo progetto è stato creato come esperimento dalla classe 4G dell'ITIS B. Pascal di Cesena. Serve (per ora) solo per testate il funzionamento di CodePlex e del sistema SVN. Forse un giorno conterrà qualcosa di buono, rimanete aggiornati.Rug.Cmd - Command Line Parser and Console Application Framework: Rugland Console Framework is a collection of classes to enable the fast and consistent development of .NET console applications. Parse command line arguments and write your applications usage. If you are developing command line or build process tools in .NET then this maybe the lightweight framework for you. It is developed in C#.SamaToursUSA: sama tours usaSamcrypt: .Security System: With this program you will be able to secure your screen from prying eyes. In fact as soon as the block will not be unlocked only with your password. Perfect for when you go to have a coffee in the break. :)Sharp Temperature Conversor: Sharp Temperature Conversor has the objective of providing a easy, fast and a direct way to convert temperatures from one type to another. The project is small, uses C#, Visual Studio 2010. The project is small. However, the growth is possible. Silverlight Star Rating Control: A simple star rating control for editing or displaying ratings in Silverlight. Supports half-filled stars. Includes the star shape as a separate control.Silverware: Silverware is a set of libraries to enhance and make application development in Silverlight easier.Simple & lightweight fluent interface for Design by Contract: This project try to focus on make a good quality code for your project. It try to make sure all instance and variables must be satisfy some conditions in Design by Contract.SimpleAspect: A simple Aspect library for PostSharpTespih: Basit tespih uygulamasi. Kendi evrad u ezkar listenizi olusturup seçtiginiz bir evrat üzerinden tespih çekebilirsiniz.Texticize: Texticize is a fast, extensible, and intuitive object-to-text template engine for .NET. You can use Texticize to quickly create dynamic e-mails, letters, source code, or any other text documents using predefined text templates substituting placeholders with properties of CLR objects in realtime.The Dragon riders: a mmorgh game with free play in creaction. FantasyWPF ObservableCollection: WPF ObservableCollection Idle use.X9.37 Image Cash Letter file viewer: x9.37 Image Cash Letter viewer. Developed using VB.Net. Currently allows viewing and searching of X9 files. The code also has image manipulation code, specifically multi page TIF file handling that you might find useful,

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• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentDictionary

  - by Simon Cooper

  Using locks to implement a thread-safe collection is rather like using a sledgehammer - unsubtle, easy to understand, and tends to make any other tool redundant. Unlike the previous two collections I looked at, ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentDictionary uses locks quite heavily. However, it is careful to wield locks only where necessary to ensure that concurrency is maximised. This will, by necessity, be a higher-level look than my other posts in this series, as there is quite a lot of code and logic in ConcurrentDictionary. Therefore, I do recommend that you have ConcurrentDictionary open in a decompiler to have a look at all the details that I skip over. The problem with locks There's several things to bear in mind when using locks, as encapsulated by the lock keyword in C# and the System.Threading.Monitor class in .NET (if you're unsure as to what lock does in C#, I briefly covered it in my first post in the series): Locks block threads The most obvious problem is that threads waiting on a lock can't do any work at all. No preparatory work, no 'optimistic' work like in ConcurrentQueue and ConcurrentStack, nothing. It sits there, waiting to be unblocked. This is bad if you're trying to maximise concurrency. Locks are slow Whereas most of the methods on the Interlocked class can be compiled down to a single CPU instruction, ensuring atomicity at the hardware level, taking out a lock requires some heavy lifting by the CLR and the operating system. There's quite a bit of work required to take out a lock, block other threads, and wake them up again. If locks are used heavily, this impacts performance. Deadlocks When using locks there's always the possibility of a deadlock - two threads, each holding a lock, each trying to aquire the other's lock. Fortunately, this can be avoided with careful programming and structured lock-taking, as we'll see. So, it's important to minimise where locks are used to maximise the concurrency and performance of the collection. Implementation As you might expect, ConcurrentDictionary is similar in basic implementation to the non-concurrent Dictionary, which I studied in a previous post. I'll be using some concepts introduced there, so I recommend you have a quick read of it. So, if you were implementing a thread-safe dictionary, what would you do? The naive implementation is to simply have a single lock around all methods accessing the dictionary. This would work, but doesn't allow much concurrency. Fortunately, the bucketing used by Dictionary allows a simple but effective improvement to this - one lock per bucket. This allows different threads modifying different buckets to do so in parallel. Any thread making changes to the contents of a bucket takes the lock for that bucket, ensuring those changes are thread-safe. The method that maps each bucket to a lock is the GetBucketAndLockNo method: private void GetBucketAndLockNo( int hashcode, out int bucketNo, out int lockNo, int bucketCount) { // the bucket number is the hashcode (without the initial sign bit) // modulo the number of buckets bucketNo = (hashcode & 0x7fffffff) % bucketCount; // and the lock number is the bucket number modulo the number of locks lockNo = bucketNo % m_locks.Length; } However, this does require some changes to how the buckets are implemented. The 'implicit' linked list within a single backing array used by the non-concurrent Dictionary adds a dependency between separate buckets, as every bucket uses the same backing array. Instead, ConcurrentDictionary uses a strict linked list on each bucket: This ensures that each bucket is entirely separate from all other buckets; adding or removing an item from a bucket is independent to any changes to other buckets. Modifying the dictionary All the operations on the dictionary follow the same basic pattern: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { int bucketNo, lockNo; 1: GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, m_buckets.Length); 2: lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { 3: Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; 4: Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } } For example, when adding another entry to the dictionary, you would iterate through the linked list to check whether the key exists already, and add the new entry as the head node. When removing items, you would find the entry to remove (if it exists), and remove the node from the linked list. Adding, updating, and removing items all follow this pattern. Performance issues There is a problem we have to address at this point. If the number of buckets in the dictionary is fixed in the constructor, then the performance will degrade from O(1) to O(n) when a large number of items are added to the dictionary. As more and more items get added to the linked lists in each bucket, the lookup operations will spend most of their time traversing a linear linked list. To fix this, the buckets array has to be resized once the number of items in each bucket has gone over a certain limit. (In ConcurrentDictionary this limit is when the size of the largest bucket is greater than the number of buckets for each lock. This check is done at the end of the TryAddInternal method.) Resizing the bucket array and re-hashing everything affects every bucket in the collection. Therefore, this operation needs to take out every lock in the collection. Taking out mutiple locks at once inevitably summons the spectre of the deadlock; two threads each hold a lock, and each trying to acquire the other lock. How can we eliminate this? Simple - ensure that threads never try to 'swap' locks in this fashion. When taking out multiple locks, always take them out in the same order, and always take out all the locks you need before starting to release them. In ConcurrentDictionary, this is controlled by the AcquireLocks, AcquireAllLocks and ReleaseLocks methods. Locks are always taken out and released in the order they are in the m_locks array, and locks are all released right at the end of the method in a finally block. At this point, it's worth pointing out that the locks array is never re-assigned, even when the buckets array is increased in size. The number of locks is fixed in the constructor by the concurrencyLevel parameter. This simplifies programming the locks; you don't have to check if the locks array has changed or been re-assigned before taking out a lock object. And you can be sure that when a thread takes out a lock, another thread isn't going to re-assign the lock array. This would create a new series of lock objects, thus allowing another thread to ignore the existing locks (and any threads controlling them), breaking thread-safety. Consequences of growing the array Just because we're using locks doesn't mean that race conditions aren't a problem. We can see this by looking at the GrowTable method. The operation of this method can be boiled down to: private void GrowTable(Node[] buckets) { try { 1: Acquire first lock in the locks array // this causes any other thread trying to take out // all the locks to block because the first lock in the array // is always the one taken out first // check if another thread has already resized the buckets array // while we were waiting to acquire the first lock 2: if (buckets != m_buckets) return; 3: Calculate the new size of the backing array 4: Node[] array = new array[size]; 5: Acquire all the remaining locks 6: Re-hash the contents of the existing buckets into array 7: m_buckets = array; } finally { 8: Release all locks } } As you can see, there's already a check for a race condition at step 2, for the case when the GrowTable method is called twice in quick succession on two separate threads. One will successfully resize the buckets array (blocking the second in the meantime), when the second thread is unblocked it'll see that the array has already been resized & exit without doing anything. There is another case we need to consider; looking back at the AlterBucket method above, consider the following situation: Thread 1 calls AlterBucket; step 1 is executed to get the bucket and lock numbers. Thread 2 calls GrowTable and executes steps 1-5; thread 1 is blocked when it tries to take out the lock in step 2. Thread 2 re-hashes everything, re-assigns the buckets array, and releases all the locks (steps 6-8). Thread 1 is unblocked and continues executing, but the calculated bucket and lock numbers are no longer valid. Between calculating the correct bucket and lock number and taking out the lock, another thread has changed where everything is. Not exactly thread-safe. Well, a similar problem was solved in ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue by storing a local copy of the state, doing the necessary calculations, then checking if that state is still valid. We can use a similar idea here: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { while (true) { Node[] buckets = m_buckets; int bucketNo, lockNo; GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, buckets.Length); lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { // if the state has changed, go back to the start if (buckets != m_buckets) continue; Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } break; } } TryGetValue and GetEnumerator And so, finally, we get onto TryGetValue and GetEnumerator. I've left these to the end because, well, they don't actually use any locks. How can this be? Whenever you change a bucket, you need to take out the corresponding lock, yes? Indeed you do. However, it is important to note that TryGetValue and GetEnumerator don't actually change anything. Just as immutable objects are, by definition, thread-safe, read-only operations don't need to take out a lock because they don't change anything. All lockless methods can happily iterate through the buckets and linked lists without worrying about locking anything. However, this does put restrictions on how the other methods operate. Because there could be another thread in the middle of reading the dictionary at any time (even if a lock is taken out), the dictionary has to be in a valid state at all times. Every change to state has to be made visible to other threads in a single atomic operation (all relevant variables are marked volatile to help with this). This restriction ensures that whatever the reading threads are doing, they never read the dictionary in an invalid state (eg items that should be in the collection temporarily removed from the linked list, or reading a node that has had it's key & value removed before the node itself has been removed from the linked list). Fortunately, all the operations needed to change the dictionary can be done in that way. Bucket resizes are made visible when the new array is assigned back to the m_buckets variable. Any additions or modifications to a node are done by creating a new node, then splicing it into the existing list using a single variable assignment. Node removals are simply done by re-assigning the node's m_next pointer. Because the dictionary can be changed by another thread during execution of the lockless methods, the GetEnumerator method is liable to return dirty reads - changes made to the dictionary after GetEnumerator was called, but before the enumeration got to that point in the dictionary. It's worth listing at this point which methods are lockless, and which take out all the locks in the dictionary to ensure they get a consistent view of the dictionary: Lockless: TryGetValue GetEnumerator The indexer getter ContainsKey Takes out every lock (lockfull?): Count IsEmpty Keys Values CopyTo ToArray Concurrent principles That covers the overall implementation of ConcurrentDictionary. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this sophisticated collection. That I leave to you. However, we've looked at enough to be able to extract some useful principles for concurrent programming: Partitioning When using locks, the work is partitioned into independant chunks, each with its own lock. Each partition can then be modified concurrently to other partitions. Ordered lock-taking When a method does need to control the entire collection, locks are taken and released in a fixed order to prevent deadlocks. Lockless reads Read operations that don't care about dirty reads don't take out any lock; the rest of the collection is implemented so that any reading thread always has a consistent view of the collection. That leads us to the final collection in this little series - ConcurrentBag. Lacking a non-concurrent analogy, it is quite different to any other collection in the class libraries. Prepare your thinking hats!

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• How do I make my page respect h1 css addition? [migrated]

  - by Adobe

  I add h1 { margin-top:100px; } to the end of the css, but the page doesn't change. But if I add to the html of some h1: <h1 style="margin-top:100px;"><a class="toc-backref" href="#id4">KHotKeys</a><a class="headerlink" href="#khotkeys" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1> Then it does. I'm not css pro, and I guess the problem is somewhere in the css file. Here it is: div.clearer { clear: both; } /* -- relbar ---------------------------------------------------------------- */ div.related { width: 100%; font-size: 90%; } div.related h3 { display: none; } div.related ul { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 10px; list-style: none; } div.related li { display: inline; } div.related li.right { float: right; margin-right: 5px; } /* -- sidebar --------------------------------------------------------------- */ div.sphinxsidebarwrapper { padding: 10px 5px 0 10px; } div.sphinxsidebar { float: left; width: 230px; margin-left: -100%; font-size: 90%; } div.sphinxsidebar ul { list-style: none; } div.sphinxsidebar ul ul, div.sphinxsidebar ul.want-points { margin-left: 20px; list-style: square; } div.sphinxsidebar ul ul { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } div.sphinxsidebar form { margin-top: 10px; } div.sphinxsidebar input { border: 1px solid #98dbcc; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 1em; } div.sphinxsidebar input[type="text"] { width: 160px; } div.sphinxsidebar input[type="submit"] { width: 30px; } img { border: 0; } /* -- search page ----------------------------------------------------------- */ ul.search { margin: 10px 0 0 20px; padding: 0; } ul.search li { padding: 5px 0 5px 20px; background-image: url(file.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 0 7px; } ul.search li a { font-weight: bold; } ul.search li div.context { color: #888; margin: 2px 0 0 30px; text-align: left; } ul.keywordmatches li.goodmatch a { font-weight: bold; } /* -- index page ------------------------------------------------------------ */ table.contentstable { width: 90%; } table.contentstable p.biglink { line-height: 150%; } a.biglink { font-size: 1.3em; } span.linkdescr { font-style: italic; padding-top: 5px; font-size: 90%; } /* -- general index --------------------------------------------------------- */ table.indextable { width: 100%; } table.indextable td { text-align: left; vertical-align: top; } table.indextable dl, table.indextable dd { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } table.indextable tr.pcap { height: 10px; } table.indextable tr.cap { margin-top: 10px; background-color: #f2f2f2; } img.toggler { margin-right: 3px; margin-top: 3px; cursor: pointer; } div.modindex-jumpbox { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; margin: 1em 0 1em 0; padding: 0.4em; } div.genindex-jumpbox { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; margin: 1em 0 1em 0; padding: 0.4em; } /* -- general body styles --------------------------------------------------- */ a.headerlink { visibility: hidden; } h1:hover > a.headerlink, h2:hover > a.headerlink, h3:hover > a.headerlink, h4:hover > a.headerlink, h5:hover > a.headerlink, h6:hover > a.headerlink, dt:hover > a.headerlink { visibility: visible; } div.body p.caption { text-align: inherit; } div.body td { text-align: left; } .field-list ul { padding-left: 1em; } .first { margin-top: 0 !important; } p.rubric { margin-top: 30px; font-weight: bold; } img.align-left, .figure.align-left, object.align-left { clear: left; float: left; margin-right: 1em; } img.align-right, .figure.align-right, object.align-right { clear: right; float: right; margin-left: 1em; } img.align-center, .figure.align-center, object.align-center { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } .align-left { text-align: left; } .align-center { text-align: center; } .align-right { text-align: right; } /* -- sidebars -------------------------------------------------------------- */ div.sidebar { margin: 0 0 0.5em 1em; border: 1px solid #ddb; padding: 7px 7px 0 7px; background-color: #ffe; width: 40%; float: right; } p.sidebar-title { font-weight: bold; } /* -- topics ---------------------------------------------------------------- */ div.topic { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 7px 7px 0 7px; margin: 10px 0 10px 0; } p.topic-title { font-size: 1.1em; font-weight: bold; margin-top: 10px; } /* -- admonitions ----------------------------------------------------------- */ div.admonition { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 7px; } div.admonition dt { font-weight: bold; } div.admonition dl { margin-bottom: 0; } p.admonition-title { margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; font-weight: bold; } div.body p.centered { text-align: center; margin-top: 25px; } /* -- tables ---------------------------------------------------------------- */ table.docutils { border: 0; border-collapse: collapse; } table.docutils td, table.docutils th { padding: 1px 8px 1px 5px; border-top: 0; border-left: 0; border-right: 0; border-bottom: 1px solid #aaa; } table.field-list td, table.field-list th { border: 0 !important; } table.footnote td, table.footnote th { border: 0 !important; } th { text-align: left; padding-right: 5px; } table.citation { border-left: solid 1px gray; margin-left: 1px; } table.citation td { border-bottom: none; } /* -- other body styles ----------------------------------------------------- */ ol.arabic { list-style: decimal; } ol.loweralpha { list-style: lower-alpha; } ol.upperalpha { list-style: upper-alpha; } ol.lowerroman { list-style: lower-roman; } ol.upperroman { list-style: upper-roman; } dl { margin-bottom: 15px; } dd p { margin-top: 0px; } dd ul, dd table { margin-bottom: 10px; } dd { margin-top: 3px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 30px; } dt:target, .highlighted { background-color: #fbe54e; } dl.glossary dt { font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.1em; } .field-list ul { margin: 0; padding-left: 1em; } .field-list p { margin: 0; } .refcount { color: #060; } .optional { font-size: 1.3em; } .versionmodified { font-style: italic; } .system-message { background-color: #fda; padding: 5px; border: 3px solid red; } .footnote:target { background-color: #ffa; } .line-block { display: block; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; } .line-block .line-block { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 1.5em; } .guilabel, .menuselection { font-family: sans-serif; } .accelerator { text-decoration: underline; } .classifier { font-style: oblique; } /* -- code displays --------------------------------------------------------- */ pre { overflow: auto; overflow-y: hidden; /* fixes display issues on Chrome browsers */ } td.linenos pre { padding: 5px 0px; border: 0; background-color: transparent; color: #aaa; } table.highlighttable { margin-left: 0.5em; } table.highlighttable td { padding: 0 0.5em 0 0.5em; } tt.descname { background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.2em; } tt.descclassname { background-color: transparent; } tt.xref, a tt { background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; } h1 tt, h2 tt, h3 tt, h4 tt, h5 tt, h6 tt { background-color: transparent; } .viewcode-link { float: right; } .viewcode-back { float: right; font-family: sans-serif; } div.viewcode-block:target { margin: -1px -10px; padding: 0 10px; } /* -- math display ---------------------------------------------------------- */ img.math { vertical-align: middle; } div.body div.math p { text-align: center; } span.eqno { float: right; } /* -- printout stylesheet --------------------------------------------------- */ @media print { div.document, div.documentwrapper, div.bodywrapper { margin: 0 !important; width: 100%; } div.sphinxsidebar, div.related, div.footer, #top-link { display: none; 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• Calculating the Size (in Bytes and MB) of a Oracle Coherence Cache

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  The concept and usage of data grids are becoming very popular in this days since this type of technology are evolving very fast with some cool lead products like Oracle Coherence. Once for a while, developers need an programmatic way to calculate the total size of a specific cache that are residing in the data grid. In this post, I will show how to accomplish this using Oracle Coherence API. This example has been tested with 3.6, 3.7 and 3.7.1 versions of Oracle Coherence. To start the development of this example, you need to create a POJO ("Plain Old Java Object") that represents a data structure that will hold user data. This data structure will also create an internal fat so I call that should increase considerably the size of each instance in the heap memory. Create a Java class named "Person" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.domain; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import java.util.Random; @SuppressWarnings("serial") public class Person implements Serializable { private String firstName; private String lastName; private List<Object> fat; private String email; public Person() { generateFat(); } public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String email) { setFirstName(firstName); setLastName(lastName); setEmail(email); generateFat(); } private void generateFat() { fat = new ArrayList<Object>(); Random random = new Random(); for (int i = 0; i < random.nextInt(18000); i++) { HashMap<Long, Double> internalFat = new HashMap<Long, Double>(); for (int j = 0; j < random.nextInt(10000); j++) { internalFat.put(random.nextLong(), random.nextDouble()); } fat.add(internalFat); } } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } } Now let's create a Java program that will start a data grid into Coherence and will create a cache named "People", that will hold people instances with sequential integer keys. Each person created in this program will trigger the execution of a custom constructor created in the People class that instantiates an internal fat (the random amount of data generated to increase the size of the object) for each person. Create a Java class named "CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import com.oracle.coherence.domain.Person; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; import com.tangosol.net.NamedCache; public class CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData { public static void main(String[] args) { // Asks Coherence for a new cache named "People"... NamedCache people = CacheFactory.getCache("People"); // Creates three people that will be putted into the data grid. Each person // generates an internal fat that should increase its size in terms of bytes... Person pessoa1 = new Person("Ricardo", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa2 = new Person("Vitor", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa3 = new Person("Vivian", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); // Insert three people at the data grid... people.put(1, pessoa1); people.put(2, pessoa2); people.put(3, pessoa3); // Waits for 5 minutes until the user runs the Java program // that calculates the total size of the people cache... try { System.out.println("---> Waiting for 5 minutes for the cache size calculation..."); Thread.sleep(300000); } catch (InterruptedException ie) { ie.printStackTrace(); } } } Finally, let's create a Java program that, using the Coherence API and JMX, will calculate the total size of each cache that the data grid is currently managing. The approach used in this example was retrieve every cache that the data grid are currently managing, but if you are interested on an specific cache, the same approach can be used, you should only filter witch cache will be looked for. Create a Java class named "CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import java.text.DecimalFormat; import java.util.Map; import java.util.Set; import java.util.TreeMap; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.MBeanServerFactory; import javax.management.ObjectName; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; public class CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache { @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" }) private void run() throws Exception { // Enable JMX support in this Coherence data grid session... System.setProperty("tangosol.coherence.management", "all"); // Create a sample cache just to access the data grid... CacheFactory.getCache(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName()); // Gets the JMX server from Coherence data grid... MBeanServer jmxServer = getJMXServer(); // Creates a internal data structure that would maintain // the statistics from each cache in the data grid... Map cacheList = new TreeMap(); Set jmxObjectList = jmxServer.queryNames(new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,*"), null); for (Object jmxObject : jmxObjectList) { ObjectName jmxObjectName = (ObjectName) jmxObject; String cacheName = jmxObjectName.getKeyProperty("name"); if (cacheName.equals(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName())) { continue; } else { cacheList.put(cacheName, new Statistics(cacheName)); } } // Updates the internal data structure with statistic data // retrieved from caches inside the in-memory data grid... Set<String> cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Set resultSet = jmxServer.queryNames( new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,name=" + cacheName + ",*"), null); for (Object resultSetRef : resultSet) { ObjectName objectName = (ObjectName) resultSetRef; if (objectName.getKeyProperty("tier").equals("back")) { int unit = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Units"); int size = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Size"); Statistics statistics = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); statistics.incrementUnit(unit); statistics.incrementSize(size); cacheList.put(cacheName, statistics); } } } // Finally... print the objects from the internal data // structure that represents the statistics from caches... cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Statistics estatisticas = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); System.out.println(estatisticas); } } public MBeanServer getJMXServer() { MBeanServer jmxServer = null; for (Object jmxServerRef : MBeanServerFactory.findMBeanServer(null)) { jmxServer = (MBeanServer) jmxServerRef; if (jmxServer.getDefaultDomain().equals(DEFAULT_DOMAIN) || DEFAULT_DOMAIN.length() == 0) { break; } jmxServer = null; } if (jmxServer == null) { jmxServer = MBeanServerFactory.createMBeanServer(DEFAULT_DOMAIN); } return jmxServer; } private class Statistics { private long unit; private long size; private String cacheName; public Statistics(String cacheName) { this.cacheName = cacheName; } public void incrementUnit(long unit) { this.unit += unit; } public void incrementSize(long size) { this.size += size; } public long getUnit() { return unit; } public long getSize() { return size; } public double getUnitInMB() { return unit / (1024.0 * 1024.0); } public double getAverageSize() { return size == 0 ? 0 : unit / size; } public String toString() { StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); sb.append("\nCache Statistics of '").append(cacheName).append("':\n"); sb.append(" - Total Entries of Cache -----> " + getSize()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> " + getUnit()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (MB) -----------> " + FORMAT.format(getUnitInMB())).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Object Average Size --------> " + FORMAT.format(getAverageSize())).append("\n"); return sb.toString(); } } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { new CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache().run(); } public static final DecimalFormat FORMAT = new DecimalFormat("###.###"); public static final String DEFAULT_DOMAIN = ""; public static final String DOMAIN_NAME = "Coherence"; } I've commented the overall example so, I don't think that you should get into trouble to understand it. Basically we are dealing with JMX. The first thing to do is enable JMX support for the Coherence client (ie, an JVM that will only retrieve values from the data grid and will not integrate the cluster) application. This can be done very easily using the runtime "tangosol.coherence.management" system property. Consult the Coherence documentation for JMX to understand the possible values that could be applied. The program creates an in memory data structure that holds a custom class created called "Statistics". This class represents the information that we are interested to see, which in this case are the size in bytes and in MB of the caches. An instance of this class is created for each cache that are currently managed by the data grid. Using JMX specific methods, we retrieve the information that are relevant for calculate the total size of the caches. To test this example, you should execute first the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program and after the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program. The results in the console should be something like this: 2012-06-23 13:29:31.188/4.970 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational overrides from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence-override-dev.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/tangosol-coherence-override.xml" is not specified 2012-06-23 13:29:31.266/5.048 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/custom-mbeans.xml" is not specified Oracle Coherence Version 3.6.0.4 Build 19111 Grid Edition: Development mode Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2012-06-23 13:29:33.156/6.938 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded Reporter configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/reports/report-group.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:33.500/7.282 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded cache configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/coherence-cache-config.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:35.391/9.173 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): TCMP bound to /192.168.177.133:8090 using SystemSocketProvider 2012-06-23 13:29:37.062/10.844 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): This Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) joined cluster "cluster:0xC4DB" with senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) 2012-06-23 13:29:37.172/10.954 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Cluster with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Management with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service DistributedCache with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Started cluster Name=cluster:0xC4DB Group{Address=224.3.6.0, Port=36000, TTL=4} MasterMemberSet ( ThisMember=Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) OldestMember=Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) ActualMemberSet=MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) ) RecycleMillis=1200000 RecycleSet=MemberSet(Size=0, BitSetCount=0 ) ) TcpRing{Connections=[1]} IpMonitor{AddressListSize=0} 2012-06-23 13:29:37.891/11.673 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Invocation:Management, member=2): Service Management joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.203/12.985 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Service DistributedCache joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.297/13.079 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Asking member 1 for 128 primary partitions Cache Statistics of 'People': - Total Entries of Cache -----> 3 - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> 883920 - Used Memory (MB) -----------> 0.843 - Object Average Size --------> 294640 I hope that this post could save you some time when calculate the total size of Coherence cache became a requirement for your high scalable system using data grids. See you!

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• Windows Azure Service Bus Scatter-Gather Implementation

  - by Alan Smith

  One of the more challenging enterprise integration patterns that developers may wish to implement is the Scatter-Gather pattern. In this article I will show the basic implementation of a scatter-gather pattern using the topic-subscription model of the windows azure service bus. I’ll be using the implementation in demos, and also as a lab in my training courses, and the pattern will also be included in the next release of my free e-book the “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”. The Scatter-Gather pattern answers the following scenario. How do you maintain the overall message flow when a message needs to be sent to multiple recipients, each of which may send a reply? Use a Scatter-Gather that broadcasts a message to multiple recipients and re-aggregates the responses back into a single message. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Scatter-Gather pattern here.   The scatter-gather pattern uses a composite of the publish-subscribe channel pattern and the aggregator pattern. The publish-subscribe channel is used to broadcast messages to a number of receivers, and the aggregator is used to gather the response messages and aggregate them together to form a single message. Scatter-Gather Scenario The scenario for this scatter-gather implementation is an application that allows users to answer questions in a poll based voting scenario. A poll manager application will be used to broadcast questions to users, the users will use a voting application that will receive and display the questions and send the votes back to the poll manager. The poll manager application will receive the users’ votes and aggregate them together to display the results. The scenario should be able to scale to support a large number of users.   Scatter-Gather Implementation The diagram below shows the overall architecture for the scatter-gather implementation.       Messaging Entities Looking at the scatter-gather pattern diagram it can be seen that the topic-subscription architecture is well suited for broadcasting a message to a number of subscribers. The poll manager application can send the question messages to a topic, and each voting application can receive the question message on its own subscription. The static limit of 2,000 subscriptions per topic in the current release means that 2,000 voting applications can receive question messages and take part in voting. The vote messages can then be sent to the poll manager application using a queue. The voting applications will send their vote messages to the queue, and the poll manager will receive and process the vote messages. The questions topic and answer queue are created using the Windows Azure Developer Portal. Each instance of the voting application will create its own subscription in the questions topic when it starts, allowing the question messages to be broadcast to all subscribing voting applications. Data Contracts Two simple data contracts will be used to serialize the questions and votes as brokered messages. The code for these is shown below.   [DataContract] public class Question {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; } }     To keep the implementation of the voting functionality simple and focus on the pattern implementation, the users can only vote yes or no to the questions.   [DataContract] public class Vote {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; }       [DataMember]     public bool IsYes { get; set; } }     Poll Manager Application The poll manager application has been implemented as a simple WPF application; the user interface is shown below. A question can be entered in the text box, and sent to the topic by clicking the Add button. The topic and subscriptions used for broadcasting the messages are shown in a TreeView control. The questions that have been broadcast and the resulting votes are shown in a ListView control. When the application is started any existing subscriptions are cleared form the topic, clients are then created for the questions topic and votes queue, along with background workers for receiving and processing the vote messages, and updating the display of subscriptions.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Create a new results list and data bind it.     Results = new ObservableCollection<Result>();     lsvResults.ItemsSource = Results;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Clear out any old subscriptions.     NamespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subs =         NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     foreach (SubscriptionDescription sub in subs)     {         NamespaceManager.DeleteSubscription(sub.TopicPath, sub.Name);     }       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create the topic and queue clients.     ScatterGatherTopicClient =         factory.CreateTopicClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker threads.     VotesBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     VotesBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     VotesBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();       SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(UpdateSubscriptions);     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     When the poll manager user nters a question in the text box and clicks the Add button a question message is created and sent to the topic. This message will be broadcast to all the subscribing voting applications. An instance of the Result class is also created to keep track of the votes cast, this is then added to an observable collection named Results, which is data-bound to the ListView control.   private void btnAddQuestion_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new result for recording votes.     Result result = new Result()     {         Question = txtQuestion.Text     };     Results.Add(result);       // Send the question to the topic     Question question = new Question()     {         QuestionText = result.Question     };     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(question);     ScatterGatherTopicClient.Send(msg);       txtQuestion.Text = ""; }     The Results class is implemented as follows.   public class Result : INotifyPropertyChanged {     public string Question { get; set; }       private int m_YesVotes;     private int m_NoVotes;       public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;       public int YesVotes     {         get { return m_YesVotes; }         set         {             m_YesVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("YesVotes");         }     }       public int NoVotes     {         get { return m_NoVotes; }         set         {             m_NoVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("NoVotes");         }     }       private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string prop)     {         if(PropertyChanged != null)         {             PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(prop));         }     } }     The INotifyPropertyChanged interface is implemented so that changes to the number of yes and no votes will be updated in the ListView control. Receiving the vote messages from the voting applications is done asynchronously, using a background worker thread.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Receive a vote message from the queue         BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherQueueClient.Receive();         if (msg != null)         {             // Deserialize the message.             Vote vote = msg.GetBody<Vote>();               // Update the results.             foreach (Result result in Results)             {                 if (result.Question.Equals(vote.QuestionText))                 {                     if (vote.IsYes)                     {                         result.YesVotes++;                     }                     else                     {                         result.NoVotes++;                     }                     break;                 }             }               // Mark the message as complete.             msg.Complete();         }       } }     When a vote message is received, the result that matches the vote question is updated with the vote from the user. The message is then marked as complete. A second background thread is used to update the display of subscriptions in the TreeView, with a dispatcher used to update the user interface. // This runs on a background worker. private void UpdateSubscriptions(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Get a list of subscriptions.         IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subscriptions =             NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);           // Update the user interface.         SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()         {             trvSubscriptions.Items.Clear();             TreeViewItem topicItem = new TreeViewItem()             {                 Header = AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic             };               foreach (SubscriptionDescription subscription in subscriptions)             {                 TreeViewItem subscriptionItem = new TreeViewItem()                 {                     Header = subscription.Name                 };                 topicItem.Items.Add(subscriptionItem);             }             trvSubscriptions.Items.Add(topicItem);               topicItem.ExpandSubtree();         };         this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);           Thread.Sleep(3000);     } }       Voting Application The voting application is implemented as another WPF application. This one is more basic, and allows the user to vote “Yes” or “No” for the questions sent by the poll manager application. The user interface for that application is shown below. When an instance of the voting application is created it will create a subscription in the questions topic using a GUID as the subscription name. The application can then receive copies of every question message that is sent to the topic. Clients for the new subscription and the votes queue are created, along with a background worker to receive the question messages. The voting application is set to receiving mode, meaning it is ready to receive a question message from the subscription.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Set the mode to receiving.     IsReceiving = true;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create a subcription for this instance     NamespaceManager mgr = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     string subscriptionName = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();     mgr.CreateSubscription(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);       // Create the subscription and queue clients.     ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient = factory.CreateSubscriptionClient         (AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker thread.     BackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     BackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     I took the inspiration for creating the subscriptions in the voting application from the chat application that uses topics and subscriptions blogged by Ovais Akhter here. The method that receives the question messages runs on a background thread. If the application is in receive mode, a question message will be received from the subscription, the question will be displayed in the user interface, the voting buttons enabled, and IsReceiving set to false to prevent more questing from being received before the current one is answered.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         if (IsReceiving)         {             // Receive a question message from the topic.             BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient.Receive();             if (msg != null)             {                 // Deserialize the message.                 Question question = msg.GetBody<Question>();                   // Update the user interface.                 SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()                 {                     lblQuestion.Content = question.QuestionText;                     btnYes.IsEnabled = true;                     btnNo.IsEnabled = true;                 };                 this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);                 IsReceiving = false;                   // Mark the message as complete.                 msg.Complete();             }         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }     } }     When the user clicks on the Yes or No button, the btnVote_Click method is called. This will create a new Vote data contract with the appropriate question and answer and send the message to the poll manager application using the votes queue. The user voting buttons are then disabled, the question text cleared, and the IsReceiving flag set to true to allow a new message to be received.   private void btnVote_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new vote.     Vote vote = new Vote()     {         QuestionText = (string)lblQuestion.Content,         IsYes = ((sender as Button).Content as string).Equals("Yes")     };       // Send the vote message.     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(vote);     ScatterGatherQueueClient.Send(msg);       // Update the user interface.     lblQuestion.Content = "";     btnYes.IsEnabled = false;     btnNo.IsEnabled = false;     IsReceiving = true; }     Testing the Application In order to test the application, an instance of the poll manager application is started; the user interface is shown below. As no instances of the voting application have been created there are no subscriptions present in the topic. When an instance of the voting application is created the subscription will be displayed in the poll manager. Now that a voting application is subscribing, a questing can be sent from the poll manager application. When the message is sent to the topic, the voting application will receive the message and display the question. The voter can then answer the question by clicking on the appropriate button. The results of the vote are updated in the poll manager application. When two more instances of the voting application are created, the poll manager will display the new subscriptions. More questions can then be broadcast to the voting applications. As the question messages are queued up in the subscription for each voting application, the users can answer the questions in their own time. The vote messages will be received by the poll manager application and aggregated to display the results. The screenshots of the applications part way through voting are shown below. The messages for each voting application are queued up in sequence on the voting application subscriptions, allowing the questions to be answered at different speeds by the voters.

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

  One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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• More SharePoint 2010 Expression Builders

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction Following my last post, I decided to publish the whole set of expression builders that I use with SharePoint. For all who don’t know about expression builders, they allow us to employ a declarative approach, so that we don’t have to write code for “gluing” things together, like getting a value from the query string, the page’s underlying SPListItem or the current SPContext and assigning it to a control’s property. These expression builders are for some quite common scenarios, I use them quite often, and I hope you find them useful as well. SPContextExpression This expression builder allows us to specify an expression to be processed on the SPContext.Current property object. For example: 1: <asp:Literal runat="server" Text=“<%$ SPContextExpression:Site.RootWeb.Lists[0].Author.LoginName %>”/> It is identical to having the following code: 1: String authorName = SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.Lists[0].Author.LoginName; SPFarmProperty Returns a property stored on the farm level: 1: <asp:Literal runat="server" Text="<%$ SPFarmProperty:SomeProperty %>"/> Identical to: 1: Object someProperty = SPFarm.Local.Properties["SomeProperty"]; SPField Returns the value of a selected page’s list item field: 1: <asp:Literal runat="server" Text="<%$ SPField:Title %>"/> Does the same as: 1: String title = SPContext.Current.ListItem["Title"] as String; SPIsInAudience Checks if the current user belongs to an audience: 1: <asp:CheckBox runat="server" Checked="<%$ SPIsInAudience:SomeAudience %>"/> Equivalent to: 1: AudienceManager audienceManager = new AudienceManager(SPServiceContext.Current); 2: Audience audience = audienceManager.Audiences["SomeAudience"]; 3: Boolean isMember = audience.IsMember(SPContext.Current.Web.User.LoginName); SPIsInGroup Checks if the current user belongs to a group: 1: <asp:CheckBox runat="server" Checked="<%$ SPIsInGroup:SomeGroup %>"/> The equivalent C# code is: 1: SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser.Groups.OfType<SPGroup>().Any(x => String.Equals(x.Name, “SomeGroup”, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)); SPProperty Returns the value of a user profile property for the current user: 1: <asp:Literal runat="server" Text="<%$ SPProperty:LastName %>"/> Where the same code in C# would be: 1: UserProfileManager upm = new UserProfileManager(SPServiceContext.Current); 2: UserProfile u = upm.GetUserProfile(false); 3: Object property = u["LastName"].Value; SPQueryString Returns a value passed on the query string: 1: <asp:GridView runat="server" PageIndex="<%$ SPQueryString:PageIndex %>" /> Is equivalent to (no SharePoint code this time): 1: Int32 pageIndex = Convert.ChangeType(typeof(Int32), HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["PageIndex"]); SPWebProperty Returns the value of a property stored at the site level: 1: <asp:Literal runat="server" Text="<%$ SPWebProperty:__ImagesListId %>"/> You can get the same result as: 1: String imagesListId = SPContext.Current.Web.AllProperties["__ImagesListId"] as String; Code OK, let’s move to the code. First, a common abstract base class, mainly for inheriting the conversion method: 1: public abstract class SPBaseExpressionBuilder : ExpressionBuilder 2: { 3: #region Protected static methods 4: protected static Object Convert(Object value, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 5: { 6: if (value != null) 7: { 8: if (propertyInfo.PropertyType.IsAssignableFrom(value.GetType()) == false) 9: { 10: if (propertyInfo.PropertyType.IsEnum == true) 11: { 12: value = Enum.Parse(propertyInfo.PropertyType, value.ToString(), true); 13: } 14: else if (propertyInfo.PropertyType == typeof(String)) 15: { 16: value = value.ToString(); 17: } 18: else if ((typeof(IConvertible).IsAssignableFrom(propertyInfo.PropertyType) == true) && (typeof(IConvertible).IsAssignableFrom(value.GetType()) == true)) 19: { 20: value = System.Convert.ChangeType(value, propertyInfo.PropertyType); 21: } 22: } 23: } 24:  25: return (value); 26: } 27: #endregion 28:  29: #region Public override methods 30: public override CodeExpression GetCodeExpression(BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 31: { 32: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(entry.Expression) == true) 33: { 34: return (new CodePrimitiveExpression(String.Empty)); 35: } 36: else 37: { 38: return (new CodeMethodInvokeExpression(new CodeMethodReferenceExpression(new CodeTypeReferenceExpression(this.GetType()), "GetValue"), new CodePrimitiveExpression(entry.Expression.Trim()), new CodePropertyReferenceExpression(new CodeArgumentReferenceExpression("entry"), "PropertyInfo"))); 39: } 40: } 41: #endregion 42:  43: #region Public override properties 44: public override Boolean SupportsEvaluate 45: { 46: get 47: { 48: return (true); 49: } 50: } 51: #endregion 52: } Next, the code for each expression builder: 1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPContext")] 2: public class SPContextExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String expression, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: SPContext context = SPContext.Current; 8: Object expressionValue = DataBinder.Eval(context, expression.Trim().Replace('\'', '"')); 9:  10: expressionValue = Convert(expressionValue, propertyInfo); 11:  12: return (expressionValue); 13: } 14:  15: #endregion 16:  17: #region Public override methods 18: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 19: { 20: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 21: } 22: #endregion 23: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPFarmProperty")] 2: public class SPFarmPropertyExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String propertyName, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: Object propertyValue = SPFarm.Local.Properties[propertyName]; 8:  9: propertyValue = Convert(propertyValue, propertyInfo); 10:  11: return (propertyValue); 12: } 13:  14: #endregion 15:  16: #region Public override methods 17: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 18: { 19: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 20: } 21: #endregion 22: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPField")] 2: public class SPFieldExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String fieldName, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: Object fieldValue = SPContext.Current.ListItem[fieldName]; 8:  9: fieldValue = Convert(fieldValue, propertyInfo); 10:  11: return (fieldValue); 12: } 13:  14: #endregion 15:  16: #region Public override methods 17: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 18: { 19: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 20: } 21: #endregion 22: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPIsInAudience")] 2: public class SPIsInAudienceExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String audienceName, PropertyInfo info) 6: { 7: Debugger.Break(); 8: audienceName = audienceName.Trim(); 9:  10: if ((audienceName.StartsWith("'") == true) && (audienceName.EndsWith("'") == true)) 11: { 12: audienceName = audienceName.Substring(1, audienceName.Length - 2); 13: } 14:  15: AudienceManager manager = new AudienceManager(); 16: Object value = manager.IsMemberOfAudience(SPControl.GetContextWeb(HttpContext.Current).CurrentUser.LoginName, audienceName); 17:  18: if (info.PropertyType == typeof(String)) 19: { 20: value = value.ToString(); 21: } 22:  23: return(value); 24: } 25:  26: #endregion 27:  28: #region Public override methods 29: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 30: { 31: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 32: } 33: #endregion 34: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPIsInGroup")] 2: public class SPIsInGroupExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String groupName, PropertyInfo info) 6: { 7: groupName = groupName.Trim(); 8:  9: if ((groupName.StartsWith("'") == true) && (groupName.EndsWith("'") == true)) 10: { 11: groupName = groupName.Substring(1, groupName.Length - 2); 12: } 13:  14: Object value = SPControl.GetContextWeb(HttpContext.Current).CurrentUser.Groups.OfType<SPGroup>().Any(x => String.Equals(x.Name, groupName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)); 15:  16: if (info.PropertyType == typeof(String)) 17: { 18: value = value.ToString(); 19: } 20:  21: return(value); 22: } 23:  24: #endregion 25:  26: #region Public override methods 27: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 28: { 29: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 30: } 31: #endregion 32: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPProperty")] 2: public class SPPropertyExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String propertyName, System.Reflection.PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: SPServiceContext serviceContext = SPServiceContext.GetContext(HttpContext.Current); 8: UserProfileManager upm = new UserProfileManager(serviceContext); 9: UserProfile up = upm.GetUserProfile(false); 10: Object propertyValue = (up[propertyName] != null) ? up[propertyName].Value : null; 11:  12: propertyValue = Convert(propertyValue, propertyInfo); 13:  14: return (propertyValue); 15: } 16:  17: #endregion 18:  19: #region Public override methods 20: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 21: { 22: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 23: } 24: #endregion 25: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPQueryString")] 2: public class SPQueryStringExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String parameterName, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: Object parameterValue = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString[parameterName]; 8:  9: parameterValue = Convert(parameterValue, propertyInfo); 10:  11: return (parameterValue); 12: } 13:  14: #endregion 15:  16: #region Public override methods 17: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 18: { 19: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 20: } 21: #endregion 22: }   1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPWebProperty")] 2: public class SPWebPropertyExpressionBuilder : SPBaseExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetValue(String propertyName, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: Object propertyValue = SPContext.Current.Web.AllProperties[propertyName]; 8:  9: propertyValue = Convert(propertyValue, propertyInfo); 10:  11: return (propertyValue); 12: } 13:  14: #endregion 15:  16: #region Public override methods 17: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 18: { 19: return (GetValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 20: } 21: #endregion 22: } Registration You probably know how to register them, but here it goes again: add this following snippet to your Web.config file, inside the configuration/system.web/compilation/expressionBuilders section: 1: <add expressionPrefix="SPContext" type="MyNamespace.SPContextExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 2: <add expressionPrefix="SPFarmProperty" type="MyNamespace.SPFarmPropertyExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 3: <add expressionPrefix="SPField" type="MyNamespace.SPFieldExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 4: <add expressionPrefix="SPIsInAudience" type="MyNamespace.SPIsInAudienceExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 5: <add expressionPrefix="SPIsInGroup" type="MyNamespace.SPIsInGroupExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 6: <add expressionPrefix="SPProperty" type="MyNamespace.SPPropertyExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 7: <add expressionPrefix="SPQueryString" type="MyNamespace.SPQueryStringExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> 8: <add expressionPrefix="SPWebProperty" type="MyNamespace.SPWebPropertyExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=xxx" /> I’ll leave it up to you to figure out the best way to deploy this to your server!

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• How to Load Oracle Tables From Hadoop Tutorial (Part 5 - Leveraging Parallelism in OSCH)

  - by Bob Hanckel

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Using OSCH: Beyond Hello World In the previous post we discussed a “Hello World” example for OSCH focusing on the mechanics of getting a toy end-to-end example working. In this post we are going to talk about how to make it work for big data loads. We will explain how to optimize an OSCH external table for load, paying particular attention to Oracle’s DOP (degree of parallelism), the number of external table location files we use, and the number of HDFS files that make up the payload. We will provide some rules that serve as best practices when using OSCH. The assumption is that you have read the previous post and have some end to end OSCH external tables working and now you want to ramp up the size of the loads. Using OSCH External Tables for Access and Loading OSCH external tables are no different from any other Oracle external tables.  They can be used to access HDFS content using Oracle SQL: SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; or use the same SQL access to load a table in Oracle. INSERT INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; To speed up the load time, you will want to control the degree of parallelism (i.e. DOP) and add two SQL hints. ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL DML PARALLEL  8; ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL QUERY PARALLEL 8; INSERT /*+ append pq_distribute(my_oracle_table, none) */ INTO my_oracle_table SELECT * FROM my_hdfs_external_table; There are various ways of either hinting at what level of DOP you want to use.  The ALTER SESSION statements above force the issue assuming you (the user of the session) are allowed to assert the DOP (more on that in the next section).  Alternatively you could embed additional parallel hints directly into the INSERT and SELECT clause respectively. /*+ parallel(my_oracle_table,8) *//*+ parallel(my_hdfs_external_table,8) */ Note that the "append" hint lets you load a target table by reserving space above a given "high watermark" in storage and uses Direct Path load.  In other doesn't try to fill blocks that are already allocated and partially filled. It uses unallocated blocks.  It is an optimized way of loading a table without incurring the typical resource overhead associated with run-of-the-mill inserts.  The "pq_distribute" hint in this context unifies the INSERT and SELECT operators to make data flow during a load more efficient. Finally your target Oracle table should be defined with "NOLOGGING" and "PARALLEL" attributes.   The combination of the "NOLOGGING" and use of the "append" hint disables REDO logging, and its overhead.  The "PARALLEL" clause tells Oracle to try to use parallel execution when operating on the target table. Determine Your DOP It might feel natural to build your datasets in Hadoop, then afterwards figure out how to tune the OSCH external table definition, but you should start backwards. You should focus on Oracle database, specifically the DOP you want to use when loading (or accessing) HDFS content using external tables. The DOP in Oracle controls how many PQ slaves are launched in parallel when executing an external table. Typically the DOP is something you want to Oracle to control transparently, but for loading content from Hadoop with OSCH, it's something that you will want to control. Oracle computes the maximum DOP that can be used by an Oracle user. The maximum value that can be assigned is an integer value typically equal to the number of CPUs on your Oracle instances, times the number of cores per CPU, times the number of Oracle instances. For example, suppose you have a RAC environment with 2 Oracle instances. And suppose that each system has 2 CPUs with 32 cores. The maximum DOP would be 128 (i.e. 2*2*32). In point of fact if you are running on a production system, the maximum DOP you are allowed to use will be restricted by the Oracle DBA. This is because using a system maximum DOP can subsume all system resources on Oracle and starve anything else that is executing. Obviously on a production system where resources need to be shared 24x7, this can’t be allowed to happen. The use cases for being able to run OSCH with a maximum DOP are when you have exclusive access to all the resources on an Oracle system. This can be in situations when your are first seeding tables in a new Oracle database, or there is a time where normal activity in the production database can be safely taken off-line for a few hours to free up resources for a big incremental load. Using OSCH on high end machines (specifically Oracle Exadata and Oracle BDA cabled with Infiniband), this mode of operation can load up to 15TB per hour. The bottom line is that you should first figure out what DOP you will be allowed to run with by talking to the DBAs who manage the production system. You then use that number to derive the number of location files, and (optionally) the number of HDFS data files that you want to generate, assuming that is flexible. Rule 1: Find out the maximum DOP you will be allowed to use with OSCH on the target Oracle system Determining the Number of Location Files Let’s assume that the DBA told you that your maximum DOP was 8. You want the number of location files in your external table to be big enough to utilize all 8 PQ slaves, and you want them to represent equally balanced workloads. Remember location files in OSCH are metadata lists of HDFS files and are created using OSCH’s External Table tool. They also represent the workload size given to an individual Oracle PQ slave (i.e. a PQ slave is given one location file to process at a time, and only it will process the contents of the location file.) Rule 2: The size of the workload of a single location file (and the PQ slave that processes it) is the sum of the content size of the HDFS files it lists For example, if a location file lists 5 HDFS files which are each 100GB in size, the workload size for that location file is 500GB. The number of location files that you generate is something you control by providing a number as input to OSCH’s External Table tool. Rule 3: The number of location files chosen should be a small multiple of the DOP Each location file represents one workload for one PQ slave. So the goal is to keep all slaves busy and try to give them equivalent workloads. Obviously if you run with a DOP of 8 but have 5 location files, only five PQ slaves will have something to do and the other three will have nothing to do and will quietly exit. If you run with 9 location files, then the PQ slaves will pick up the first 8 location files, and assuming they have equal work loads, will finish up about the same time. But the first PQ slave to finish its job will then be rescheduled to process the ninth location file, potentially doubling the end to end processing time. So for this DOP using 8, 16, or 32 location files would be a good idea. Determining the Number of HDFS Files Let’s start with the next rule and then explain it: Rule 4: The number of HDFS files should try to be a multiple of the number of location files and try to be relatively the same size In our running example, the DOP is 8. This means that the number of location files should be a small multiple of 8. Remember that each location file represents a list of unique HDFS files to load, and that the sum of the files listed in each location file is a workload for one Oracle PQ slave. The OSCH External Table tool will look in an HDFS directory for a set of HDFS files to load.  It will generate N number of location files (where N is the value you gave to the tool). It will then try to divvy up the HDFS files and do its best to make sure the workload across location files is as balanced as possible. (The tool uses a greedy algorithm that grabs the biggest HDFS file and delegates it to a particular location file. It then looks for the next biggest file and puts in some other location file, and so on). The tools ability to balance is reduced if HDFS file sizes are grossly out of balance or are too few. For example suppose my DOP is 8 and the number of location files is 8. Suppose I have only 8 HDFS files, where one file is 900GB and the others are 100GB. When the tool tries to balance the load it will be forced to put the singleton 900GB into one location file, and put each of the 100GB files in the 7 remaining location files. The load balance skew is 9 to 1. One PQ slave will be working overtime, while the slacker PQ slaves are off enjoying happy hour. If however the total payload (1600 GB) were broken up into smaller HDFS files, the OSCH External Table tool would have an easier time generating a list where each workload for each location file is relatively the same.  Applying Rule 4 above to our DOP of 8, we could divide the workload into160 files that were approximately 10 GB in size.  For this scenario the OSCH External Table tool would populate each location file with 20 HDFS file references, and all location files would have similar workloads (approximately 200GB per location file.) As a rule, when the OSCH External Table tool has to deal with more and smaller files it will be able to create more balanced loads. How small should HDFS files get? Not so small that the HDFS open and close file overhead starts having a substantial impact. For our performance test system (Exadata/BDA with Infiniband), I compared three OSCH loads of 1 TiB. One load had 128 HDFS files living in 64 location files where each HDFS file was about 8GB. I then did the same load with 12800 files where each HDFS file was about 80MB size. The end to end load time was virtually the same. However when I got ridiculously small (i.e. 128000 files at about 8MB per file), it started to make an impact and slow down the load time. What happens if you break rules 3 or 4 above? Nothing draconian, everything will still function. You just won’t be taking full advantage of the generous DOP that was allocated to you by your friendly DBA. The key point of the rules articulated above is this: if you know that HDFS content is ultimately going to be loaded into Oracle using OSCH, it makes sense to chop them up into the right number of files roughly the same size, derived from the DOP that you expect to use for loading. Next Steps So far we have talked about OLH and OSCH as alternative models for loading. That’s not quite the whole story. They can be used together in a way that provides for more efficient OSCH loads and allows one to be more flexible about scheduling on a Hadoop cluster and an Oracle Database to perform load operations. The next lesson will talk about Oracle Data Pump files generated by OLH, and loaded using OSCH. It will also outline the pros and cons of using various load methods.  This will be followed up with a final tutorial lesson focusing on how to optimize OLH and OSCH for use on Oracle's engineered systems: specifically Exadata and the BDA. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• MVC HTML.RenderAction – Error: Duration must be a positive number

  - by BarDev

  On my website I want the user to have the ability to login/logout from any page. When the user select login button a modal dialog will be present to the user for him to enter in his credentials. Since login will be on every page, I thought I would create a partial view for the login and add it to the layout page. But when I did this I got the following error: Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number. There are other ways to work around this that would not using partial views, but I believe this should work. So to test this, I decided to make everything simple with the following code: Created a layout page with the following code @{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");} In the AccountController: public ActionResult _Login() { return PartialView("_Login"); } Partial View _Login <a id="signin">Login</a> But when I run this simple version this I still get this error: Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number. Source of error points to "@{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");}" There are some conversations on the web that are similar to my problem, which identifies this as bug with MVC (see links below). But the links pertain to Caching, and I'm not doing any caching. OuputCache Cache Profile does not work for child actions http://aspnet.codeplex.com/workitem/7923 Asp.Net MVC 3 Partial Page Output Caching Not Honoring Config Settings Asp.Net MVC 3 Partial Page Output Caching Not Honoring Config Settings Caching ChildActions using cache profiles won't work? Caching ChildActions using cache profiles won't work? I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but I'll go ahead and add it here. I'm using MVC 3 with Razor. Update Stack Trace [InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number.] System.Web.Mvc.OutputCacheAttribute.ValidateChildActionConfiguration() +624394 System.Web.Mvc.OutputCacheAttribute.OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) +127 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodFilter(IActionFilter filter, ActionExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +72 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodFilter(IActionFilter filter, ActionExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784922 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodWithFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, IList1 filters, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IDictionary2 parameters) +314 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, String actionName) +784976 System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore() +159 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +335 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClassb.b_5() +62 System.Web.Mvc.Async.<c_DisplayClass1.b_0() +20 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClasse.b_d() +54 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClass4.b_3() +15 System.Web.Mvc.ServerExecuteHttpHandlerWrapper.Wrap(Func`1 func) +41 System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) +1363 [HttpException (0x80004005): Error executing child request for handler 'System.Web.Mvc.HttpHandlerUtil+ServerExecuteHttpHandlerAsyncWrapper'.] System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) +2419 System.Web.HttpServerUtility.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage) +275 System.Web.HttpServerUtilityWrapper.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm) +94 System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.ActionHelper(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, TextWriter textWriter) +838 System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues) +56 ASP._Page_Views_Shared_SiteLayout_cshtml.Execute() in c:\Projects\Odat Projects\Odat\Source\Presentation\Odat.PublicWebSite\Views\Shared\SiteLayout.cshtml:80 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy() +280 System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.ExecutePageHierarchy() +104 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy(WebPageContext pageContext, TextWriter writer, WebPageRenderingBase startPage) +173 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.Write(HelperResult result) +89 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.RenderSurrounding(String partialViewName, Action1 body) +234 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.PopContext() +234 System.Web.Mvc.ViewResultBase.ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) +384 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClass1c.<InvokeActionResultWithFilters>b__19() +33 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784900 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784900 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultWithFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, IList1 filters, ActionResult actionResult) +265 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, String actionName) +784976 System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore() +159 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +335 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClassb.b_5() +62 System.Web.Mvc.Async.<c_DisplayClass1.b_0() +20 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClasse.b_d() +54 System.Web.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +453 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +371 Update When I Break in Code, it errors at @{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");} with the following exception. The inner exception Error executing child request for handler 'System.Web.Mvc.HttpHandlerUtil+ServerExecuteHttpHandlerAsyncWrapper'. at System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) at System.Web.HttpServerUtility.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage) at System.Web.HttpServerUtilityWrapper.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm) at System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.ActionHelper(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, TextWriter textWriter) at System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues) at ASP._Page_Views_Shared_SiteLayout_cshtml.Execute() in c:\Projects\Odat Projects\Odat\Source\Presentation\Odat.PublicWebSite\Views\Shared\SiteLayout.cshtml:line 80 at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy() at System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.ExecutePageHierarchy() at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy(WebPageContext pageContext, TextWriter writer, WebPageRenderingBase startPage) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.Write(HelperResult result) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.RenderSurrounding(String partialViewName, Action1 body) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.PopContext() at System.Web.Mvc.ViewResultBase.ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.<>c__DisplayClass1c.<InvokeActionResultWithFilters>b__19() at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) Answer Thanks Darin Dimitrov Come to find out, my AccountController had the following attribute [System.Web.Mvc.OutputCache(NoStore =true, Duration = 0, VaryByParam = "*")]. I don't believe this should caused a problem, but when I removed the attribute everything worked. BarDev

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• Problems with Google Maps API v3 + jQuery UI Tabs

  - by Bears will eat you

  There are a number of problems, which seem to be fairly well-known, when using the Google Maps API to render a map within a jQuery UI tab. I've seen SO questions posted about similar issues (here and here, for example) but the solutions there only seem to work for v2 of the Maps API. Other references I checked out are here and here, along with pretty much everything I could dig up through Googling. I've been trying to stuff a map (using v3 of the API) into a jQuery tab with mixed results. I'm using the latest versions of everything (currently jQuery 1.3.2, jQuery UI 1.7.2, don't know about Maps). This is the markup & javascript: <body> <div id="dashtabs"> <span class="logout"> <a href="go away">Log out</a> </span> <!-- tabs --> <ul class="dashtabNavigation"> <li><a href="#first_tab" >First</a></li> <li><a href="#second_tab" >Second</a></li> <li><a href="#map_tab" >Map</a></li> </ul> <!-- tab containers --> <div id="first_tab">This is my first tab</div> <div id="second_tab">This is my second tab</div> <div id="map_tab"> <div id="map_canvas"></div> </div> </div> </body> and $(document).ready(function() { var map = null; $('#dashtabs').tabs(); $('#dashtabs').bind('tabsshow', function(event, ui) { if (ui.panel.id == 'map_tab' && !map) { map = initializeMap(); google.maps.event.trigger(map, 'resize'); } }); }); function initializeMap() { // Just some canned map for now var latlng = new google.maps.LatLng(-34.397, 150.644); var myOptions = { zoom: 8, center: latlng, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP }; return new google.maps.Map($('#map_canvas')[0], myOptions); } And here's what I've found that does/doesn't work (for Maps API v3): Using the off-left technique as described in the jQuery UI Tabs documentation (and in the answers to the two questions I linked) doesn't work at all. In fact, the best-functioning code uses the CSS .ui-tabs .ui-tabs-hide { display: none; } instead. The only way to get a map to display in a tab at all is to set the CSS width and height of #map_canvas to be absolute values. Changing the width and height to auto or 100% causes the map to not display at all, even if it's already been successfully rendered (using absolute width and height). I couldn't find it documented anywhere outside of the Maps API, but map.checkResize() won't work anymore. Instead, you have to fire a resize event by calling google.maps.event.trigger(map, 'resize'). If the map is not initialized inside of a function bound to a tabsshow event, the map itself is rendered correctly but the controls are not - most are just plain missing. So, here are my questions: Does anyone else have experience accomplishing this same feat? If so, how did you figure out what would actually work, since the documented tricks don't work for Maps API v3? What about loading tab content using Ajax as per the jQuery UI docs? I haven't had a chance to play around with it but my guess is that it's going to break Maps even more. What are the chances of getting it to work (or is it not worth trying)? How do I make the map fill the largest possible area? I'd like it to fill the tab and adapt to page resizes, much in the way that it's done over at maps.google.com. But, as I said, I appear to be stuck with applying only absolute width and height CSS to the map div. Sorry if this was long-winded but this might be the only documentation for Maps API v3 + jQuery tabs. Cheers!

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• threaded serial port IOException when writing

  - by John McDonald

  Hi, I'm trying to write a small application that simply reads data from a socket, extracts some information (two integers) from the data and sends the extracted information off on a serial port. The idea is that it should start and just keep going. In short, it works, but not for long. After a consistently short period I start to receive IOExceptions and socket receive buffer is swamped. The thread framework has been taken from the MSDN serial port example. The delay in send(), readThread.Join(), is an effort to delay read() in order to allow serial port interrupt processing a chance to occur, but I think I've misinterpreted the join function. I either need to sync the processes more effectively or throw some data away as it comes in off the socket, which would be fine. The integer data is controlling a pan tilt unit and I'm sure four times a second would be acceptable, but not sure on how to best acheive either, any ideas would be greatly appreciated, cheers. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.IO.Ports; using System.Threading; using System.Net; using System.Net.Sockets; using System.IO; namespace ConsoleApplication1 { class Program { static bool _continue; static SerialPort _serialPort; static Thread readThread; static Thread sendThread; static String sendString; static Socket s; static int byteCount; static Byte[] bytesReceived; // synchronise send and receive threads static bool dataReceived; const int FIONREAD = 0x4004667F; static void Main(string[] args) { dataReceived = false; readThread = new Thread(Read); sendThread = new Thread(Send); bytesReceived = new Byte[16384]; // Create a new SerialPort object with default settings. _serialPort = new SerialPort("COM4", 38400, Parity.None, 8, StopBits.One); // Set the read/write timeouts _serialPort.WriteTimeout = 500; _serialPort.Open(); string moveMode = "CV "; _serialPort.WriteLine(moveMode); s = null; IPHostEntry hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry("localhost"); foreach (IPAddress address in hostEntry.AddressList) { IPEndPoint ipe = new IPEndPoint(address, 10001); Socket tempSocket = new Socket(ipe.AddressFamily, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp); tempSocket.Connect(ipe); if (tempSocket.Connected) { s = tempSocket; s.ReceiveBufferSize = 16384; break; } else { continue; } } readThread.Start(); sendThread.Start(); while (_continue) { Thread.Sleep(10); ;// Console.WriteLine("main..."); } readThread.Join(); _serialPort.Close(); s.Close(); } public static void Read() { while (_continue) { try { //Console.WriteLine("Read"); if (!dataReceived) { byte[] outValue = BitConverter.GetBytes(0); // Check how many bytes have been received. s.IOControl(FIONREAD, null, outValue); uint bytesAvailable = BitConverter.ToUInt32(outValue, 0); if (bytesAvailable > 0) { Console.WriteLine("Read thread..." + bytesAvailable); byteCount = s.Receive(bytesReceived); string str = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytesReceived); //str = Encoding::UTF8->GetString( bytesReceived ); string[] split = str.Split(new Char[] { '\t', '\r', '\n' }); string filteredX = (split.GetValue(7)).ToString(); string filteredY = (split.GetValue(8)).ToString(); string[] AzSplit = filteredX.Split(new Char[] { '.' }); filteredX = (AzSplit.GetValue(0)).ToString(); string[] ElSplit = filteredY.Split(new Char[] { '.' }); filteredY = (ElSplit.GetValue(0)).ToString(); // scale values int x = (int)(Convert.ToInt32(filteredX) * 1.9); string scaledAz = x.ToString(); int y = (int)(Convert.ToInt32(filteredY) * 1.9); string scaledEl = y.ToString(); String moveAz = "PS" + scaledAz + " "; String moveEl = "TS" + scaledEl + " "; sendString = moveAz + moveEl; dataReceived = true; } } } catch (TimeoutException) {Console.WriteLine("timeout exception");} catch (NullReferenceException) {Console.WriteLine("Read NULL reference exception");} } } public static void Send() { while (_continue) { try { if (dataReceived) { // sleep Read() thread to allow serial port interrupt processing readThread.Join(100); // send command to PTU dataReceived = false; Console.WriteLine(sendString); _serialPort.WriteLine(sendString); } } catch (TimeoutException) { Console.WriteLine("Timeout exception"); } catch (IOException) { Console.WriteLine("IOException exception"); } catch (NullReferenceException) { Console.WriteLine("Send NULL reference exception"); } } } } }

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