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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 13, 2010New ProjectsChat Neo: Video chatDev-wow HappyFuwa: Silverlight + Asp.net + Ajax 实现的以北京奥运为题材，福娃在线聊天互动系统 登录系统后，你可以和线上的朋友即时互动，走动 聊天 动作等都会呈现给其他的在线用户Dynamic Configuration Manager: Dynamic Configuration Manager GameHelper: the project of myselfGeotron: Geotron is a C# geolocation library to resolve postcodes and addresses to co-ordinates, to assist developers in creating location-aware applications. InfoPath Forms Services 2010 Web Testing Toolkit: This project has the tools and information needed to write Visual Studio web tests for InfoPath Forms Services 2010.IronBrainFuck, SimpleBrainFuck: IronBrainFuck and SimpleBrainFuck makes it easier for BrainFuck programmers to develop BrainFuck-compatible programs. It's developed in C#.Runtime Intelligence API: The Runtime Intelligence API library and samples provided by PreEmptive Solutions.SilverVNC 1.0: This project is a Silverlight VNC Viewer. It requires Silverlight 4.0 and works in Out of Browser with full-trust.Snippet Creator: Yet another Visual Studio plugin for creating code snippets.Software Codex: Software Codex is a collection of projects developed in .net to provide a set of libraries and functionalities for developers. It is divided into m...TestCrm: Let go!Make our CrmVidCoder: VidCoder is a DVD ripping and video transcoding application. It uses HandBrake for the encoding engine, but has a revamped and easy to use UI writt...WPF Data Virtualization: Component for displaying and interacting a large data set in WPF application.WPF Gantt chart: Gantt chart control for WPFNew ReleasesAJAX Control Toolkit: 40412: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - April 12th 2010 Release Version 40412April 12, 2010 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit...ASP.NET MVC | SCAFFOLD: ASP.NET MVC SCAFFOLD 1.0 PREVIEW: Primeiro release do ASP.NET MVC SCAFFOLD.Autenticar no OpenLDAP utilizando pGIna: LDAPAuth plugin: Release: DLL LDAPAuth Brief: pGina pluginBluetooth Radar: Version 1.8: Add position helper class to test whether a given point is on the interior of a circle. Random set of Devices on the radar + Zindex changes on Mous...Database Searcher: DB-Searcher Binaries v0.1: First beta version containing following features: Search exact database values via .NET DB-Provider Microsoft SQL MySQL .NET Connector (no .NET t...DBSourceTools: DBSourceTools_1.2.0.7: Release 1.2.0.7 Extended search engine from (pegas)'s patch. Fixed Script Data bug with reserved word (eripsni). Write Targets can now create targe...ESB Toolkit Extensions: Tellago SOA ESB Extenstions v0.4: Windows Installer file that installs Library on a BizTalk ESB 2.0 system. This Install automatically configures the esb.config to use the new compo...Fluent Assertions: Release 1.2: See this blog post for more details on this release: http://www.dennisdoomen.net/2010/04/fluent-assertions-12-has-been-released.htmlFNA Fractal Numerical Algorithm for a new encryption technology: FNA: This is a latest distribution ( 0.04 at the moment). Is a Perl package (.pm). More information on: http://search.cpan.org/~anak/Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.6 Released!: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.0.6 which contains the following major features: * Zoom using interactive ZoomRec...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET_Downloader_v.91_BETA: - added configuration option 'FeedAddress' to specify the URL of the RSS feed to consume - implemented fix for workitem4260: AddDate = false; will ...HobbyBrew Mobile: Beta 1: First public BetaHome Access Plus+: v3.2.6.1: v3.2.6.1 Fixed the wrong date in the iCal Generator Fixed the admin booking posting logging it as being booked by the admin Fixed the problem o...HTML Ruby: 6.21.1: Added back the space ruby text option More consistent ruby text positioning regardless to the page's stylesInfoPath Forms Services 2010 Web Testing Toolkit: IPFS 2010 Web Test Toolkit 20100412 for VS2008: The ExtractAndSubstituteDynamicInfoPathData web test plugin. To use it, simply add the plugin to your web test. It automatically recognizes the inf...IronPython: 2.6.1: Hello Python Community, We’re pleased to announce the final release of IronPython 2.6.1. This version of IronPython makes great strides in stabili...IronRuby: 1.0: IronRuby 1.0 is the first stable version of IronRuby, targeting Ruby 1.8.6 compatibility. For a high-level compatibility report solely based on Rub...METAR.NET Decoder: 0.3.x beta: First public release. Main of the application is working. Metar can be downloaded, decoded, updated and encoded back to metar string. Release incl...MiniTwitter: 1.11: MiniTwitter 1.11 更新内容 修正 設定ファイルを自動でバックアップして、破損したときは出来るだけ修正するように。 初回起動時にタイムラインを更新しようとすると落ちるバグを修正。MSBuild Mercurial Tasks: 1.0.1 Stable: Ready for Production release. This version integrates all the basic functionalities of Mercurial as defined in the Use Case 1.Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_7_0_0: Latest Version Strongly recommended to use .NET 4.0 now that it is in RC It can be downloaded from hereMVC Foolproof Validation: Beta 0.9.3754: First Beta release. Addressed several bugs from alpha along with some considerable class refactoring. ModelAwareValidationAttribute will make creat...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.121: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version allow...Proxi [Proxy Interface]: Proxi Release 1.0.0.412: Proxi Release 1.0.0.412QueryUnit: QueryUnitPOC v. 0.0.0.8: This version add support for AreNotEqual, Greater, Less and fix some problems with "format" attribute used in conjunction with the string data type...Rainier: Trabalhos de orçamento empresarial: Estão disponíveis os arquivos de exemplo sobre o planejamento para orçamento empresarial. A resolução é referente aos exercícios explicados em sal...Runtime Intelligence API: Initial release: The initial release of the WCF contract & proxy assembly. AuthentiCode signed library.SharePoint Accelerators: Central Admin - Command Search: This web part allows you to search for a SharePoint 2010 Central Admin commands. This web part can come handy when you are demostrating SharePoint ...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5013A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5013A-FRA-Level100* This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to provision a computed site column that shows a customized view of an existing hid...SilverVNC 1.0: SilverVNC 1.0.3755.0: This download is the first release of the project published on www.silverlightplayground.org. For a detailed explanation please refer to http://www...Snippet Creator: SnippetCreator.Setup: This is the first and (I hope) final release.SQL Server Health & History (SQLH2): SQLH2 v.2.2.001: New Features Updated to use .Net 3.5 Job and Job history information implemented Last dif and log backup columns added Logical Disk implemented Dis...SQL Server Health & History (SQLH2): SQLH2PerfCollector v.2.1.003: Updated to run on .Net 3.5 Now installs to correct registry path on x64Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson one content: Here is Lesson one original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. The blog tutorial has now started over on http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgen...SysPad: SysPad 4.10.7.1: A folder management and scratchpad utility; especially useful in a business network setting that utilizes numerous, commonly used folders. The pro...TaskUnZip for SSIS: TaskUnZip for SSIS 1.1.0.0: Add: recursive compress. Add: filter option for exstract e compress file. (Tnx to: Kevin Wendler)TCP Wrapper: TCP Wrapper 1.0.0.3: Adding Client Accessor to CommingDataAvailableEventArgs ...UCD: Architecture: UCDArch 1.0: Production release of UCDArch 1.0 (for ASP.NET MVC 1.0). New Features including the ability to modify the NHibernate FlushMode, URL convention help...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30412.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVidCoder: 0.1.0: First VidCoder beta release. It's missing a few features that will be added before release: Advanced x264 options In-GUI encode log Additiona...WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.10.01: Whats New changesBrowser: Removed extra "\" sign from Current folder name selecting the root folder Browser: Fixed Folder Rendering Browser Fix...WPF Gantt chart: gantt: first, alpha version, of gantt chart for wpfxvanneste: Coverflow et thumbnail sharepoint: Code du coverflow silverlight du webcast sur les thumbnails sharepointMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitPHPExcelMost Active ProjectsRawrnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.AutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterBlogEngine.NETBeanProxy

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 27, 2010Popular ReleasesRocket Framework (.Net 4.0): Rocket Framework for Windows V 1.0.0: Architecture is reviewed and adjusted in a way so that I can introduce the Web version and WPF version of this framework next. - Rocket.Core is introduced - Controller button functions revisited and updated - DB is renewed to suite the implemented features - Create New button functionality is changed - Add Question Handling featuresVCC: Latest build, v2.1.31226.0: Automatic drop of latest buildFxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrtor 1.1.0: New FeatureSearch violation information FxCop Integrator provides the violation search feature. You can find out specific violation information by simple search expression.Analyze with FxCop project file FxCop Integrator supports code analysis with FxCop project file. You can customize code analysis behavior (e.g. analyze specifid types only, use specific rules only, and so on). ImprovementImproved the code analysis result list to show more information (added Proejct and File column). Change...Flickr Wallpaper Rotator (for Windows desktop): Wallpaper Flickr 1.1: Some minor bugfixes (mostly covering when network connection is flakey, so I discovered them all while at my parents' house for Christmas).Mcopy API: McopyAPI v.1.0.0.2: changed display help "mcopyapi /?" and a few minor changedOPSM: OPSM v2.0: Updated version, 30%-40% faster than v1.0. Requires .NET Framework 2.0People's Note: People's Note 0.19: Added touch scrolling to the note view screen. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.HSS Core Framework: HSS Core v4.0.700.10: Release v4.0.700.10 December 25th, 2010 Upgrade Instructions from v4.0.700 to v4.0.700.10: (patch release) Uninstall v4.0.700 Install the new v4.0.700.10 Upgrade Instructions: (full upgrade from a version prior to v4.0.700) Uninstall your old version Update the Log Configuration, by changing the logging from Database to Machine Backup and then Truncate the hss logging tables Uninstall the HSSLOG Database using the HSSLOG Database install wizard Uninstall the HSS Core Framework Ins...NoSimplerAccounting: NoSimplerAccounting 6.0: -Fixed a bug in expense category report.NHibernate Mapping Generator: NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0: Added support for Postgres (Thanks to Angelo)NewLife XCode: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????（????v3.5??）: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????，??： NewLife.Core ??? NewLife.Net ??? XControl ??? XTemplate ????，??C#?????? XAgent ???? NewLife.CommonEnitty ??????（???，XCode??????） XCode?? ?????????，??????????????????，?????95% XCode v3.5.2009.0714 ??，?v3.5?v6.0???????????????，?????????。v3.5???????????，??????????????。 XCoder ??XTemplate?????????，????????XCode??? XCoder_Src ???????（????XTemplate????），??????????????????MiniTwitter: 1.64: MiniTwitter 1.64 ???? ?? 1.63 ??? URL ??????????????VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.0: Please see changes: http://support.vivoware.com/project/ChangeLog.aspx?PROJID=48Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6 Beta - codename JUNO: The Umbraco 4.6 beta (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains more than 89 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login t...SSH.NET Library: 2010.12.23: This release includes some bug fixes and few new fetures. Fixes Allow to retrieve big directory structures ssh-dss algorithm is fixed Populate sftp file attributes New Features Support for passhrase when private key is used Support added for diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 and diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1 key exchange algorithms Allow to provide multiple key files for authentication Add support for "keyboard-interactive" authentication method...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.3.0: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. Release notesThis will be the last release targeting ASP.NET MVC 2 and .NET 3.5. MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 will be targeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4 Web.config setting skipAssemblyScanOn has been deprecated in favor of excludeAssembliesForScan and includeAssembliesForScan ISiteMapNodeUrlResolver is now completely responsible for generating th...Media Companion: Media Companion 3.400: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. A manual is included to get you startedMulticore Task Framework: MTF 1.0.1: Release 1.0.1 of Multicore Task Framework.SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 7: 1. added script save/load in user query window 2. fixed problem with connection dialog when choosing windows auth but still ask for user name 3. auto open user table when double click one table node 4. improved alert message, added log only methodEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.6 ALPHA: 2.2.6 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Fixing up some r...New ProjectsActiveDirectory Object Model Library: The ActiveDirectory Object Model Library, which can operate the AD easily.Allspark: Allspark is an BI focused sharing space.Calendar Control for WP7: Calendar Control for Wp7 (Windows Phone 7). I needed a calendar control for my WP7 app and since WP7 did not have any and I couldn't find anything on the internet I decided to write my own. Please feel free to use it in your project and share if you have improved on it.CryptoPad: CryptoPad is a simple notepad like application that works with encrypted files. Users can open,edit and save encrypted files using CrypoPad without andy other application, everythning is easy and transparent.Entity Visualizer: Entity Framework Debugger VisualizerHTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx is meant to be an open-source lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor in which the user can see what they are doing in realtime. Comparable to my other project, Brandons HTML IDE, I'm hoping this to be a huge success.IL Inject: Aspect-oriented programming based on the injection of IL instruction in the methods of an assembly that is marked by attributesIntegração no Trabalho: Este projeto será desenvolvido para ser possível a integração entre funcionarios de uma empresa. O programa funcionará em rede e através dele será possível cadastrar projetos, atividades e seus colegas poderão comentar, criticar e dar dicas nos outros projetos .Knexsys Project: Knexsys, also know as KKD (Knexsys Knowledge Discovery), is a research program that aims to study the capabilities of SQL Server and the .NET framework to implement a rule production engine to mine real-time data. It's developed in C#.mysvn: This project host including some of my own projects. I am interested in WPF and RIA. Furthermore, I want to learn more about C, C++, Java, PHP, Python.OpenTwitter: Twitter clone made with C# and LINQ. this is only a webservice, there is no client for it, the main idea behind opentwitter is to provide a framework that you can use with your own clients ( mobile devices, web pages, etc ) and data provider ( xml, sql server, oracle, etc ).OPSM: OPSM Miner & information projectOutlook UI Tools: Changes to the Outlook UI to make it more usable: * Allow reply to address a recipient instead of the sender * Keep meeting reminders from popping up when overdue many daysSimpleUploadTo: Simple UploadToTFS 4 FPSE: Allow the ability for FrontPage Server Extensions to use TFS as a source control repository.TFS CheckInNotifier: Team Foundation Server 2010 Check-in event notifier desktop application.Universe.WCF.Behaviors: Universe.WCF.Behaviors provides behaviors: - Easy migration from Remoting - Transparent delivery - Traffic Statistics - WCF Streaming Adaptor for BinaryWriter and TextWriter - etc vebshop2: vebshop2Windows Weibo all in one for Sina Sohu and QQ: Windows Weibo all in one for Sina Sohu and QQ.

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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 11, 2010New ProjectsBIxPress Community Edition: SSIS Toolset BIDS Addin,Audit,Notify,Deploy,Template: BI xPress is a BIDS Addin/standalone application for SQL Developer/DBA. This tool has many features including Auditing, Notification, Deployment, P...C# Shell (cash): Cash is a command-line interpreter (shell), written in C#. It is part of an project to produce tools which replace the traditional GNU/Linux user-l...Chernarus Life Revivved: Chernarus life revivved for arma 2 multiplayerDKAL: DKAL is a distributed authorization policy language. This project contains an engine for running DKAL policies. It is implemented primarly in F#.ImageResizer for Albulle: Application permettant de déployer le contenu pour une la galerie photos php Albulle. L'objectif est de faciliter et automatiser le redimensionnem...Intraweb Active Directory Authentication Demo: A simple demo created using Delphi 7 and Intraweb 9.0.42 with the Active Directory Helper interface to authenticate a user to Active Directory. ...Lokad CQRS - build scalable web sites and enterprise solutions on Windows Azure: Lokad CQRS helps to build scalable cloud applications for Windows Azure. It provides time-proven guidance and .NET Application Blocks to help arc...LRS: Write a concise, reader-focused summary. Write a concise, reader-focused summary. Write a concise, reader-focused summary. ManagementPeople99: ...MEDILIG - MEDICAL LIFE GUARD: Cross-platform EHR/EMR software for the design, implementation and use of autonomous, open database models for multilingual clinical data managemen...NETris - ASP .NET, AJAX, Web Service based Tetris Game: Tetris game with business logic provided via Web Services.Peace Through Force: Peace Through Force is a 2D side scrolling tactical shooter developed in XNA Game Studio 3.1 using C#. The game is targeted to be made available o...Powwa: Util to show battery status and cpu speed on laptop. Uses jWMI's for interfacing with Windows' WMI.Resource Management System: Resource Management system for Internal purpose using WPF,WCF and SilverlighttChat - ASP.NET, Ajax & Web Service based Chat Room: Simple chat room application. Technology: ASP .NET, Ajax, Web Services and MS SQL Server Database. Uses ASP .NET authentication mechanism.Test Project (ignore): This is used to demonstrate CodePlex at meetings. Please ignore this project.Transform Config: Transfom Config lets you use the new configuration transformation feature in Visual Studio 2010 without performing a publish on a web application p...unsocialcity: trying to make a game for facebook called <projectname> - just seemed like a fun idea http://apps.facebook.com/unsocialcityVorbisPlayer: VorbisPlayer is the audio user control for Silverlight games. It plays loop-sets seamless, it solves the short sound problem, and it can play sound...New ReleasesA Guide to Parallel Programming: Drop 5 - Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 7, and code: This is Drop 5 with Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 7, Appendix B, Glossary, and References, and the accompanying code samples. This drop requires Visu...CC.Hearts Screen Saver: CC.Hearts Screen Saver 1.0.10.610: The third release of CC.Hearts Screen Saver. Key features are: Further performance enhancements Keyboard commands (Press ? for help) Help Popu...Fiddler Delayed Responses Extension: v1 beta: UI improvement . drag and drop . session markers . icons . layout Algorithm review . Performance issues Thanks to Eric Lawrence for his ideas.FontViewer 2010: FontViewer 2010 (Codename Eraser): This is the installer for the development version ("Eraser") of FontViewer 2010. Because many of the features are under development, functionality...Genuilder: Genuilder 1.2: First release of Genuilder.Extensibility.ImageResizer for Albulle: ImageResizer1.0-bin: Première version. Permet de déployer des images dans un système de fichier (local).imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.5: myImdb 0.9.5KooBoo Image Gallery: Beta 4: This new version has a new example using s3slider script http://www.serie3.info/s3slider/demonstration.html thanks to mshimao Now there are two pl...LogikBug's IoC Container: LogikBug's IoC Container v1.1.1: In this release: I extended the Extensibility namespace. Fixed a few minor issues with the Extensibility namespace.LRS: jlrs: asdfaLRS: jlrs src: jlrs srcMiniTwitter: 1.14: MiniTwitter 1.14 更新内容 修正 リストのインポートをキャンセルしてもタイムラインの名前がリストの名前になるバグを修正 OAuth の承認を取り消した後、再ログインできないバグを修正 インポートするリストを選択せずにインポートをクリックすると落ちるバグを修正 追加 ...NETris - ASP .NET, AJAX, Web Service based Tetris Game: NETris - Source Code and Documentation: Fully functional prototype. Please note that documentation is written in the form of a report as the project was an assignment at Coventry University.Object/Relational Mapper & Code Generator in Net 2.0 for Relational & XML Schema: 2.10: Minor release, incremental changes to sample website and UI templates.Opalis Community Releases: Integration Pack for Standard OIS Logging: The Integration Pack for Standard OIS Logging provides extended Policy Logging functions to OIS and MSSQL. This Integration Pack adds the followin...PicassoCms: 0.6: More intuitive UI, new controlsPowerAuras: PowerAuras-3.0.0K-beta2: New Auras: Item Name Equipment Slot Tracking Changes from beta1 5 new aura textures Fixed Tracking bug Added graphical equipment slot sele...PowerPivot Sample Data: PowerPivot for Excel Tutorial Sample Data-v.2: The PowerPivot Tutorial Sample Data-Version 2 download includes a variety of data sources that you can use to complete the tutorial in the PowerPiv...Powwa: First build: Unpack & built with NetBean 6.8Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4: Added functionality to add and remove performance counters at run time. Also added saving and loading to file so sets of performance counters can b...Resonance: TrainNode Client Library: Libraries to access the TrainNode ServiceSharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Import Utility: TaxonomyBuilder Version 1.0.2: New Features Added support for additional term labels per term Added support for Term Set Owners Added support for Term Set stakeholders Upda...Silverlight for Umbraco Media Objects (SUMO): Community Tech Preview: The CTP for SUMO is now live, feedback appreciated!Silverlight Reporting: Initial Release: This is the first release of the code. It includes the source code from Pete's blog post article on Silverlight reporting.Simple.NET: Simple.Mocking 1.0.0.7: Initial version of a new mocking framework for .NET Revision 1: Expect.AnyInocationOn<T>(T target) changed to Expect.AnyInocationOn(object target...Smart Voice: Smart Voice 0.2.2: Changelog: Fixed more bugs Added a readme into the archiveSoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): WPFClient pre alpha 2: pre alpha 2, need your feedbackSquiggle - A Free open source Lan Messenger: Squiggle 1.5: File Transfer capability added (With drag/drop support) Message text box maintains history of last 10 messages and you can retrieve them by CTRL+U...SSIS Expression Editor & Tester: Expression Editor and Tester v1.0.1.0: Minor updated release of expression editor tool and editor control. Download and extract the files to get started, no install required. Changes Si...StreamInsight Samples: GregLow HighwayMonitor Samples: Initial Upload of GregLow HighwayMonitor StreamInsight samples. These samples are used in the upcoming free eClinic for StreamInsight and have been...tChat - ASP.NET, Ajax & Web Service based Chat Room: tChat Source Code and Documentation: Functional prototype. T-SQL scripts can be found in the SQL folder. Please note that the documentation is written in a format of a report for a "du...Transform Config: Initial Release: This is the initial release of the project. It's all been thrown together quickly so it's lacking error handling etc, but it's still fully function...UrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer v2.0.2: Integrate the support of SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP2 for a better portability.Value Injecter: map anything to anything anyway you might imagine: ValueInjecter 1.9: Features map anything to anything flattening unflattening includes sample projects for: asp.net mvc asp.net web-forms win-formsVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30610.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Picture SlideShow Viewer (Visual C++ 2008): A picture slidershow viewer.VorbisPlayer: VorbisPlayer: The first release of the Silverlight VorbisPlayer, including source code and example files.WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: AnonymousOverHttps Template: Produces a WCF service application configured for anonymous calls over HTTPS/SSL. Supplies a BasicHttpBinding default configured for Transport secu...Most Popular ProjectsHaoRan_TokyoTyrantClient.NET Transactional File ManagerSOLID by exampleMemetic NPC Behavior ToolkitSharpotify - Spotify .Net LibraryWCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010SFTP Component for .NET CSharp, VB.NET, and ASP.NETUltimate FTP Component for .NET C#, VB.NET and ASP.NETAnurag Pallaprolu's Code RepositoryBigfootMVCMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRhyduino - Arduino and Managed Codepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleCassandraemonBlogEngine.NETMediaCoder.NETAndrew's XNA HelpersStyleCop

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• Metro: Creating a Master/Detail View with a WinJS ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create a simple master/detail view by using the WinJS ListView and Template controls. In particular, I explain how you can use a ListView control to display a list of movies and how you can use a Template control to display the details of the selected movie. Creating a master/detail view requires completing the following four steps: Create the data source – The data source contains the list of movies. Declare the ListView control – The ListView control displays the entire list of movies. It is the master part of the master/detail view. Declare the Details Template control – The Details Template control displays the details for the selected movie. It is the details part of the master/detail view. Handle the selectionchanged event – You handle the selectionchanged event to display the details for a movie when a new movie is selected. Creating the Data Source There is nothing special about our data source. We initialize a WinJS.Binding.List object to represent a list of movies: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); The data source is exposed to the rest of our application with the name ListViewDemos.movies. Declaring the ListView Control The ListView control is declared with the following markup: <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The data-win-options attribute is used to set the following properties of the ListView control: itemDataSource – The ListView is bound to the list of movies which we created in the previous section. Notice that the ListView is bound to ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.movies. itemTemplate – The item template contains the template used for rendering each item in the ListView. The markup for this template is included below. tabBehavior – This enumeration determines what happens when you tap or click on an item in the ListView. The possible values are directSelect, toggleSelect, invokeOnly, none. Because we want to handle the selectionchanged event, we set tapBehavior to the value directSelect. selectionMode – This enumeration determines whether you can select multiple items or only a single item. The possible values are none, single, multi. In the code above, this property is set to the value single. layout – You can use ListLayout or GridLayout with a ListView. If you want to display a vertical ListView, then you should select ListLayout. You must associate a ListView with an item template if you want to render anything interesting. The ListView above is associated with an item template named #masterItemTemplate. Here’s the markup for the masterItemTemplate: <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> This template simply renders the title of each movie. Declaring the Details Template Control The details part of the master/detail view is created with the help of a Template control. Here’s the markup used to declare the Details Template control: <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> The Details Template control displays the movie title and director.   Handling the selectionchanged Event The ListView control can raise two types of events: the iteminvoked and selectionchanged events. The iteminvoked event is raised when you click on a ListView item. The selectionchanged event is raised when one or more ListView items are selected. When you set the tapBehavior property of the ListView control to the value “directSelect” then tapping or clicking a list item raised both the iteminvoked and selectionchanged event. Tapping a list item causes the item to be selected and the item appears with a checkmark. In our code, we handle the selectionchanged event to update the movie details Template when you select a new movie. Here’s the code from the default.js file used to handle the selectionchanged event: var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); The code above sets up an event handler (listener) for the selectionchanged event. The event handler first verifies that an item has been selected in the ListView (selection.count() > 0). Next, the details for the movie are rendered using the movie details Template (we created this Template in the previous section). The Complete Code For the sake of completeness, I’ve included the complete code for the master/detail view below. I’ve included both the default.html, default.js, and movies.js files. Here is the final code for the default.html file: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewMasterDetail</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewMasterDetail references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/movies.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: xx-large; } .movie { padding: 5px; } #masterDetail { display: -ms-box; } #movieList { width: 300px; margin: 20px; } #movieDetails { margin: 20px; } </style> </head> <body> <!-- Templates --> <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> <!-- Master/Detail --> <div id="masterDetail"> <!-- Master --> <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> <!-- Detail --> <div id="movieDetails"></div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll(); var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); } }; app.start(); })();   Here is the movies.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })();   Summary The purpose of this blog entry was to describe how to create a simple master/detail view by taking advantage of the WinJS ListView control. We handled the selectionchanged event of the ListView control to display movie details when you select a movie in the ListView.

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• OFM 11g: Implementing OAM SSO with Forms

  - by olaf.heimburger

  There is some confusion about the integration of OFM 11g Forms with Oracle Access Manager 11g (OAM). Some say this does not work, some say it works, but.... Actually, having implemented it many times I belong to the later group. Here is how. Caveat Before you start installing anything, take a step back and consider your current implementation and what you really need and want to achieve. The current integration of Forms 11g with OAM 11g does not support self-service account creation and password resets from the Forms application. If you really need this, you must use the existing Oracle AS 10.1.4.3 infrastructure. On the other hand, if your user population is pretty stable, you can enjoy the latest Forms 11g with OAM 11g. Assumptions The whole process should be done in one day. I assume that all domains and instances are started during setup, if you need to restart them on demand or purpose, be sure to have proper start/stop scripts, I don't mention them. Preparation It goes without saying, that you always should do a proper backup before you change anything on your production environment. With proper backup, I also mean a tested and verified restore process. If you dared to test it before, do it now. It pays off. Requirements For OAM 11g to work properly you need a LDAP repository. For the integration of Forms 11g you need an Oracle Internet Directory (OID) configured with the Oracle AS SSO LDAP extensions. For better support I usually give the latest version a try, in this case OID 11g is a good choice.During the Installation and Integration steps we use an upgrade wizard that needs the old OID configuration on the same host but in a different ORACLE_HOME. Installation vs Configuration With OFM 11g Oracle introduced a clear separation between Installation of the binaries (the software) and the Configuration of the instances (the runtime). This is really great as you can install all the software and create new instances when needed. In the following we adhere to this scheme and install the software first and then configure the instances later. Installation Steps The Oracle documentation contains all the necessary steps for the installation of all pieces of software. But some hints help to avoid traps and pitfalls. Step 1 The Database Start the installation with the database. It is quite obvious but we need an Oracle database for all the other steps. If you have one at hand, fine. If not, just install at least a Oracle 10.2.0.4 version. This database can be on a different host. Step 2 The Repository Creation Utility The next step should be to run the Repository Creation Utility (RCU). This is a client application that just needs to connect to your database. It can be run on any host that can reach the database and is a Windows or Linux 32-bit machine. When you run it, be sure to install the OID schema and the OAM schema. If you miss one of these, you can run the RCU again to install the missing schema. Step 3 The Foundation With OFM 11g Oracle started to use WebLogic Server 11g (WLS) as its foundation for all OFM 11g installation. We therefore install it first. Depending on your operating system, it might be possible, that no native installer is available. My approach to this dilemma is to use the WLS Generic Installer for all my installations. It does not include a JDK either but if you have both for your platform you are ready to go. Step 3a The JDK To make things interesting, Oracle currently has two JDKs in its portfolio. The Sun JDK and the JRockit JDK. Both are available for a number of platforms. If you are lucky and both are available for your platform, install both in a separate directory (and not one of your ORACLE_HOMEs) each, You can use the later as you like. Step 3b Install WLS for OID and OAM With the JDK installed, we start the generic installer with java -jar wls_generic.jar.STOP! Before you do this, check the version first. It should be 1.6.0_18 or later and not the GCC one (Some Linux distros have it installed by default). To verify the version, issue a java -version command and make sure that the output does not contain the text gcj and the version matches. If this does not work, use an absolute path like /opt/java/jdk1.6.0_23/bin/java to start the installer. The installer allows you to specify a path to install the software into, say /opt/oracle/iam/11.1.1.3 for the OID and OAM installation. We will call this IAM_HOME. Step 4 Install OID Now we are ready to install OID. Start the OID installer (in the Disk1 directory) and just select the installation only step. This will install the software only and does not configure the instance. Use the IAM_HOME as the target directory. Step 5 Install SOA Suite The IAM 11g Suite uses the BPEL component of the SOA Suite 11g for its workflows. This is a pretty closed environment and not to be used for SCA Composites. We install the SOA Suite in $IAM_HOME/soa. The installer only installs the binaries. Configuration will be done later. Step 6 Install OAM Once the installation of OID and SOA is done, we are ready to install the OAM software in the same IAM_HOME. Make sure to install the OAM binaries in a directory different from the one you used during the OID and SOA installation. As before, we only install the software, the instance will be created later. Step 7 Backup the Installation At this point, I normally do a backup (or snapshot in a virtual image) of the installation. Good when you need to go back to this point. Step 8 Configure OID The software is installed and now we need instances to run it. This process is called configuration. For OID use the config.sh found in $IAM_HOME/oid/bin to start the configuration wizard. Normally this runs smoothly. If you encounter some issues check the Oracle Support site for help. This configuration will also start the OID instance. Step 9 Install the Oracle AS SSO Schema Before we install the Forms software we need to install the Oracle AS SSO Schema into the database and OID. This is a rather dangerous procedure, but fully documented in the IAM Installation Guide, Chapter 10. You should finish this in one go, do not reboot your host during the whole procedure. As a precaution, you should make a backup of the OID instance before you start the procedure. Once the backup is ready, read the chapter, including every note, carefully. You can avoid a number of issues by following all the steps and will succeed with a working solution. Step 10 Configure OAM Reached this step? Great. You are ready to create an OAM instance. Use the $IAM_HOME/iam/common/binconfig.sh for this. This will open the WLS Domain Creation Wizard and asks for the libraries to be installed. You should at least select the OAM with Database repository item. The configuration will also start the OAM instance. Step 11 Install WLS for Forms 11g It is quite tempting to install everything in one ORACLE_HOME. Unfortunately this does not work for all OFM packages. Therefore we do another WLS installation in another ORACLE_HOME. The same considerations as in step 3b apply. We call this one FORMS_HOME. Step 12 Install Forms In the FORMS_HOME we now install the binaries for the Forms 11g software. Again, this is a install only step. Configuration starts with the next step. Step 13 Configure Forms To configure Forms 11g we start the Configuration Wizard (config.sh) in FORMS_HOME/bin. This wizard should create a new WebLogic Domain and an OHS instance! Do not extend existing domains or instances! Forms should run in its own instances! When all information is supplied, the wizard will create the domain and instance and starts them automatically.Step 14 Setup your Forms SSO EnvironmentOnce you have implemented and tested your Forms 11g instance, you can configured it for SSO. Yes, this requires the old Oracle AS SSO solution, OIDDAS for creating and assigning users and SSO to setup your partner applications. In this step you should consider to create every user necessary for use within the environment. When done, do not forget to test it. Step 15 Migrate the SSO Repository Since the final goal is to get rid of the old SSO implementation we need to migrate the old SSO repository into the new OID structure. Additionally, this step will also migrate all partner application configurations into OAM 11g. Quite convenient. To do this step, you have to start the upgrade agent (ua or ua.bat or ua.cmd) on the operating system level in $IAM_HOME/bin. Once finished, this wizard will create new osso.conf files for each partner application in $IAM_HOME/upgrade/temp/oam/.Note: At the time of this writing, this step only works if everything is on the same host (ie. OID, OAM, etc.). This restriction might be lifted in later releases. Step 16 Change your OHS sso.conf and shut down OC4J_SECURITY In Step 14 we verified that SSO for our Forms environment works fine. Now, we are shutting the old system done and reconfigure the OHS that acts as the Forms entry point. First we go to the OHS configuration directory and rename the old osso.conf  to osso.conf.10g. Now we change the moduleconf/mod_osso.conf  to point to the new osso.conf file. Copy the new osso.conf  file from $IAM_HOME/upgrade/temp/oam/ to the OHS configuration directory. Restart OHS, test forms by using the same forms links. OAM should now kick in and show the login dialog to ask for your user credentials.Done. Now your Forms environment is successfully integrated with OAM 11g.Enjoy. What's Next? This rather lengthy setup is just the foundation for your growing environment of OAM 11g protections. In the next entry we will show that Forms 11g and ADF Faces 11g can use the same OAM installation and provide real single sign-on. References Nearly everything is documented. Use the documentation! Oracle® Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle Identity Management 11gR1 Oracle® Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle Identity Management 11gR1, Chapter 11-14 Oracle® Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Access Manager 11gR1, Appendix B Oracle® Fusion Middleware Upgrade Guide for Oracle Identity Management 11gR1, Chapter 10   

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• Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

  - by BuckWoody

  As part of my professional development, I’ve created a list of books to read throughout the year, starting in June of 2011. This a review of the first one, called Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan. You can find my entire list of books I’m reading for my career here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/06/07/head-in-the-clouds-eyes-on-the-books.aspx  Why I Chose This Book: As part of my learning style, I try to read multiple books about a single subject. I’ve found that at least 3 books are necessary to get the right amount of information to me. This is a “technical” work, meaning that it deals with technology and not business, writing or other facets of my career. I’ll have a mix of all of those as I read along. I chose this work in addition to others I’ve read since it covers everything from an introduction to more advanced topics in a single book. It also has some practical examples of actually working with the product, particularly on storage. Although it’s dated, many examples normally translate. I also saw that it had pretty good reviews. What I learned: I learned a great deal about storage, and many useful code snippets. I do think that there could have been more of a focus on the application fabric - but of course that wasn’t as mature a feature when this book was written. I learned some great architecture examples, and in one section I learned more about encryption. In that example, however, I would rather have seen the examples go the other way - the book focused on moving data from on-premise to Azure storage in an encrypted fashion. Using the Application Fabric I would rather see sensitive data left in a hybrid fashion on premise, and connect to for the Azure application. Even so, the examples were very useful. If you’re looking for a good “starter” Azure book, this is a good choice. I also recommend the last chapter as a quick read for a DBA, or Database Administrator. It’s not very long, but useful. Note that the limits described are incorrect - which is one of the dangers of reading a book about any cloud offering. The services offered are updated so quickly that the information is in constant danger of being “stale”. Even so, I found this a useful book, which I believe will help me work with Azure better. Raw Notes: I take notes as I read, calling that process “reading with a pencil”. I find that when I do that I pay attention better, and record some things that I need to know later. I’ll take these notes, categorize them into a OneNote notebook that I synchronize in my Live.com account, and that way I can search them from anywhere. I can even read them on the web, since the Live.com has a OneNote program built in. Note that these are the raw notes, so they might not make a lot of sense out of context - I include them here so you can watch my though process. Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan: Learning about how to select applications suitable for Distributed Technology. Application Fabric gets the least attention; probably because it was newer at the time. Very clear (Chapter One) Good foundation Background and history, but not too much I normally arrange my descriptions differently, starting with the use-cases and moving to physicality, but this difference helps me. Interesting that I am reading this using Safari Books Online, which uses many of these concepts. Taught me some new aspects of a Hypervisor – very low-level information about the Azure Fabric (not to be confused with the Application Fabric feature) (Chapter Two) Good detail of what is included in the SDK. Even more is available now. CS = Cloud Service (Chapter 3) Place Storage info in the configuration file, since it can be streamed in-line with a running app. Ditto for logging, and keep separated configs for staging and testing. Easy-switch in and switch out.  (Chapter 4) There are two Runtime API’s, one of external and one for internal. Realizing how powerful this paradigm really is. Some places seem light, and to drop off but perhaps that’s best. Managing API is not charged, which is nice. I don’t often think about the price, until it comes to an actual deployment (Chapter 5) Csmanage is something I want to dig into deeper. API requires package moves to Blob storage first, so it needs a URL. Csmanage equivalent can be written in Unix scripting using openssl. Upgrades are possible, and you use the upgradeDomainCount attribute in the Service-Definition.csdef file  Always use a low-privileged account to test on the dev fabric, since Windows Azure runs in partial trust. Full trust is available, but can be dangerous and must be well-thought out. (Chapter 6) Learned how to run full CMD commands in a web window – not that you would ever do that, but it was an interesting view into those links. This leads to a discussion on hosting other runtimes (such as Java or PHP) in Windows Azure. I got an expanded view on this process, although this is where the book shows its age a little. Books can be a problem for Cloud Computing for this reason – things just change too quickly. Windows Azure storage is not eventually consistent – it is instantly consistent with multi-phase commit. Plumbing for this is internal, not required to code that. (Chapter 7) REST API makes the service interoperable, hybrid, and consistent across code architectures. Nicely done. Use affinity groups to keep data and code together. Side note: e-book readers need a common “notes” feature. There’s a decent quick description of REST in this chapter. Learned about CloudDrive code – PowerShell sample that mounts Blob storage as a local provider. Works against Dev fabric by default, can be switched to Account. Good treatment in the storage chapters on the differences between using Dev storage and Azure storage. These can be mitigated. No, blobs are not of any size or number. Not a good statement (Chapter 8) Blob storage is probably Azure’s closest play to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). Blob change operations must be authenticated, even when public. Chapters on storage are pretty in-depth. Queue Messages are base-64 encoded (Chapter 9) The visibility timeout ensures processing of message in a disconnected system. Order is not guaranteed for a message, so if you need that set an increasing number in the queue mechanism. While Queues are accessible via REST, they are not public and are secured by default. Interesting – the header for a queue request includes an estimated count. This can be useful to create more worker roles in a dynamic system. Each Entity (row) in the Azure Table service is atomic – all or nothing. (Chapter 10) An entity can have up to 255 Properties  Use “ID” for the class to indicate the key value, or use the [DataServiceKey] Attribute.  LINQ makes working with the Azure Table Service much easier, although Interop is certainly possible. Good description on the process of selecting the Partition and Row Key.  When checking for continuation tokens for pagination, include logic that falls out of the check in case you are at the last page.  On deleting a storage object, it is instantly unavailable, however a background process is dispatched to perform the physical deletion. So if you want to re-create a storage object with the same name, add retry logic into the code. Interesting approach to deleting an index entity without having to read it first – create a local entity with the same keys and apply it to the Azure system regardless of change-state.  Although the “Indexes” description is a little vague, it’s interesting to see a Folding and Stemming discussion a-la the Porter Stemming Algorithm. (Chapter 11)  Presents a better discussion of indexes (at least inverted indexes) later in the chapter. Great treatment for DBA’s in Chapter 11. We need to work on getting secondary indexes in Table storage. There is a limited form of transactions called “Entity Group Transactions” that, although they have conditions, makes a transactional system more possible. Concurrency also becomes an issue, but is handled well if you’re using Data Services in .NET. It watches the Etag and allows you to take action appropriately. I do not recommend using Azure as a location for secure backups. In fact, I would rather have seen the examples in (Chapter 12) go the other way, showing how data could be brought back to a local store as a DR or HA strategy. Good information on cryptography and so on even so. Chapter seems out of place, and should be combined with the Blob chapter.  (Chapter 13) on SQL Azure is dated, although the base concepts are OK.  Nice example of simple ADO.NET access to a SQL Azure (or any SQL Server Really) database.  

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 13, 2012Popular ReleasesArduino Installer For Atmel Studio 6: Arduino Installer - Version 1.01 Beta2: Bug Fixes - Handling spaces in avrdude path - Handling spaces in avrdude config path - Handling spaces in project names - Handling spaces in project path - hard coded directories pointing to my space has been removed New Features - Total of 7 project templates included - C program - C library - C++ program - C++ library - Arduino Unit Tests - Arduino library - Arduino program (sketch) - Group all supporting scripts under a script directory in the solution - Support for calling multiple pre-...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2: ??●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...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.8: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release, and methods that are now deprecated. Note changes to the PDF Writer: tcPDF is no longer bundled with PHPExcel, but should be installed separately if you wish to use that 3rd-Party library with PHPExcel. Alternatively, you can choose to use mPDF or DomPDF as PDF Rendering libraries instead: PHPExcel now provides a configurable wrapper allowing you a choice of PDF renderer. See the documentation, or the PDF s...DirectX Tool Kit: October 12, 2012: October 12, 2012 Added PrimitiveBatch for drawing user primitives Debug object names for all D3D resources (for PIX and debug layer leak reporting)Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.70: Fixed issue described in discussion #399087: variable references within case values weren't getting resolved.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.1: Some important bug fixes and couple of new features were added. There are no major changes to the sample website. Source code could be downloaded from the Source Code section selecting branch release-6.1. Thus just builds of GoogleMap Control are issued here in this release. NuGet Package GoogleMap Control 6.1 NuGet Package FeaturesBounds property to provide ability to create a map by center and bounds as well; Setting in markup <artem:GoogleMap ID="GoogleMap1" runat="server" MapType="HY...mojoPortal: 2.3.9.3: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2393-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...OstrivDB: OstrivDB 0.1: - Storage configuration: objects serialization (Xml, Json), storage file compressing, data block size. - Caching for Select queries. - Indexing. - Batch of queries. - No special query language (LINQ used). - Integrated sorting and paging. - Multithreaded data processing.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.4: Fixed a bug where the server ip was not logged properly in the stats file.Captcha MVC: Captcha Mvc 2.1.2: v 2.1.2: Fixed problem with serialization. Made all classes from a namespace Jetbrains.Annotaions as the internal. Added autocomplete attribute and autocorrect attribute for captcha input element. Minor changes. v 2.1.1: Fixed problem with serialization. Minor changes. v 2.1: Added support for storing captcha in the session or cookie. See the updated example. Updated example. Minor changes. v 2.0.1: Added support for a partial captcha. Now you can easily customize the layout, s...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the module printing function was only visible to administrators Fixed issue where pane level skinning was being assigned to a default container for any content pane Fixed issue when using password aging and FB / Google authentication Fixed issue that was causing the DateEditControl to not load the assigned value Fixed issue that stopped additional profile properties to be displayed in the member directory after modifying the template Fixed er...Advanced DataGridView with Excel-like auto filter: 1.0.0.0: ?????? ??????WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...VidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.5.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release supports the Sandcastle October 2012 Release (v2.7.1.0). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release suppor...The GLMET Project: Shutdown Manager: Shutdown, Log off and Restart Timer Set time for shutdown, log off and restartClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.68.0: ClosedXML now resolves formulas! Yes it finally happened. If you call cell.Value and it has a formula the library will try to evaluate the formula and give you the result. For example: var wb = new XLWorkbook(); var ws = wb.AddWorksheet("Sheet1"); ws.Cell("A1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("B1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("C1").FormulaA1 = "\"The total value is: \" & SUM(A1:B2)"; var...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 10: New feature - Added Portable build to NuGet package New feature - Added GetValue and TryGetValue with StringComparison to JObject Change - Improved duplicate object reference id error message Fix - Fixed error when comparing empty JObjects Fix - Fixed SecAnnotate warnings Fix - Fixed error when comparing DateTime JValue with a DateTimeOffset JValue Fix - Fixed serializer sometimes not using DateParseHandling setting Fix - Fixed error in JsonWriter.WriteToken when writing a DateT...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.2: Changes: Tested against KeePass 2.20.1 Tested under Ubuntu 12.10 (and KeePass 2.20) Added GenerateAsUtf8 method returning the encrypted passphrase as a UTF8 byte array.New ProjectsAaron.Core: It's a special core be used to help your project become standardization. It provides the standard platform, including core systems, data flows,...AFSSignarlRServer: Server ready tryAgileFramework: Agile Framework in order to build easily application based on WCF, NHibernate , WPF, and multithreadingala, A Programming Language: ala, A Programming LanguageBaseSRS (Basic Service Request System): BaseSRS is a basic "Service Request System" or "SRS" which can be adapted and used by anyone. ContainerVariations: ContainerVariations is a collection of similar unit tests projects, each applied to a different Inversion of Control container. If successful, it will provide a consistent and comprehensive set of examples for popular .NET IoC containers. It is developed in C#.COST Policies - ART Work: COST Policies: ART Work ? ??????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?? ??????????: -baceCP -guideCPCS Script Runner: Provide users an easy way of executing C# programs (scripts) that are compiled on the fly.DbUtility: DbUtility is a free utility to display databases info like, size, backup date, instance name, database name, last backup log date, with export to excel feature.EchoLink Monitor: EchoLink Monitor is a management tool for EchoLink sysops maintaining remote EchoLink nodes.NextUI: We are on the way...Notas Alexandre: Apenas teste ainda...será modificado depois...Orchard CMS Amba.HtmlBlocks: Amba.HtmlBlocks module for Orchard CMS 1.5.1Portable Basemap Server: multiple map data source<--PBS-->multiple map apiRonYee: ??????????????。 ????（viewer）???????????????????，???????????????。 ????（customer）?????????????????，???????，?????????????????。 ??????（user）??????????????????。ShangWu: ????，???StoreIpAddress: Examine different means to store IP addressesSummon for Umbraco: Summon for Umbraco is a .NET solution for Summon API, provided by Serials Solutions.teasingg: this is for testing code plexWeb Scripting and Content Creation assignment: A stub project.WriteableBitmapEx for Windows Embedded: WriteableBitmapEx for Windows Embedded Compact 7 and Silverlight for Windows Embedded. Requires XAML In The Hand for managed code development.X.Web.Sitemap: X.Web.Sitemap is a part of X-Framework library. X.Web.Sitemap allows quickly and easily generate a Google-compatible filesZeropaste: A pastebin with minimal features.??: ?????EPUB????。

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 16, 2010New ProjectsAtomFeedBuilder: Simple and lightweight Atom feed builder. Developed in VB.Net.Cable and Wire harness tester: If you build lots of cable/wire harness' you know that testing them is a pain. I have wanted an automated cable tester for a while now but commerci...Carmenta Engine Power Pack: The target of Carmenta Engine Power Pack is to provide extensions, utilities and wrapper classes that allows developers to work more efficiently w...Customer Book: Customer Book, its like address book with facility for generating quotation for a business or a supplier to the clients.Dialector: Using this program, you can convert pure Turkish texts into different dialects; such as: Emmi, Kufurbaz, Kusdili, Laz, Peltek, Tiki, and many more....Downline Commision Generator: Analyze the compensations plan of the organizations in multi-level marketing or network marketing. Check with this tool the commision plan of the c...EmbeddedSpark 2010 Project M: Project M is a system for seamlessly interfacing a tabletop interface to portable devices placed upon it. Using image recognition and projectors, P...Event Log Creator by eVestment Alliance: Provides a simple utility to create a new source and log in the Windows event log. The utility checks if the current user is an administrator, and...ExchangeHog: Desktop/daemon application that aggregates emails from multiple pop3-accounts into single Microsoft Exchange 2010 account. For users receiving ema...Extra Time Calculator: Extra Time Calculator allows exam end times to be easily calculated for students receiving an extra time accommodation.Generic WCF Hosting Service: The Generic Host Service provides a simple, reusable, and reliable mechanism for hosting WCF services. Google Storage for .NET: Google Storage for .NET (GSN) is an open source library that provides .NET developers with easy access to the Google Storage API. The library allo...Helium: The Helium XNA game engine is a light portable game engine designed to work on many platforms and soon to be expanded on more. Currently the helium...IconizedButton Control Set: ASP.NET WebForms IconizedButton Custom Control Set. Replaces the dull Button/LinkButton/HyperLink controls with styling and left and right aligned...Jedi Council PM List: Allows for users to process Private Message Lists on the Jedi Council forums for TheForce.Net.JetPumpDesign: 本软件为蒸气喷射泵设计计算软件 作者：申阳 单位：西安交通大学过程装备与控制工程61班log4Nez: An high personalized implementation of a logging libraryMutantFramework: Provides a common set of building blocks for building enterprise applicationsNUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit add-in which allows to send notifications to Growl when test run is started or finished, when a first test failure occurs and so on.Object Reports: Object Reports is a "proof of concept" application which provides users the ability to visualy build queries based on data stored in the relational...openTrionyx: openTrionyx is a set of tools to make easier web application development. Includes Data, Web and plain text documents tools. Developed in C#, compl...Partial Rendering control for MVC 2: This project shows a web custom control that allow to have partial rendering using async post-back (through JQuery) in a MVC 2 web application.PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: The PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension exposes PowerGUI as an editor in Visual Studio. PowerShell developers can now write scripts directly in Visual...PowerShell Script Provider: Write your own PowerShell provider using only script, no C# required. Module definition is provided by a Windows PowerShell 2.0 Module, which may b...Scholar: Scholar is a solution/framework for .Net developers to help with the creation of distributed data processing (think SETI@home style apps). It is in...scrabb: Scrabb help people play scrabble over net.SharePointNuke: A DotNetNuke module that connects to a SharePoint server using web services API and displays the content of a specified list. SolidWorksBackConverter: a Project to Convert a solidwork file to an older version Soma - Sql Oriented MApping framework: Sql Oriented MApping framework.SPCreate: SPCreate auto store procedure creator. It's developed in c#. SpCreate as output ADO.NET Class (C# or VB.Net) and SQL Server or MS Access Store pro...std::streambuf wrapper for COM IStream: This provides a subclass of std::streambuf that wraps a COM IStream, so you can use an IStream with any C++ code that uses iostreams or the STL alg...VACID solutions: Solutions of verification problems posed in paper "Verification of Ample Correctness of Invariants of Data-structures". Developed with various tool...Viewer: Our Goal is to create a C# project that will centeralize Image and Movie Viewing in a forms application, It will also have a Specialized Webbrowser...vsXPathTester: vsXPathTester is a utility for Developer. This help them load XML file and the run their XPath Query. The Resultant is shown in window. It save the...New Releases.Net Max Framework: Version 1.0.0: Version 1.0.0 - EstableAndrew's XNA Helpers: V1.2: Features upgraded features based off of the V1.1 code for both X86 and XBOX Additions/Changes Reworked the Texture2D and Rectangle extender namesp...BaseCalendar: BaseControls 1.2: BaseControls 1.2 contains the BaseCalendar ASP.NET control. Changes: 1.2 Exposed EffectiveVisibleDate and FirstVisibleDay methods 1.1 Rendering ...Customer Book: Customer Book Code: Bronze Release PostgreSQL database dump for Customer Book. Open PgAdmin III and restore the database dump into your server. Notice User Name for t...Data Connection Suite: Data Connections Suite v1.0.0.0: This is the first release of this incomplete component, but good enought to use in a production environment (it's what we do).DigitArchive: Build 8: Now the software works on .NET 3.5 and above. So if you have Windows 7 it installs without any pre-requisites. Changes: -Works on .NET 3.5 -Now t...Doom 64 Ex (SVN Builds): Doom 64 Ex r-738: Finally a new build after so many months. There are way to many updates to even begin to write about here just download and frag away. There is a s...DotNetNuke® Media: 03.03.00a: This release is Beta!! There is no guaranteed upgrade path to the 03.03.00 release version! Please use this to help us and test what we have. Repor...Downline Commision Generator: Downline Commision Generator: Downline Commision GeneratorElmah2 : An extensable error logger for ASP.net: 1.0 Beta 1: This is a beta release be sure to report any errors etc. Be sure to check out the documentation tab on information on how to install and configure...EPiServer Template Foundation: First compiled release: First compiled release for experimenting only! :) An introductory post will be published shortly on the blog.Helium: Initial Release: This is the initial release of the Helium Engine. Please check out the documentation link for information on how to use the engine. To see a ful...IconizedButton Control Set: IconizedButton Control Set: Taking a line from Google's play book - marking everything as Beta. Seriously, I'd like to hear some feedback before moving the Development Status...JetPumpDesign: JetPumpDesign 1.0: 当前的软件可以设计5级以内的蒸汽喷射泵。Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework: Version 1.4.4 Installer: Tools TargetingVisual Studio 2010 Expression Blend 4 (part of Expression Studio 4) Analytics Services Included Vendor Behavior Silverlight 3...NHibernate Sidekick Library: 0.7.0: Added a few methods for use with the NHibernate 2nd level cache (EvictAllObjectsFromCache and EvictPersistentClass). I also added the boolean optio...NHibernate Sidekick Library: 0.7.5: Fix for http://nhprof.com/Learn/Alerts/DoNotUseImplicitTransactionsNito.KitchenSink: Version 9: Dependencies Nito.Linq 0.6 Beta (released 2010-06-14) Rx 1.0.2563.0 (released 2010-06-09) Supported Platforms .NET 4.0 Client Profile, with Rx. ...NQueue: Version 1.0.0.0: Version 1.0.0.0NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 0: The very first stable releasePartial Rendering control for MVC 2: Partial Rendering control for MVC 2: Here there is the source code and a MVC 2 web site as testPowerShell Script Provider: PSProvider 0.1: Requires PowerShell 2.0 RTM The functions in the attached ps1 script are the bare minimum for a working container-style provider (no subfolders.) ...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4.3: Fixed issue where if an instance name contains backslash characters (\) the program would not load the performance counter properly. Also added sta...SharePointNuke: SharePointNuke 2.00.08: SharePointNuke 2.00.08 - Binary DotNetNuke 5.x module.Skype Voice Changer: 1.0 Updated Sample Code: This updated release is the accompanying code for the Skype Voice Changer article on Coding4Fun. Changes in this release: Added support for PreEmp...std::streambuf wrapper for COM IStream: Beta release (tested in a commercial project): This code has been tested in a custom Windows Search filter and property handler I wrote for a proprietary binary format. There may be some bugs, b...Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme - 20100615 - source and binary: This is the result of building the current source code in Debug mode. The source code is included. The binaries are in the SchemeCode folder along...Timo-Design / 40FINGERS DotNetNuke® Skinning Extensions: Style Helper Skin Object Beta: The 40FINGERS Style Helper Skin object allows you to add CSS and Javascript links and meta tags to the head of your page. It can also remove CSS l...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.1 RC: This is the final test version of Umbraco 4.1 before the final release. PLEASE BE AWARE THAT UMBRACO 4.1 RC IS A .NET 4.0 RELEASE AND WON'T WORK O...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30615.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: UserNameForCertificate Template: Produces a WCF service application supporting username and password authentication, relying on message security to protect messages en route. Suppl...WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: UserNameOverHttps Template: Produces a WCF service application supporting username and password authentication over HTTPS/SSL, relying on transport security to protect message...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib 0.4.1 alpha (ReSharper 5.1.1709 only): xunitcontrib release 0.4.1 (ReSharper runner) This release targets the current nightly build of ReSharper 5.1's Early Access Programme (build 1709)...Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRIA Services EssentialsNeatUploadBxf (Basic XAML Framework).NET Transactional File ManagerSOLID by exampleSSIS Expression Editor & TesterWEI ShareChirpy - VS Add In For Handling Js, Css, and DotLess FilesASP.NET MVC Time PlannerMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeCassandraemonpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeLightweight Fluent Workflowpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library ContribNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services

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• A Closable jQuery Plug-in

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my client side development I deal a lot with content that pops over the main page. Be it data entry ‘windows’ or dialogs or simple pop up notes. In most cases this behavior goes with draggable windows, but sometimes it’s also useful to have closable behavior on static page content that the user can choose to hide or otherwise make invisible or fade out. Here’s a small jQuery plug-in that provides .closable() behavior to most elements by using either an image that is provided or – more appropriately by using a CSS class to define the picture box layout. /* * * Closable * * Makes selected DOM elements closable by making them * invisible when close icon is clicked * * Version 1.01 * @requires jQuery v1.3 or later * * Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Rick Strahl * http://www.west-wind.com/ * * Licensed under the MIT license: * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php Support CSS: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Options: * handle Element to place closebox into (like say a header). Use if main element and closebox container are two different elements. * closeHandler Function called when the close box is clicked. Return true to close the box return false to keep it visible. * cssClass The CSS class to apply to the close box DIV or IMG tag. * imageUrl Allows you to specify an explicit IMG url that displays the close icon. If used bypasses CSS image styling. * fadeOut Optional provide fadeOut speed. Default no fade out occurs */ (function ($) { $.fn.closable = function (options) { var opt = { handle: null, closeHandler: null, cssClass: "closebox", imageUrl: null, fadeOut: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.each(function (i) { var el = $(this); var pos = el.css("position"); if (!pos || pos == "static") el.css("position", "relative"); var h = opt.handle ? $(opt.handle).css({ position: "relative" }) : el; var div = opt.imageUrl ? $("<img>").attr("src", opt.imageUrl).css("cursor", "pointer") : $("<div>"); div.addClass(opt.cssClass) .click(function (e) { if (opt.closeHandler) if (!opt.closeHandler.call(this, e)) return; if (opt.fadeOut) $(el).fadeOut(opt.fadeOut); else $(el).hide(); }); if (opt.imageUrl) div.css("background-image", "none"); h.append(div); }); } })(jQuery); The plugin can be applied against any selector that is a container (typically a div tag). The close image or close box is provided typically by way of a CssClass - .closebox by default – which supplies the image as part of the CSS styling. The default styling for the box looks something like this: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Alternately you can also supply an image URL which overrides the background image in the style sheet. I use this plug-in mostly on pop up windows that can be closed, but it’s also quite handy for remove/delete behavior in list displays like this: you can find this sample here to look to play along: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/Samples/Ajax/AmazonBooks/BooksAdmin.aspx For closable windows it’s nice to have something reusable because in my client framework there are lots of different kinds of windows that can be created: Draggables, Modal Dialogs, HoverPanels etc. and they all use the client .closable plug-in to provide the closable operation in the same way with a few options. Plug-ins are great for this sort of thing because they can also be aggregated and so different components can pick and choose the behavior they want. The window here is a draggable, that’s closable and has shadow behavior and the server control can simply generate the appropriate plug-ins to apply to the main <div> tag: $().ready(function() { $('#ctl00_MainContent_panEditBook') .closable({ handle: $('#divEditBook_Header') }) .draggable({ dragDelay: 100, handle: '#divEditBook_Header' }) .shadow({ opacity: 0.25, offset: 6 }); }) The window is using the default .closebox style and has its handle set to the header bar (Book Information). The window is just closable to go away so no event handler is applied. Actually I cheated – the actual page’s .closable is a bit more ugly in the sample as it uses an image from a resources file: .closable({ imageUrl: '/WestWindWebToolkit/Samples/WebResource.axd?d=TooLongAndNastyToPrint', handle: $('#divEditBook_Header')}) so you can see how to apply a custom image, which in this case is generated by the server control wrapping the client DragPanel. More interesting maybe is to apply the .closable behavior to list scenarios. For example, each of the individual items in the list display also are .closable using this plug-in. Rather than having to define each item with Html for an image, event handler and link, when the client template is rendered the closable behavior is attached to the list. Here I’m using client-templating and the code that this is done with looks like this: function loadBooks() { showProgress(); // Clear the content $("#divBookListWrapper").empty(); var filter = $("#" + scriptVars.lstFiltersId).val(); Proxy.GetBooks(filter, function(books) { $(books).each(function(i) { updateBook(this); showProgress(true); }); }, onPageError); } function updateBook(book,highlight) { // try to retrieve the single item in the list by tag attribute id var item = $(".bookitem[tag=" +book.Pk +"]"); // grab and evaluate the template var html = parseTemplate(template, book); var newItem = $(html) .attr("tag", book.Pk.toString()) .click(function() { var pk = $(this).attr("tag"); editBook(this, parseInt(pk)); }) .closable({ closeHandler: function(e) { removeBook(this, e); }, imageUrl: "../../images/remove.gif" }); if (item.length > 0) item.after(newItem).remove(); else newItem.appendTo($("#divBookListWrapper")); if (highlight) { newItem .addClass("pulse") .effect("bounce", { distance: 15, times: 3 }, 400); setTimeout(function() { newItem.removeClass("pulse"); }, 1200); } } Here the closable behavior is applied to each of the items along with an event handler, which is nice and easy compared to having to embed the right HTML and click handling into each item in the list individually via markup. Ideally though (and these posts make me realize this often a little late) I probably should set up a custom cssClass to handle the rendering – maybe a CSS class called .removebox that only changes the image from the default box image. This example also hooks up an event handler that is fired in response to the close. In the list I need to know when the remove button is clicked so I can fire of a service call to the server to actually remove the item from the database. The handler code can also return false; to indicate that the window should not be closed optionally. Returning true will close the window. You can find more information about the .closable class behavior and options here: .closable Documentation Plug-ins make Server Control JavaScript much easier I find this plug-in immensely useful especial as part of server control code, because it simplifies the code that has to be generated server side tremendously. This is true of plug-ins in general which make it so much easier to create simple server code that only generates plug-in options, rather than full blocks of JavaScript code.  For example, here’s the relevant code from the DragPanel server control which generates the .closable() behavior: if (this.Closable && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(DragHandleID) ) { string imageUrl = this.CloseBoxImage; if (imageUrl == "WebResource" ) imageUrl = ScriptProxy.GetWebResourceUrl(this, this.GetType(), ControlResources.CLOSE_ICON_RESOURCE); StringBuilder closableOptions = new StringBuilder("imageUrl: '" + imageUrl + "'"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.DragHandleID)) closableOptions.Append(",handle: $('#" + this.DragHandleID + "')"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ClientDialogHandler)) closableOptions.Append(",handler: " + this.ClientDialogHandler); if (this.FadeOnClose) closableOptions.Append(",fadeOut: 'slow'"); startupScript.Append(@" .closable({ " + closableOptions + "})"); } The same sort of block is then used for .draggable and .shadow which simply sets options. Compared to the code I used to have in pre-jQuery versions of my JavaScript toolkit this is a walk in the park. In those days there was a bunch of JS generation which was ugly to say the least. I know a lot of folks frown on using server controls, especially the UI is client centric as the example is. However, I do feel that server controls can greatly simplify the process of getting the right behavior attached more easily and with the help of IntelliSense. Often the script markup is easier is especially if you are dealing with complex, multiple plug-in associations that often express more easily with property values on a control. Regardless of whether server controls are your thing or not this plug-in can be useful in many scenarios. Even in simple client-only scenarios using a plug-in with a few simple parameters is nicer and more consistent than creating the HTML markup over and over again. I hope some of you find this even a small bit as useful as I have. Related Links Download jquery.closable West Wind Web Toolkit jQuery Plug-ins © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery   ASP.NET  JavaScript  

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• VSNewFile: A Visual Studio Addin to More Easily Add New Items to a Project

  - by InfinitiesLoop

  My first Visual Studio Add-in! Creating add-ins is pretty simple, once you get used to the CommandBar model it is using, which is apparently a general Office suite extensibility mechanism. Anyway, let me first explain my motivation for this. It started out as an academic exercise, as I have always wanted to dip my feet in a little VS extensibility. But I thought of a legitimate need for an add-in, at least in my personal experience, so it took on new life. But I figured I can’t be the only one who has felt this way, so I decided to publish the add-in, and host it on GitHub (VSNewFile on GitHub) hoping to spur contributions. Adding Files the Built-in Way Here’s the problem I wanted to solve. You’re working on a project, and it’s time to add a new file to the project. Whatever it is – a class, script, html page, aspx page, or what-have-you, you go through a menu or keyboard shortcut to get to the “Add New Item” dialog. Typically, you do it by right-clicking the location where you want the file (the project or a folder of it): This brings up a dialog the contains, well, every conceivable type of item you might want to add. It’s all the available item templates, which can result in anywhere from a ton to a veritable sea of choices. To be fair, this dialog has been revamped in Visual Studio 2010, which organizes it a little better than Visual Studio 2008, and adds a search box. It also loads noticeably faster.   To me, this dialog is just getting in my way. If I want to add a JavaScript script to my project, I don’t want to have to hunt for the script template item in this dialog. Yes, it is categorized, and yes, it now has a search box. But still, all this UI to swim through when all I need is a new file in the project. I will name it. I will provide the content, I don’t even need a ‘template’. VS kind of realizes this. In the add menu in a class library project, for example, there is a “Add Class…” choice. But all this really does is select that project item from the dialog by default. You still must wait for the dialog, see it, and type in a name for the file. How is that really any different than hitting F2 on an existing item? It isn’t. Adding Files the Hack Way What I often find myself doing, just to avoid going through this dialog, is to copy and paste an existing file, rename it, then “CTRL-A, DEL” the content. In a few short keystrokes I’ve got my new file. Even if the original file wasn’t the right type, it doesn’t matter – I will rename it anyway, including the extension. It works well enough if the place I am adding the file to doesn’t have much in it already. But if there are a lot of files at that level, it sucks, because the new file will have the name “Copy of xyz”, causing it to be moved into the ‘C’ section of the alphabetically sorted items, which might be far, far away from the original file (and so I tend to try and copy a file that starts with ‘C’ *evil grin*). Using ‘Export Template’ To be completely fair I should at least mention this feature. I’m not even sure if this is new in VS 2010 or not (I think so). But it allows you to export a project item or items, including potential project references required by it. Then it becomes a new item in the available ‘installed templates’. No doubt this is useful to help bootstrap new projects. But that still requires you to go through the ‘New Item’ dialog. Adding Files with VSNewFile So hopefully I have sufficiently defined the problem and got a few of you to think, “Yeah, me too!”… What VSNewFile does is let you skip the dialog entirely by adding project items directly to the context menu. But it does a bit more than that, so do read on. For example, to add a new class, you can right-click the location and pick that option. A new .cs file is instantly added to the project, and the new item is selected and put into the ‘rename’ mode immediately. The default items available are shown here. But you can customize them. You can also customize the content of each template. To do so, you create a directory in your documents folder, ‘VSNewFile Templates’. In there, you drop the templates you want to use, but you name them in a particular way. For example, here’s a template that will add a new item named “Add TITLE”. It will add a project item named “SOMEFILE.foo” (or ‘SOMEFILE1.foo’ if that exists, etc). The format of the file name is: <ORDER>_<KEY>_<BASE FILENAME>_<ICON ID>_<TITLE>.<EXTENTION> Where: <ORDER> is a number that lets you determine the order of the items in the menu (relative to each other). <KEY> is a case sensitive identifier different for each template item. More on that later. <BASE FILENAME> is the default name of the file, which doesn’t matter that much, since they will be renaming it anyway. <ICON ID> is a number the dictates the icon used for the menu item. There are a huge number of built-in choices. More on that later. <TITLE> is the string that will appear in the menu. And, the contents of the file are the default content for the item (the ‘template’). The content of the file can contain anything you want, of course. But it also supports two tokens: %NAMESPACE% and %FILENAME%, which will be replaced with the corresponding values. Here is the content of this sample: testing Namespace = %NAMESPACE% Filename = %FILENAME% I kind went back and forth on this. I could have made it so there’d be an XML or JSON file that defines the templates, instead of cramming all this data into the filename itself. I like the simplicity of this better. It makes it easy to customize since you can literally just throw these files around, copy them from someone else, etc, without worrying about merge data into a central description file, in whatever format. Here’s our new item showing up: Practical Use One immediate thing I am using this for is to make it easier to add very commonly used scripts to my web projects. For example, uh, say, jQuery? :) All I need to do is drop jQuery-1.4.2.js and jQuery-1.4.2.min.js into the templates folder, provide the order, title, etc, and then instantly, I can now add jQuery to any project I have without even thinking about “where is jQuery? Can I copy it from that other project?”   Using the KEY There are two reasons for the ‘key’ portion of the item. First, it allows you to turn off the built-in, default templates, which are: FILE = Add File (generic, empty file) VB = Add VB Class CS = Add C# Class (includes some basic usings) HTML = Add HTML page (includes basic structure, doctype, etc) JS = Add Script (includes an immediately-invoking function closure) To turn one off, just include a file with the name “_<KEY>”. For example, to turn off all the items except our custom one, you do this: The other reason for the key is that there are new Visual Studio Commands created for each one. This makes it possible to bind a keyboard shortcut to one of them. So you could, for example, have a keyboard combination that adds a new web page to your website, or a new CS class to your class library, etc. Here is our sample item showing up in the keyboard bindings option. Even though the contents of the template directory may change from one launch of Visual Studio to the next, the bindings will remain attached to any item with a particular key, thanks to it taking care not to lose keyboard bindings even though the commands are completely recreated each time. The Icon Face ID Visual Studio uses a Microsoft Office style add-in mechanism, I gather. There are a predetermined set of built-in icons available. You can use your own icons when developing add-ins, of course, but I’m no designer. I just wanted to find appropriate-ish icons for the built-in templates, and allow you to choose from an existing built-in icon for your own. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot out there on the interwebs that helps you figure out what the built-in types are. There’s an MSDN article that describes at length a way to create a program that lists all the icons. But I don’t want to write a program to figure them out! Just show them to me! Sheesh :) Thankfully, someone out there felt the same way, and uses a novel hack to get the icons to show up in an outlook toolbar. He then painstakingly took screenshots of them, one group at a time. It isn’t complete though – there are tens of thousands of icons. But it’s good enough. If anyone has an exhaustive list, please let me, and the rest of the add-in community know. Icon Face ID Reference Installing the Add-in It will work with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Just unzip the release into your Documents\Visual Studio 20xx\Addins folder. It contains the binary and the Visual Studio “.addin” file. For example, the path to mine is: C:\Users\InfinitiesLoop\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Addins Conclusion So that’s it! I hope you find it as useful as I have. It’s on GitHub, so if you’re into this kind of thing, please do fork it and improve it! Reference: VSNewFile on GitHub VSNewFile release on GitHub Icon Face ID Reference

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #003

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was the first year of my blogging and lots of new things I was learning as I go. I was indeed an infant in blogging a few years ago. However, as time passed by I have learned a lot. This year was year of experiments and new learning. 2007 Working as a full time DBA I often encoutered various errors and I started to learn how to avoid those error and document the same. ERROR Msg 5174 Each file size must be greater than or equal to 512 KB Whenever I see this error I wonder why someone is trying to attempt a database which is extremely small. Anyway, it does not matter what I think I keep on seeing this error often in industries. Anyway the solution of the error is equally interesting – just created larger database. Dilbert Humor This was very first encounter with database humor and I started to love it. It does not matter how many time we read this cartoon it does not get old. Generate Script with Data from Database – Database Publishing Wizard Generating schema script with data is one of the most frequently performed tasks among SQL Server Data Professionals. There are many ways to do the same. In the above article I demonstrated that how we can use the Database Publishing Wizard to accomplish the same. It was new to me at that time but I have not seen much of the adoption of the same still in the industry. Here is one of my videos where I demonstrate how we can generate data with schema. 2008 Delete Backup History – Cleanup Backup History Deleting backup history is important too but should be done carefully. If this is not carried out at regular interval there is good chance that MSDB will be filled up with all the old history. Every organization is different. Some would like to keep the history for 30 days and some for a year but there should be some limit. One should regularly archive the database backup history. South Asia MVP Open Days 2008 This was my very first year Microsoft MVP. I had Indeed big blast at the event and the fun was incredible. After this event I have attended many different MVP events but the fun and learning this particular event presented was amazing and just like me many others are not able to forget the same. Here are other links related to the event: South Asia MVP Open Day 2008 – Goa South Asia MVP Open Day 2008 – Goa – Day 1 South Asia MVP Open Day 2008 – Goa – Day 2 South Asia MVP Open Day 2008 – Goa – Day 3 2009 Enable or Disable Constraint  This is very simple script but I personally keep on forgetting it so I had blogged it. Till today, I keep on referencing this again and again as sometime a very little thing is hard to remember. Policy Based Management – Create, Evaluate and Fix Policies This article will cover the most spectacular feature of SQL 2008 – Policy-based management and how the configuration of SQL Server with policy-based management architecture can make a powerful difference. Policy based management is loaded with several advantages. It can help you implement various policies for reliable configuration of the system. It also provides additional administrative assistance to DBAs and helps them effortlessly manage various tasks of SQL Server across the enterprise. SQLPASS 2009 – My Very First SQPASS Experience Just Brilliant! I never had an experience such a thing in my life. SQL SQL and SQL – all around SQL! I am listing my own reasons here in order of importance to me. Networking with SQL fellows and experts Putting face to the name or avatar Learning and improving my SQL skills Understanding the structure of the largest SQL Server Professional Association Attending my favorite training sessions Since last time I have never missed a single time this event. This event is my favorite event and something keeps me going. Here are additional post related SQLPASS 2009. SQL PASS Summit, Seattle 2009 – Day 1 SQL PASS Summit, Seattle 2009 – Day 2 SQL PASS Summit, Seattle 2009 – Day 3 SQL PASS Summit, Seattle 2009 – Day 4 2010 Get All the Information of Database using sys.databases Even though we believe that we know everything about our database, we do not know a lot of things about our database. This little script enables us to know so many details about databases which we may not be familiar with. Run this on your server today and see how much you know your database. Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database While engaging in a performance tuning consultation for a client, a situation occurred where they were facing a lot of CXPACKET Waits Stats. The client asked me if I could help them reduce this huge number of wait stats. I usually receive this kind of request from other client as well, but the important thing to understand is whether this question has any merits or benefits, or not. I discusses the same in this article – a bit long but insightful for sure. Error related to Database in Use There are so many database management operations in SQL Server which requires exclusive access to the database and it is not always possible to get it. When any database is online in SQL Server it either applications or system thread often accesses them. This means database can’t have exclusive access and the operations which required this access throws an error. There is very easy method to overcome this minor issue – a single line script can give you exclusive access to the database. Difference between DATETIME and DATETIME2 Developers have found the root reason of the problem when dealing with Date Functions – when data time values are converted (implicit or explicit) between different data types, which would lose some precision, so the result cannot match each other as expected. In this blog post I go over very interesting details and difference between DATETIME and DATETIME2 History of SQL Server Database Encryption I recently met Michael Coles and Rodeney Landrum the author of one of the kind book Expert SQL Server 2008 Encryption at SQLPASS in Seattle. During the conversation we ended up how Microsoft is evolving encryption technology. The same discussion lead to talking about history of encryption tools in SQL Server. Michale pointed me to page 18 of his book of encryption. He explicitly gave me permission to re-produce relevant part of history from his book. 2011 Functions FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE with OVER clause and ORDER BY Some time an interesting feature and smart audience make a total difference in places. From last two days, I have been writing on SQL Server 2012 feature FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE. I created a puzzle which was very interesting and got many people attempt to resolve it. It was based on following two articles: Introduction to FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Introduction to FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE with OVER clause I even provided the hint about how one can solve this problem. The best part was many people solved the problem without using hints! Try your luck!  A Real Story of Book Getting ‘Out of Stock’ to A 25% Discount Story Available This is a great problem and everybody would love to have it. We had it and we loved it. Our book got out of stock in 48 hours of releasing and stocks were empty. We faced many issues and learned many valuable lessons. Some we were able to avoid in the future and some we are still facing it as those problems have no solutions. However, since that day – our books never gone out of stock. This inspiring learning story for us and I am confident that you will love to read it as well. Introduction to LEAD and LAG – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012 SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function LEAD() and LAG(). This function accesses data from a subsequent row (for lead) and previous row (for lag) in the same result set without the use of a self-join . It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. I had a fantastic time writing this blog post and I am very confident when you read it, you will like the same. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011

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

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• My View on ASP.NET Web Forms versus MVC

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction A lot has been said on Web Forms and MVC, but since I was recently asked about my opinion on the subject, here it is. First, I have to say that I really like both technologies and I don’t think any is going away – just remember SharePoint, which is built on top of Web Forms. I see them as complementary, targeting different needs and leveraging different skills. Let’s go through some of their differences. Rapid Application Development Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the development process by which you have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a visual design surface and a toolbox, and you drag components from the toolbox to the design surface and set their properties through a property inspector. It was introduced with some of the earliest Windows graphical IDEs such as Visual Basic and Delphi. With Web Forms you have RAD out of the box. Visual Studio offers a generally good (and extensible) designer for the layout of pages and web user controls. Designing a page may simply be about dragging controls from the toolbox, setting their properties and wiring up some events to event handlers, which are implemented in code behind .NET classes. Most people will be familiar with this kind of development and enjoy it. You can see what you are doing from the beginning. MVC also has designable pages – called views in MVC terminology – the problem is that they can be built using different technologies, some of which, at the moment (MVC 4) do not support RAD – Razor, for example. I believe it is just a matter of time for that to be implemented in Visual Studio, but it will mostly consist on HTML editing, and until that day comes, you have to live with source editing. Development Model Web Forms features the same development model that you are used to from Windows Forms and other similar technologies: events fired by controls and automatic persistence of their properties between postbacks. For that, it uses concepts such as view state, which some may love and others may hate, because it may be misused quite easily, but otherwise does its job well. Another fundamental concept is data binding, by which a collection of data can be fed to a control and have it render that data somehow – just thing of the GridView control. The focus is on the page, that’s where it all starts, and you can place everything in the same code behind class: data access, business logic, layout, etc. The controls take care of generating a great part of the HTML and JavaScript for you. With MVC there is no free lunch when it comes to data persistence between requests, you have to implement it yourself. As for event handling, that is at the core of MVC, in the form of controllers and action methods, you just don’t think of them as event handlers. In MVC you need to think more in HTTP terms, so action methods such as POST and GET are relevant to you, and may write actions to handle one or the other. Also of crucial importance is model binding: the way by which MVC converts your posted data into a .NET class. This is something that ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms has introduced as well, but it is a cornerstone in MVC. MVC also has built-in validation of these .NET classes, which out of the box uses the Data Annotations API. You have full control of the generated HTML - except for that coming from the helper methods, usually small fragments - which requires a greater familiarity with the specifications. You normally rely much more on JavaScript APIs, they are even included in the Visual Studio template, that is because much less is done for you. Reuse It is difficult to accept a professional company/project that does not employ reuse. It can save a lot of time thus cutting costs significantly. Code reused in several projects matures as time goes by and helps developers learn from past experiences. ASP.NET Web Forms was built with reuse in mind, in the form of controls. Controls encapsulate functionality and are generally portable from project to project (with the notable exception of web user controls, those with an associated .ASCX markup file). ASP.NET has dozens of controls and it is very easy to develop new ones, so I believe this is a great advantage. A control can inject JavaScript code and external references as well as generate HTML an CSS. MVC on the other hand does not use controls – it is possible to use them, with some view engines like ASPX, but it is just not advisable because it breaks the flow – where do Init, Load, PreRender, etc, fit? The most similar to controls is extension methods, or helpers. They serve the same purpose – generating HTML, CSS or JavaScript – and can be reused between different projects. What differentiates them from controls is that there is no inheritance and no context – an extension method is just a static method which doesn’t know where it is being called. You also have partial views, which you can reuse in the same project, but there is no inheritance as well. This, in my view, is a weakness of MVC. Architecture Both technologies are highly extensible. I have writtenstarted writing a series of posts on ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility and will probably write another series on MVC extensibility as well. A number of scenarios are covered in any of these models, and some extensibility points apply to both, because, of course both stand upon ASP.NET. With Web Forms, if you’re like me, you start by defining you master pages, pages and controls, with some helper classes to glue everything. You may as well throw in some JavaScript, but probably you’re main work will be with plain old .NET code. The controls you define have the chance to inject JavaScript code and references, through either the ScriptManager or the page’s ClientScript object, as well as generating HTML and CSS code. The master page and page model with code behind classes offer a number of “hooks” by which you can change the normal way of things, for example, in a page you can access any control on the master page, add script or stylesheet references to its head and even change the page’s title. Also, with Web Forms, you typically have URLs in the form “/SomePath/SomePage.aspx?SomeParameter=SomeValue”, which isn’t really SEO friendly, no to mention the HTML that some controls produce, far from standards, optimization and best practices. In MVC, you also normally start by defining the master page (or layout) and views, which are the visible parts, and then define controllers on separate files. These controllers do not know anything about the views, except the names and types of the parameters that will be passed to and from them. The controller will be responsible for the data access and business logic, eventually relying on additional classes for this purpose. On a controller you only receive parameters and return a result, which may be a request for the rendering of a view, a redirection to another URL or a JSON object, to name just a few. The controller class does not know anything about the web, so you can effectively reuse it in a non-web project. This separation and the lack of programmatic access to the UI elements, makes it very difficult to implement, for example, something like SharePoint with MVC. OK, I know about Orchard, but it isn’t really a general purpose development framework, but instead, a CMS that happens to use MVC. Not having controls render HTML for you gives you in turn much more control over it – it is your responsibility to create it, which you can either consider a blessing or a curse, in the later case, you probably shouldn’t be using MVC at all. Also MVC URLs tend to be much more SEO-oriented, if you design your controllers and actions properly. Testing In a well defined architecture, you should separate business logic, data access logic and presentation logic, because these are all different things and it might even be the need to switch one implementation for another: for example, you might design a system which includes a data access layer, a business logic layer and two presentation layers, one on top of ASP.NET and the other with WPF; and the data access layer might be implemented first using NHibernate and later on switched for Entity Framework Code First. These changes are not that rare, so care should be taken in designing the system to make them possible. Web Forms are difficult to test, because it relies on event handlers which are only fired in web contexts, when a form is submitted or a page is requested. You can call them with reflection, but you have to set up a number of mocking objects first, HttpContext.Current first coming to my mind. MVC, on the other hand, makes testing controllers a breeze, so much that it even includes a template option for generating boilerplate unit test classes up from start. A well designed – from the unit test point of view - controller will receive everything it needs to work as parameters to its action methods, so you can pass whatever values you need very easily. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything can be tested: views, for instance, are difficult to test without actually accessing the site, but MVC offers the possibility to compile views at build time, so that, at least, you know you don’t have syntax errors beforehand. Myths Some popular but unfounded myths around MVC include: You cannot use controls in MVC: not true, actually, you can, at least with the Web Forms (ASPX) view engine; the declaration and usage is exactly the same as with Web Forms; You cannot specify a base class for a view: with the ASPX view engine you can use the Inherits Page directive, with this and all the others you can use the pageBaseType and userControlBaseType attributes of the <page> element; MVC shields you from doing “bad things” on your views: well, you can place any code on a code block, at least with the ASPX view engine (you may be starting to see a pattern here), even data access code; The model is the entity model, tied to an O/RM: the model is actually any class that you use to pass values to a view, including (but generally not recommended) an entity model; Unit tests come with no cost: unit tests generally don’t cover the UI, although there are frameworks just for that (see WatiN, for example); also, for some tests, you will have to mock or replace either the HttpContext.Current property or the HttpContextBase class yourself; Everything is testable: views aren’t, without accessing the site; MVC relies on HTML5/some_cool_new_javascript_framework: there is no relation whatsoever, MVC renders whatever you want it to render and does not require any framework to be present. The thing is, the subsequent releases of MVC happened in a time when Microsoft has become much more involved in standards, so the files and technologies included in the Visual Studio templates reflect this, and it just happens to work well with jQuery, for example. Conclusion Well, this is how I see it. Some folks may think that I am being too rude on MVC, probably because I don’t like it, but that’s not true: like I said, I do like MVC and I am starting my new projects with it. I just don’t want to go along with that those that say that MVC is much superior to Web Forms, in fact, some things you can do much more easily with Web Forms than with MVC. I will be more than happy to hear what you think on this!

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• HTML5 Form Validation

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The latest versions of Google Chrome (16+), Mozilla Firefox (8+), and Internet Explorer (10+) all support HTML5 client-side validation. It is time to take HTML5 validation seriously. The purpose of the blog post is to describe how you can take advantage of HTML5 client-side validation regardless of the type of application that you are building. You learn how to use the HTML5 validation attributes, how to perform custom validation using the JavaScript validation constraint API, and how to simulate HTML5 validation on older browsers by taking advantage of a jQuery plugin. Finally, we discuss the security issues related to using client-side validation. Using Client-Side Validation Attributes The HTML5 specification discusses several attributes which you can use with INPUT elements to perform client-side validation including the required, pattern, min, max, step, and maxlength attributes. For example, you use the required attribute to require a user to enter a value for an INPUT element. The following form demonstrates how you can make the firstName and lastName form fields required: <!DOCTYPE html> <html > <head> <title>Required Demo</title> </head> <body> <form> <label> First Name: <input required title="First Name is Required!" /> </label> <label> Last Name: <input required title="Last Name is Required!" /> </label> <button>Register</button> </form> </body> </html> If you attempt to submit this form without entering a value for firstName or lastName then you get the validation error message: Notice that the value of the title attribute is used to display the validation error message “First Name is Required!”. The title attribute does not work this way with the current version of Firefox. If you want to display a custom validation error message with Firefox then you need to include an x-moz-errormessage attribute like this: <input required title="First Name is Required!" x-moz-errormessage="First Name is Required!" /> The pattern attribute enables you to validate the value of an INPUT element against a regular expression. For example, the following form includes a social security number field which includes a pattern attribute: <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Pattern</title> </head> <body> <form> <label> Social Security Number: <input required pattern="^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}$" title="###-##-####" /> </label> <button>Register</button> </form> </body> </html> The regular expression in the form above requires the social security number to match the pattern ###-##-####: Notice that the input field includes both a pattern and a required validation attribute. If you don’t enter a value then the regular expression is never triggered. You need to include the required attribute to force a user to enter a value and cause the value to be validated against the regular expression. Custom Validation You can take advantage of the HTML5 constraint validation API to perform custom validation. You can perform any custom validation that you need. The only requirement is that you write a JavaScript function. For example, when booking a hotel room, you might want to validate that the Arrival Date is in the future instead of the past: <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Constraint Validation API</title> </head> <body> <form> <label> Arrival Date: <input id="arrivalDate" type="date" required /> </label> <button>Submit Reservation</button> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> var arrivalDate = document.getElementById("arrivalDate"); arrivalDate.addEventListener("input", function() { var value = new Date(arrivalDate.value); if (value < new Date()) { arrivalDate.setCustomValidity("Arrival date must be after now!"); } else { arrivalDate.setCustomValidity(""); } }); </script> </body> </html> The form above contains an input field named arrivalDate. Entering a value into the arrivalDate field triggers the input event. The JavaScript code adds an event listener for the input event and checks whether the date entered is greater than the current date. If validation fails then the validation error message “Arrival date must be after now!” is assigned to the arrivalDate input field by calling the setCustomValidity() method of the validation constraint API. Otherwise, the validation error message is cleared by calling setCustomValidity() with an empty string. HTML5 Validation and Older Browsers But what about older browsers? For example, what about Apple Safari and versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer older than Internet Explorer 10? What the world really needs is a jQuery plugin which provides backwards compatibility for the HTML5 validation attributes. If a browser supports the HTML5 validation attributes then the plugin would do nothing. Otherwise, the plugin would add support for the attributes. Unfortunately, as far as I know, this plugin does not exist. I have not been able to find any plugin which supports both the required and pattern attributes for older browsers, but does not get in the way of these attributes in the case of newer browsers. There are several jQuery plugins which provide partial support for the HTML5 validation attributes including: · jQuery Validation — http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation · html5Form — http://www.matiasmancini.com.ar/jquery-plugin-ajax-form-validation-html5.html · h5Validate — http://ericleads.com/h5validate/ The jQuery Validation plugin – the most popular JavaScript validation library – supports the HTML5 required attribute, but it does not support the HTML5 pattern attribute. Likewise, the html5Form plugin does not support the pattern attribute. The h5Validate plugin provides the best support for the HTML5 validation attributes. The following page illustrates how this plugin supports both the required and pattern attributes: <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>h5Validate</title> <style type="text/css"> .validationError { border: solid 2px red; } .validationValid { border: solid 2px green; } </style> </head> <body> <form id="customerForm"> <label> First Name: <input id="firstName" required /> </label> <label> Social Security Number: <input id="ssn" required pattern="^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}$" title="Expected pattern is ###-##-####" /> </label> <input type="submit" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery.h5validate.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Enable h5Validate plugin $("#customerForm").h5Validate({ errorClass: "validationError", validClass: "validationValid" }); // Prevent form submission when errors $("#customerForm").submit(function (evt) { if ($("#customerForm").h5Validate("allValid") === false) { evt.preventDefault(); } }); </script> </body> </html> When an input field fails validation, the validationError CSS class is applied to the field and the field appears with a red border. When an input field passes validation, the validationValid CSS class is applied to the field and the field appears with a green border. From the perspective of HTML5 validation, the h5Validate plugin is the best of the plugins. It adds support for the required and pattern attributes to browsers which do not natively support these attributes such as IE9. However, this plugin does not include everything in my wish list for a perfect HTML5 validation plugin. Here’s my wish list for the perfect back compat HTML5 validation plugin: 1. The plugin would disable itself when used with a browser which natively supports HTML5 validation attributes. The plugin should not be too greedy – it should not handle validation when a browser could do the work itself. 2. The plugin should simulate the same user interface for displaying validation error messages as the user interface displayed by browsers which natively support HTML5 validation. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all display validation errors in a popup. The perfect plugin would also display a popup. 3. Finally, the plugin would add support for the setCustomValidity() method and the other methods of the HTML5 validation constraint API. That way, you could implement custom validation in a standards compatible way and you would know that it worked across all browsers both old and new. Security It would be irresponsible of me to end this blog post without mentioning the issue of security. It is important to remember that any client-side validation — including HTML5 validation — can be bypassed. You should use client-side validation with the intention to create a better user experience. Client validation is great for providing a user with immediate feedback when the user is in the process of completing a form. However, client-side validation cannot prevent an evil hacker from submitting unexpected form data to your web server. You should always enforce your validation rules on the server. The only way to ensure that a required field has a value is to verify that the required field has a value on the server. The HTML5 required attribute does not guarantee anything. Summary The goal of this blog post was to describe the support for validation contained in the HTML5 standard. You learned how to use both the required and the pattern attributes in an HTML5 form. We also discussed how you can implement custom validation by taking advantage of the setCustomValidity() method. Finally, I discussed the available jQuery plugins for adding support for the HTM5 validation attributes to older browsers. Unfortunately, I am unaware of any jQuery plugin which provides a perfect solution to the problem of backwards compatibility.

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks-Part 2: Key Shortcuts

  - by ToStringTheory

  Ask anyone that knows me, and they will confirm that I hate the mouse.  This isn’t because I deny affection to objects that don’t look like their mammalian-named self, but rather for a much more simple and not-insane reason: I have terrible eyesight.  Introduction Thanks to a degenerative eye disease known as Choroideremia, I have learned to rely more on the keyboard which I can feel digital/static positions of keys relative to my fingers, than the much more analog/random position of the mouse.  Now, I would like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts with you now, as I believe that they not only increase my productivity, but yours as well once you know them (if you don’t already of course)...  I share one of my biggest tips for productivity in the conclusion at the end. Visual Studio Key Shortcuts Global Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + X Cut This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is cut from the editor. Ctrl + C Copy This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is copied from the editor. Ctrl + V Paste If you copied an entire line by the method above, the data is pasted in the line above the current caret line. Ctrl + Shift + V Next Clipboard Element Cut/Copy multiple things, and then hit this combo repeatedly to switch to the next clipboard item when pasting. Ctrl + Backspace Delete Previous Will delete the previous word from the editor directly before the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + Del Delete Next Word Will delete the next word/space from the editor directly after the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Shift + Del Delete Focused Line Will delete the line from the editor that the caret is on. If something is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + ? or Ctrl + ? Left/Right by Word This will move the caret left or right by word or special character boundary. Holding Shift will also select the word. Ctrl + F Quick Find Either the Quick Find panel, or the search bar if you have the Productivity Power Tools installed. Ctrl + Shift + F Find in Solution Opens up the 'Find in Files' window, allowing you to search your solution, as well as using regex for pattern matching. F2 Rename File... While not debugging, selecting a file in the solution explorer\navigator and pressing F2 allows you to rename the selected file. Global Application Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten... Again... Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + N New File dialog Opens up the 'New File' dialog to add a new file to the current directory in the Solution\Project. Ctrl + O Open File dialog Opens up the 'Open File' dialog to open a file in the editor, not necessarily in the solution. Ctrl + S Save File dialog Saves the currently focused editor tab back to your HDD/SSD. Ctrl + Shift + S Save All... Quickly save all open/edited documents back to your disk. Ctrl + Tab Switch Panel\Tab Tapping this combo switches between tabs quickly. Holding down Ctrl when hitting tab will bring up a chooser window. Building Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are focused on building and running a solution. These are not usable when the IDE is in Debug mode, as the shortcut changes by context. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + Shift + B Build Solution Starts a build process on the solution according to the current build configuration manager settings. Ctrl + Break Cancel a Building Solution Will cancel a build operation currently in progress. Good for long running builds when you think of one last change. F5 Start Debugging Will build the solution if needed and launch debugging according to the current configuration manager settings. Ctrl + F5 Start Without Debugger Will build the solution if needed and launch the startup project without attaching a debugger. Debugging Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used when debugging a solution. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F5 Continue Execution Continues execution of code until the next breakpoint. Ctrl + Alt + Break Pause Execution Pauses the program execution. Shift + F5 Stop Debugging Stops the current debugging session. NOTE: Web apps will still continue processing after stopping the debugger. Keep this in mind if working on code such as credit card processing. Ctrl + Shift + F5 Restart Debugging Stops the current debugging session and restarts the debugging session from the beginning. F9 Place Breakpoint Toggles/Places a breakpoint in the editor on the current line. Set a breakpoint in condensed code by highlighting the statement first. F10 Step Over Statement When debugging, executes all code in methods/properties on the current line until the next line. F11 Step Into Statement When debugging, steps into a method call so you can walk through the code executed there (if available). Ctrl + Alt + I Immediate Window Open the Immediate Window to execute commands when execution is paused. Navigation Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for navigating in the IDE or editor panel. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F4 Properties Panel Opens the properties panel for the selected item in the editor/designer/solution navigator (context driven). F12 Go to Definition Press F12 with the caret on a member to navigate to its declaration. With the Productivity tools, Ctrl + Click works too. Ctrl + K Ctrl + T View Call Hierarchy View the call hierarchy of the member the caret is on. Great for going through n-tier solutions and interface implementations! Ctrl + Alt + B Breakpoint Window View the breakpoint window to manage breakpoints and their advanced options. Allows easy toggling of breakpoints. Ctrl + Alt + L Solution Navigator Open the solution explorer panel. Ctrl + Alt + O Output Window View the output window to see build\general output from Visual Studio. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Live Web Preview Only available with the Web Essential plugin. Launches the auto-updating Preview panel. Testing Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for running tests in the IDE. Please note, Visual Studio 2010 is all about context. If your caret is within a test method when you use one of these combinations, the combination will apply to that test. If your caret is within a test class, it will apply to that class. If the caret is outside of a test class, it will apply to all tests. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + R T Run Test(s) Run all tests in the current context without a debugger attached. Breakpoints will not be stopped on. Ctrl + R Ctrl + T Run Test(s) (Debug) Run all tests in the current context with a debugger attached. This allows you to use breakpoints. Substitute A for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL tests in the current context. Substitute Y for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL impacted/covering tests for a method in the current context. Advanced Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for more advanced editing in the editor window. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Shift + Alt + ? Shift + Alt + ? Multiline caret up/down Use this combo to edit multiple lines at once. Not too many uses for it, but once in a blue moon one comes along. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Insert Line Above Inserts a blank line above the line the caret is currently on. No need to be at end or start of line, so no cutting off words/code. Ctrl + K Ctrl + C Comment Selection Comments the current selection out of compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + U Uncomment Selection Uncomments the current selection into compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + D Format Document Automatically formats the document into a structured layout. Lines up nodes or code into columns intelligently. Alt + ? Alt + ? Code line up/down *Use this combo to move a line of code up or down quickly. Great for small rearrangements of code. *Requires the Productivity Power pack from Microsoft. Conclusion This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but these are the shortcuts I use regularly every hour/minute of the day. There are still 100s more in Visual Studio that you can discover through the configuration window, or by tooltips. Something that I started doing months ago seems to have interest in my office.. In my last post, I talked about how I hated a cluttered UI. One of the ways that I aimed to resolve that was by systematically cleaning up the toolbars week by week. First day, I removed ALL icons that I already knew shortcuts to, or would never use them (Undo in a toolbar?!). Then, every week from that point on, I make it a point to remove an icon/two from the toolbar and make an effort to remember its key combination. I gain extra space in the toolbar area, AND become more productive at the same time! I hope that you found this article interesting or at least somewhat informative.. Maybe a shortcut or two you didn't know. I know some of them seem trivial, but I often see people going to the edit menu for Copy/Paste... Thought a refresher might be helpful!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 03, 2012Popular ReleasesWiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 RC0: WiX v3.6 RC0 (3.6.2803.0) provides support for VS11 and a more stable Burn engine. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/4/3/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-Zero-availableSageFrame: SageFrame 2.0: Sageframe is an open source ASP.NET web development framework developed using ASP.NET 3.5 with service pack 1 (sp1) technology. It is designed specifically to help developers build dynamic website by providing core functionality common to most web applications.Lightbox Gallery Module for DotNetNuke: 01.11.00: This version of the Lightbox Gallery Module adds the following features/bug fixes: Feature: Read image EXIF information Bug Fix: URL parsing bug for any folder provider Minimum System Requirements Please ensure that your environment meets or exceeds the following system requirements: DotNetNuke® Version 06.00.00 or higher SQL Server 2005 or later .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 or laterClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.65.0: Aside from many bug fixes we now have Conditional Formatting The conditional formatting was sponsored by http://www.bewing.nl (big thanks)callisto: callisto 2.0.24: Implemented ares encryption protocol for supported clients. Also changed script loading method to read direct from source files.sb0t: sb0t 4.61: Added packet encryption protocol for supported clients.iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.5.4475: Fix to parse empty playlists in iTunes LibraryExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.1: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-02 v3.1.1 +????????，?????????????，????????????（...Document.Editor: 2012.2: Whats New for Document.Editor 2012.2: New Save Copy support New Page Setup support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsVidCoder: 1.3.2: Added option for the minimum title length to scan. Added support to enable or disable LibDVDNav. Added option to prompt to delete source files after clearing successful completed items. Added option to disable remembering recent files and folders. Tweaked number box to only select all on a quick click.MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Light Indexed Deferred Rendering: Implements light indexed deferred using per-tile light lists calculated in a compute shader, as well as a traditional deferred renderer that uses a compute shader for per-tile light culling and per-pixel shading.Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.9.0 (66492): Pcap.Net - March 2012 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes a packet interpretation framework. Version 0.9.0 (Change Set 66492)March 31, 2012 release of the Pcap.Net framework. Follow Pcap.Net on Google+Follow Pcap.Net on Google+ Files Pcap.Net.DevelopersPack.0.9.0.66492.zip - Includes all the tutorial example projects source files, the binaries in a 3rdParty directory and the documentation. It include...Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.6.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's in the 1.6.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner Calculator CalculatorUpDown CheckListBox - Breaking Changes CheckComboBox - New Control ChildWindow CollectionEditor CollectionEditorDialog ColorCanvas ColorPicker DateTimePicker DateTimeUpDown DecimalUpDown DoubleUpDown DropDownButton IntegerUpDown Magnifier MaskedTextBox MessageBox MultiLineTex...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!MonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 New Projects3DTweet: 3Dtweet is an effort to make tweets appear in a aesthetic manner to the users of windows phone.Its developed using VS2010 expresss.Alay Plugin for Windows Live Writer: a project for creating an alay languageAuthor-it Copy Folder Plug-in: The Copy Folder Plug-in is an Author-it plug-in that allows the user to create a duplicate of a folder and its contents, including subfolders and objects.Author-it Dependencies Plug-in: The Word Count Plug-in is an Author-it plug-in that allows the user to drill down into object relationships to find objects that selected Author-it objects depend on.Author-it Word Count Plug-in: The Word Count Plug-in is an Author-it plug-in that allows the user to get word counts for selected topics.Azure Configuration File Comparer: Compares two Azure configuration files and highlights the differencesBootstrap Footer Sticker: Bootstrap extensions for footer to stick at the bottomBulk Approval Webpart: This webpart can be added to any list, or document library that requires approval. When the button is clicked it will approve all items. It will also kick start any workflows attached to the list / library that are set to start when an item has been changed. CodeTimer: Code Execute TimeCRM 2011 - WinForm based User Settings Console: This is Windows Form based Utility to do bulk management of User Settings in CRM 2011Emergency System: An Imagine Cup projectFalafel Solution Rename Script: The Falafel Software Solution Rename PowerShell Script makes it easy to reuse an existing solution/project by performing a global rename. If you have a solution named ExampleSolution and want to reuse it as WidgetSolution, this script will rename everything for you.Gadgeteer Bluetooth Module: BETA Drivers for the .NET Gadgeteer Bluetooth modulesGreg's Channel 9 Utilities and Helpers: Utilities and helpers for Microsoft's Channel 9 (C9) site. These are utilities I've created to make my C9 work faster and easierHB's First Time: My first project hereHOMMFrame: Studying project about frames.ICNInformaticaCenter: * ICNInformaticaCenter *Insert a Favorite (Bookmark) plugin for Windows Live Writer: This Windows Live Writer plugin allows you to select a Favorite (Bookmark) and insert it into your blog entry.Kinect your Metro Style App: The main idea is to tell Metro Style App communicate with external environment via Kinect Sensor.Memo: Memo Intellegence SystemMGR.CommandLineParser: MGR.CommandLineParser is a multi-command line parser. It uses System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations to declare and validate the commands.MusicStoreMVC3: ?????MVC3??????????，????????（???????）??? 1.EF4.1 2.MVC3 3.MvcPager 4.Linq ?????? NN Crew Calculator: Calculator project to help learn C#Reporte Ciudadano: Aplicación para que los ciudadanos reporten los problemas al ayuntamiento.Sejrssedler: This is a school project made, by four student in Aarhus, Denmark. During the Datamatiker study(2nd year).smartcamera: smart cameraSpecEx: Speculative ExecutionStructure Copier: This small program is supposed to copy tree structure of directory.TFS2010 Service Provider: Web Service (asmx) is a provider of Team Foundation Server 2010 object model. Was developed to enable the implementation of client application for Android and etc. platforms, which receives data from the server via Web services.totalem: totalem - free file manager for WindowsWebSharperWithTypeProviders: WebSharper project with Visual Studio 2011 Beta, .Net 4.5 and F# 3.0 with TypeProviders

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• Metro: Creating a Master/Detail View with a WinJS ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create a simple master/detail view by using the WinJS ListView and Template controls. In particular, I explain how you can use a ListView control to display a list of movies and how you can use a Template control to display the details of the selected movie. Creating a master/detail view requires completing the following four steps: Create the data source – The data source contains the list of movies. Declare the ListView control – The ListView control displays the entire list of movies. It is the master part of the master/detail view. Declare the Details Template control – The Details Template control displays the details for the selected movie. It is the details part of the master/detail view. Handle the selectionchanged event – You handle the selectionchanged event to display the details for a movie when a new movie is selected. Creating the Data Source There is nothing special about our data source. We initialize a WinJS.Binding.List object to represent a list of movies: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); The data source is exposed to the rest of our application with the name ListViewDemos.movies. Declaring the ListView Control The ListView control is declared with the following markup: <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The data-win-options attribute is used to set the following properties of the ListView control: itemDataSource – The ListView is bound to the list of movies which we created in the previous section. Notice that the ListView is bound to ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.movies. itemTemplate – The item template contains the template used for rendering each item in the ListView. The markup for this template is included below. tabBehavior – This enumeration determines what happens when you tap or click on an item in the ListView. The possible values are directSelect, toggleSelect, invokeOnly, none. Because we want to handle the selectionchanged event, we set tapBehavior to the value directSelect. selectionMode – This enumeration determines whether you can select multiple items or only a single item. The possible values are none, single, multi. In the code above, this property is set to the value single. layout – You can use ListLayout or GridLayout with a ListView. If you want to display a vertical ListView, then you should select ListLayout. You must associate a ListView with an item template if you want to render anything interesting. The ListView above is associated with an item template named #masterItemTemplate. Here’s the markup for the masterItemTemplate: <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> This template simply renders the title of each movie. Declaring the Details Template Control The details part of the master/detail view is created with the help of a Template control. Here’s the markup used to declare the Details Template control: <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> The Details Template control displays the movie title and director.   Handling the selectionchanged Event The ListView control can raise two types of events: the iteminvoked and selectionchanged events. The iteminvoked event is raised when you click on a ListView item. The selectionchanged event is raised when one or more ListView items are selected. When you set the tapBehavior property of the ListView control to the value “directSelect” then tapping or clicking a list item raised both the iteminvoked and selectionchanged event. Tapping a list item causes the item to be selected and the item appears with a checkmark. In our code, we handle the selectionchanged event to update the movie details Template when you select a new movie. Here’s the code from the default.js file used to handle the selectionchanged event: var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); The code above sets up an event handler (listener) for the selectionchanged event. The event handler first verifies that an item has been selected in the ListView (selection.count() > 0). Next, the details for the movie are rendered using the movie details Template (we created this Template in the previous section). The Complete Code For the sake of completeness, I’ve included the complete code for the master/detail view below. I’ve included both the default.html, default.js, and movies.js files. Here is the final code for the default.html file: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewMasterDetail</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewMasterDetail references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/movies.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: xx-large; } .movie { padding: 5px; } #masterDetail { display: -ms-box; } #movieList { width: 300px; margin: 20px; } #movieDetails { margin: 20px; } </style> </head> <body> <!-- Templates --> <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> <!-- Master/Detail --> <div id="masterDetail"> <!-- Master --> <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> <!-- Detail --> <div id="movieDetails"></div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll(); var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); } }; app.start(); })();   Here is the movies.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })();   Summary The purpose of this blog entry was to describe how to create a simple master/detail view by taking advantage of the WinJS ListView control. We handled the selectionchanged event of the ListView control to display movie details when you select a movie in the ListView.

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• 10 Reasons Why Java is the Top Embedded Platform

  - by Roger Brinkley

  With the release of Oracle ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Embedded Suite, Java is now ready to fully move into the embedded developer space, what many have called the "Internet of Things". Here are 10 reasons why Java is the top embedded platform. 1. Decouples software development from hardware development cycle Development is typically split between both hardware and software in a traditional design flow . This leads to complicated co-design and requires prototype hardware to be built. This parallel and interdependent hardware / software design process typically leads to two or more re-development phases. With Embedded Java, all specific work is carried out in software, with the (processor) hardware implementation fully decoupled. This with eliminate or at least reduces the need for re-spins of software or hardware and the original development efforts can be carried forward directly into product development and validation. 2. Development and testing can be done (mostly) using standard desktop systems through emulation Because the software and hardware are decoupled it now becomes easier to test the software long before it reaches the hardware through hardware emulation. Emulation is the ability of a program in an electronic device to imitate another program or device. In the past Java tools like the Java ME SDK and the SunSPOTs Solarium provided developers with emulation for a complete set of mobile telelphones and SunSpots. This often included network interaction or in the case of SunSPOTs radio communication. What emulation does is speed up the development cycle by refining the software development process without the need of hardware. The software is fixed, redefined, and refactored without the timely expense of hardware testing. With tools like the Java ME 3.2 SDK, Embedded Java applications can be be quickly developed on Windows based platforms. In the end of course developers should do a full set of testing on the hardware as incompatibilities between emulators and hardware will exist, but the amount of time to do this should be significantly reduced. 3. Highly productive language, APIs, runtime, and tools mean quick time to market Charles Nutter probably said it best in twitter blog when he tweeted, "Every time I see a piece of C code I need to port, my heart dies a little. Then I port it to 1/4 as much Java, and feel better." The Java environment is a very complex combination of a Java Virtual Machine, the Java Language, and it's robust APIs. Combine that with the Java ME SDK for small devices or just Netbeans for the larger devices and you have a development environment where development time is reduced significantly meaning the product can be shipped sooner. Of course this is assuming that the engineers don't get slap happy adding new features given the extra time they'll have.  4. Create high-performance, portable, secure, robust, cross-platform applications easily The latest JIT compilers for the Oracle JVM approach the speed of C/C++ code, and in some memory allocation intensive circumstances, exceed it. And specifically for the embedded devices both ME Embedded and SE Embedded have been optimized for the smaller footprints.  In portability Java uses Bytecode to make the language platform independent. This creates a write once run anywhere environment that allows you to develop on one platform and execute on others and avoids a platform vendor lock in. For security, Java achieves protection by confining a Java program to a Java execution environment and not allowing it to access other parts of computer.  In variety of systems the program must execute reliably to be robust. Finally, Oracle Java ME Embedded is a cross-industry and cross-platform product optimized in release version 3.2 for chipsets based on the ARM architectures. Similarly Oracle Java SE Embedded works on a variety of ARM V5, V6, and V7, X86 and Power Architecture Linux. 5. Java isolates your apps from language and platform variations (e.g. C/C++, kernel, libc differences) This has been a key factor in Java from day one. Developers write to Java and don't have to worry about underlying differences in the platform variations. Those platform variations are being managed by the JVM. Gone are the C/C++ problems like memory corruptions, stack overflows, and other such bugs which are extremely difficult to isolate. Of course this doesn't imply that you won't be able to get away from native code completely. There could be some situations where you have to write native code in either assembler or C/C++. But those instances should be limited. 6. Most popular embedded processors supported allowing design flexibility Java SE Embedded is now available on ARM V5, V6, and V7 along with Linux on X86 and Power Architecture platforms. Java ME Embedded is available on system based on ARM architecture SOCs with low memory footprints and a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). 7. Support for key embedded features (low footprint, power mgmt., low latency, etc) All embedded devices by there very nature are constrained in some way. Economics may dictate a device with a less RAM and ROM. The CPU needs can dictate a less powerful device. Power consumption is another major resource in some embedded devices as connecting to consistent power source not always desirable or possible. For others they have to constantly on. Often many of these systems are headless (in the embedded space it's almost always Halloween).  For memory resources ,Java ME Embedded can run in environment as low as 130KB RAM/350KB ROM for a minimal, customized configuration up to 700KB RAM/1500KB ROM for the full, standard configuration. Java SE Embedded is designed for environments starting at 32MB RAM/39MB  ROM. Key functionality of embedded devices such as auto-start and recovery, flexible networking are fully supported. And while Java SE Embedded has been optimized for mid-range to high-end embedded systems, Java ME Embedded is a Java runtime stack optimized for small embedded systems. It provides a robust and flexible application platform with dedicated embedded functionality for always-on, headless (no graphics/UI), and connected devices. 8. Leverage huge Java developer ecosystem (expertise, existing code) There are over 9 million developers in world that work on Java, and while not all of them work on embedded systems, their wealth of expertise in developing applications is immense. In short, getting a java developer to work on a embedded system is pretty easy, you probably have a java developer living in your subdivsion.  Then of course there is the wealth of existing code. The Java Embedded Community on Java.net is central gathering place for embedded Java developers. Conferences like Embedded Java @ JavaOne and the a variety of hardware vendor conferences like Freescale Technlogy Forums offer an excellent opportunity for those interested in embedded systems. 9. Easily create end-to-end solutions integrated with Java back-end services In the "Internet of Things" things aren't on an island doing an single task. For instance and embedded drink dispenser doesn't just dispense a beverage, but could collect money from a credit card and also send information about current sales. Similarly, an embedded house power monitoring system doesn't just manage the power usage in a house, but can also send that data back to the power company. In both cases it isn't about the individual thing, but monitoring a collection of  things. How much power did your block, subdivsion, area of town, town, county, state, nation, world use? How many Dr Peppers were purchased from thing1, thing2, thingN? The point is that all this information can be collected and transferred securely  (and believe me that is key issue that Java fully supports) to back end services for further analysis. And what better back in service exists than a Java back in service. It's interesting to note that on larger embedded platforms that support the Java Embedded Suite some of the analysis might be done on the embedded device itself as JES has a glassfish server and Java Database as part of the installation. The result is an end to end Java solution. 10. Solutions from constrained devices to server-class systems Just take a look at some of the embedded Java systems that have already been developed and you'll see a vast range of solutions. Livescribe pen, Kindle, each and every Blu-Ray player, Cisco's Advanced VOIP phone, KronosInTouch smart time clock, EnergyICT smart metering, EDF's automated meter management, Ricoh Printers, and Stanford's automated car  are just a few of the list of embedded Java implementation that continues to grow. Conclusion Now if your a Java Developer you probably look at some of the 10 reasons and say "duh", but for the embedded developers this is should be an eye opening list. And with the release of ME Embedded 3.2 and the Java Embedded Suite the embedded developers life is now a whole lot easier. For the Java developer your employment opportunities are about to increase. For both it's a great time to start developing Java for the "Internet of Things".

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• 8 Reasons Why Even Microsoft Agrees the Windows Desktop is a Nightmare

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Let’s be honest: The Windows desktop is a mess. Sure, it’s extremely powerful and has a huge software library, but it’s not a good experience for average people. It’s not even a good experience for geeks, although we tolerate it. Even Microsoft agrees about this. Microsoft’s Surface tablets with Windows RT don’t support any third-party desktop apps. They consider this a feature — users can’t install malware and other desktop junk, so the system will always be speedy and secure. Malware is Still Common Malware may not affect geeks, but it certainly continues to affect average people. Securing Windows, keeping it secure, and avoiding unsafe programs is a complex process. There are over 50 different file extensions that can contain harmful code to keep track of. It’s easy to have theoretical discussions about how malware could infect Mac computers, Android devices, and other systems. But Mac malware is extremely rare, and has  generally been caused by problem with the terrible Java plug-in. Macs are configured to only run executables from identified developers by default, whereas Windows will run everything. Android malware is talked about a lot, but Android malware is rare in the real world and is generally confined to users who disable security protections and install pirated apps. Google has also taken action, rolling out built-in antivirus-like app checking to all Android devices, even old ones running Android 2.3, via Play Services. Whatever the reason, Windows malware is still common while malware for other systems isn’t. We all know it — anyone who does tech support for average users has dealt with infected Windows computers. Even users who can avoid malware are stuck dealing with complex and nagging antivirus programs, especially since it’s now so difficult to trust Microsoft’s antivirus products. Manufacturer-Installed Bloatware is Terrible Sit down with a new Mac, Chromebook, iPad, Android tablet, Linux laptop, or even a Surface running Windows RT and you can enjoy using your new device. The system is a clean slate for you to start exploring and installing your new software. Sit down with a new Windows PC and the system is a mess. Rather than be delighted, you’re stuck reinstalling Windows and then installing the necessary drivers or you’re forced to start uninstalling useless bloatware programs one-by-one, trying to figure out which ones are actually useful. After uninstalling the useless programs, you may end up with a system tray full of icons for ten different hardware utilities anyway. The first experience of using a new Windows PC is frustration, not delight. Yes, bloatware is still a problem on Windows 8 PCs. Manufacturers can customize the Refresh image, preventing bloatware rom easily being removed. Finding a Desktop Program is Dangerous Want to install a Windows desktop program? Well, you’ll have to head to your web browser and start searching. It’s up to you, the user, to know which programs are safe and which are dangerous. Even if you find a website for a reputable program, the advertisements on that page will often try to trick you into downloading fake installers full of adware. While it’s great to have the ability to leave the app store and get software that the platform’s owner hasn’t approved — as on Android — this is no excuse for not providing a good, secure software installation experience for typical users installing typical programs. Even Reputable Desktop Programs Try to Install Junk Even if you do find an entirely reputable program, you’ll have to keep your eyes open while installing it. It will likely try to install adware, add browse toolbars, change your default search engine, or change your web browser’s home page. Even Microsoft’s own programs do this — when you install Skype for Windows desktop, it will attempt to modify your browser settings t ouse Bing, even if you’re specially chosen another search engine and home page. With Microsoft setting such an example, it’s no surprise so many other software developers have followed suit. Geeks know how to avoid this stuff, but there’s a reason program installers continue to do this. It works and tricks many users, who end up with junk installed and settings changed. The Update Process is Confusing On iOS, Android, and Windows RT, software updates come from a single place — the app store. On Linux, software updates come from the package manager. On Mac OS X, typical users’ software updates likely come from the Mac App Store. On the Windows desktop, software updates come from… well, every program has to create its own update mechanism. Users have to keep track of all these updaters and make sure their software is up-to-date. Most programs now have their act together and automatically update by default, but users who have old versions of Flash and Adobe Reader installed are vulnerable until they realize their software isn’t automatically updating. Even if every program updates properly, the sheer mess of updaters is clunky, slow, and confusing in comparison to a centralized update process. Browser Plugins Open Security Holes It’s no surprise that other modern platforms like iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Windows RT, and Windows Phone don’t allow traditional browser plugins, or only allow Flash and build it into the system. Browser plugins provide a wealth of different ways for malicious web pages to exploit the browser and open the system to attack. Browser plugins are one of the most popular attack vectors because of how many users have out-of-date plugins and how many plugins, especially Java, seem to be designed without taking security seriously. Oracle’s Java plugin even tries to install the terrible Ask toolbar when installing security updates. That’s right — the security update process is also used to cram additional adware into users’ machines so unscrupulous companies like Oracle can make a quick buck. It’s no wonder that most Windows PCs have an out-of-date, vulnerable version of Java installed. Battery Life is Terrible Windows PCs have bad battery life compared to Macs, IOS devices, and Android tablets, all of which Windows now competes with. Even Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 2 has bad battery life. Apple’s 11-inch MacBook Air, which has very similar hardware to the Surface Pro 2, offers double its battery life when web browsing. Microsoft has been fond of blaming third-party hardware manufacturers for their poorly optimized drivers in the past, but there’s no longer any room to hide. The problem is clearly Windows. Why is this? No one really knows for sure. Perhaps Microsoft has kept on piling Windows component on top of Windows component and many older Windows components were never properly optimized. Windows Users Become Stuck on Old Windows Versions Apple’s new OS X 10.9 Mavericks upgrade is completely free to all Mac users and supports Macs going back to 2007. Apple has also announced their intention that all new releases of Mac OS X will be free. In 2007, Microsoft had just shipped Windows Vista. Macs from the Windows Vista era are being upgraded to the latest version of the Mac operating system for free, while Windows PCs from the same era are probably still using Windows Vista. There’s no easy upgrade path for these people. They’re stuck using Windows Vista and maybe even the outdated Internet Explorer 9 if they haven’t installed a third-party web browser. Microsoft’s upgrade path is for these people to pay $120 for a full copy of Windows 8.1 and go through a complicated process that’s actaully a clean install. Even users of Windows 8 devices will probably have to pay money to upgrade to Windows 9, while updates for other operating systems are completely free. If you’re a PC geek, a PC gamer, or someone who just requires specialized software that only runs on Windows, you probably use the Windows desktop and don’t want to switch. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the Windows desktop is actually a good experience. Much of the burden falls on average users, who have to struggle with malware, bloatware, adware bundled in installers, complex software installation processes, and out-of-date software. In return, all they get is the ability to use a web browser and some basic Office apps that they could use on almost any other platform without all the hassle. Microsoft would agree with this, touting Windows RT and their new “Windows 8-style” app platform as the solution. Why else would Microsoft, a “devices and services” company, position the Surface — a device without traditional Windows desktop programs — as their mass-market device recommended for average people? This isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Windows RT. If you’re tech support for your family members and it comes time for them to upgrade, you may want to get them off the Windows desktop and tell them to get a Mac or something else that’s simple. Better yet, if they get a Mac, you can tell them to visit the Apple Store for help instead of calling you. That’s another thing Windows PCs don’t offer — good manufacturer support. Image Credit: Blanca Stella Mejia on Flickr, Collin Andserson on Flickr, Luca Conti on Flickr     

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 05, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 05, 2010Popular ReleasesSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.0: First public releaseMiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Winware: Winware 3.0 (.Net 4.0): Winware 3.0 is base on .Net 4.0 with C#. Please open it with Visual Studio 2010. This release contains a lab web application.UltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.02 PL3 KAKAROTO + CE-X-3.41 EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version CEX341 pour pouvoir jouer avec des jeux demandant le firmware 3.50 ( certain ne fonctionne tous simplement pas ). - Pour l'instant le CEX341 n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB CEX341 => Spoof le Firmware 3.41 en 3.50 ( facilite l'utilisation de certain jeux avec openManage...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.5 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.5 beta with the following new feature: New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. Also this release includes few bug fixes: AxisXLabel label were getting clipped if angle was set for AxisLabels and ScrollingEnabled was not set in Chart. If LabelStyle property was set as 'Inside', size of the Pie was not proper. Yo...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60438): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket. The source code include a LiveChat demo.New ProjectsBambook???: ????Bambook???????。Beespot: Beespot is an easy to use, secure, robust and powerful Honeypot for the SSH Service written in Python. caitanzhangDemo: this is my demoColorPicker [SA:MP]: ColorPicker [SA:MP] is a simple tool that generates: - PAWN Hex Color Codes (useful for SAMP Scripts); - ARGB Color Codes; - HTML Color Codes; It's developed in C#.Conversions-n-Stuff: Conversions-n-Stuff (CNS) is a program focused on making it easier for anyone to convert from one measurement to another. There is no need to know the calculations and formulas! Just fill in the forms and click, and you have your answer! CNS leverages C#, WPF, and Silverlight.dotP2P: dotP2P would consist of servers running caches to keep track of domain and nameserver records. Cache servers can be created with any server that supports XML-RPC or SOAP. MySQL is used to store the the cache data. EmailMasterTemplate: This user master and child user control based email template engine.Ezekiel: Ezekiel is a Windows application that leverages a user's existing BusinessObjects reports to provide a custom read-only front end for a database. It's developed using Visual C# 2010 Express.F# Colorizer Editor: Standalone Colorizer Editor for Brian's Fsharp Deep Colorizer VS ExtensionGameCore: Core engine for game services for mobile and RIA clientsGestão de contas bancárias: Trabalho final de Matematica Aplicada da UATLAGPP: GPPkmean: Kmeans ClusteringPHP ORM: ??????orm???，??PHP????，??????????????！Steampunk Odyssey: Steampunk Odyssey is a side-scrolling action game based on the XNA platformSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools is a small utility that helps modifying existing subtitles or downloading new ones based on the digital signatures of your movie files from opensubtitles.org site.Windows Phone 7 Accelerometer: Accelerometer for Windows Phone 7???: ????????????????????????

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, September 04, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, September 04, 2012Popular ReleasesPE file reader: READPE-e9ff717a638d.zip: Introduced some new code which parses the IMAGENTHEADERS. At the moment the command line options dosheader and imagentheaders are working and and example of their usage can be... D:\>readpe pe-files\main.exe dosheader imagentheadersMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.64: Another attempt to fix the fiasco that was my bad decision to rename the DLLs to get away from a strong-name collision that was causing lots of problems for me. Too many existing projects expected AjaxMin.dll, and lots of things broke downstream from me. This release keeps the .net 2.0 version named AjaxMin.dll. The new .net 3.5 and .net 4.0 versions are named AjaxMinLibrary.dll. If an existing project is expecting the old name, they should continue to pick up the .net 2.0 version (since the ...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83NWebsec: NWebsec 1.0.3: This release fixes two bugs in the NWebsec.Mvc package. Go get it on NuGet! http://nuget.org/packages/NWebsec.Mvc/ These work items made it into the release: 9 10 Check out the Documentation to learn how it works. This release has been tagged v1.0.3 in source control. Enjoy!RBAC Manager R2 for Exchange 2010 SP2, Exchange 2013 Preview and Office 365: RBAC Manager R2 1.5.5.0: now supports to manage RBAC on Office 365 'remember password' feature now saves the password as encrypted as opposed to plain-text format in version 1.5.0.0 DPAPI is used to encrypt the saved password; for more information about DPAPI please check: Managed DPAPI Part I: ProtectedData http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnfa/archive/2004/05/05/126825.aspx The tool requires HTTP/HTTPS network connection to the Exchange server Known Bugs: Active Directory lookup is not working remotely and crashes the ...WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.Dynamics AX Build Scripts: AX TFS Build Library Beta - v0.2.0.0: Beta release of TFS 2010 workflow code activities for AX 2009 and AX 2012. Build template for AX 2012 included. There is one refactor of code that will break your existing workflows. The AOS workflow step to stop/start AOS now expects the actual windows service name, not the port number of the AOS. There now is a new step to retrieve server settings, which can get the service identifier based on the port number. The registry has to be read to retrieve these settings, and we didn't want to ke...Cosmo OS: Cosmo OS Lama Preview: Info Sulla Release Lama Preview ( Prima Preview Pubblica ) Data Di Rilascio: 2 / 09 / 12 Build: 1950 Ramo Di Sviluppo: cosmo_os.preview.lama.bid1535543 Tipo Release: Stable / PreviewNETDeob0: NETDeob 0.3.1 BETA binaries: 0.3.1Custom Captcha Plugin for Kooboo CMS for adding content or sending feedback: Custom Captcha Validator Plugin v1.1 for Kooboo: Download file CustomCaptchaValidatorPlugin.dll and install it to KooBoo CMS. Release 1.1: Fixed error: "A generic error occurred in GDI+" (if hosting is less than Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7) - http://forum.kooboo.com/yafpostsm6602Custom-captcha---any-best-practice.aspx#post6602TSQL Code Smells Finder: POC 1.01: Proof of concept 1.01 TSQLDomTest.ps1 and Errors.Txt are requiredSaturn Kinect: Saturn Kinect + Sample Applications - Release 3: This release includes : - Saturn Kinect Library - Kinect Motion Capture Application - Controlling mouse cursor sample - Hand swip detection sample + Source CodesDiscuzViet: DiscuzX2.5_02092012_Vietnam: DiscuzX2.502092012VietnamBookmark Collector: 01.00.00: This is the first release with a minimal feature set. You can save, edit, delete, and display a list of URLs from various sites.EntLib.com????????: EntLib.com???????? v3.0: EntLib eCommerce Solution ???Microsoft .Net Framework?????????????????????。Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.1: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Since v2.2.0: Student-T density more robust for very large degrees of freedom Sparse Kronecker product much more efficient (now leverages sparsity) Direct access to raw matrix storage implementations for advanced extensibility Now also separate package for signed core library with a strong name (we dropped strong names in v2.2.0) Also available as NuGet packages...New ProjectsAction Bar: Action Bar is a SNS network based on activities.async/await C# Samples: Project demonstrating new C# feature - async and await. You can find here several solutions to make UI calls asynchronous: APM, EAP and async.Attribute Based Xaml Generator: Dynamic Xaml UI Generator and Editor Just point it to a dll or an exe and then navigate through your namespaces to your classB INI Sharp Library: Full support for INI files.brevis nopCommerce Extensions: Extensions for nopCommerce open soruce e-commerce solution (several Versions). !Contents nop 1.90 fpr testing the new Lib! This will be removed after 1. releaseConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu (short for Console Emulator) is a console window and tabbed environment for Windows. Tabs, Fonts, Quake style, Transparency and hundreds of other optionsContrib.Mod.AccountWidgets: Orchard module for adding login and registration widgetsCSharp GUI for Mono: This is an application which makes use of "Mono" to execute CSharp programs. It provides a graphical user interface to run the CSharp program. DocCollection: ???????????????http://www.qlili.comfanpages: Fanatics!ISIS Associations Manager: Application Web permettant la gestion d'Associations. (Membres, Emailing, Calendier)LogMan: ????????????b/s??，??python?? require: web.pyLucifure Stash - Azure Table Storage Client: Lucifure Stash is an alternate Azure table storage client, which supports arrays, enumerations, large data > 64KB, serialization, morphing and more.Mod.EverlastingLogin: Orchard module to allow a user to stay logged in for a certain amount of time using cookiesPHP Extra Functions: PHP Extra Functions is a suite of functions that extend common libraries with easy to use functions. For example, functions are added to MySQLi to simplify use.Raise events controlled: This is an example of raising you events controlled (with exception handling)sb0t v.5: sb0t 5 development page.SharePoint Mobile OA Platform: Via mobile device, by using the SharePoint Mobile Support, Web Service, Client OM, WCF Data Service bring about mobile office.Simple Guestbook: I just want to share simple code, may be will be helpful for newbies.SimplyWeather2.gadget: A neat little weather gadget for your Windows Desktop.Tanks: Required summary is hereUtility Project: Utilities ProjectWindows Phone: The goal of this project is to improve my skills in Windows Phonewords: ?????????Wpf Testing Lib: This is a project for auto testing wpf appswtstudy: wtstudy

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• Going Paperless

  - by Jesse

  One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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• Evil DRY

  - by StefanSteinegger

  DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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