geeks on hugs - Page 23

XNA Notes 004

- by George Clingerman

The XNA community has been crazy busy again. It always make me fee like such a slacker collecting all of these notes as I see the tremendous output from people all over the world and it’s incredible and humbling. There are some amazingly skilled people working with XNA. On another not, I’m going to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say, if you are developing ANYTHING and are not using some sort of source/revision control, START IMMEDIATELY. This applies to teams of one. Projects for fun. And “I back up my hard drive” or “I use dropbox!” does NOT count as using source control. You’ll be doing yourself a HUGE favor if you find one, learn to use it and integrate it into your everyday workflow. I personally use Subversion. It’s hosted offsite at xp.dev.com and I use TortoiseSVN as my front end to interface with the repository. It’s simple and easy to use and has saved me from myself so many time. Honestly, get setup with some type of source control immediately. If you don’t understand how, grab another developer that does and have them walk you through setup and the basics of using it. Ok, I’m done. On to the notes… The XNA Team Only 14 days left to Submit XNA GS 3.1 Games! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/24/14-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx Shawn Hargreaves shares some great information on Exception Handling best practices on the XNA forums http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73333/448556.aspx#448556 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx XNA MVPs @CatalinZima gives us a peek at Chicken’s Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/games/chickens-cant-fly/ Screen-space deformations in XNA for WP7 from Catalin Zima http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/30313083767357440 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ XNA Developers Going to GDC? Don’t miss the XNA panel hosted by a plethora of well known XNA community names! http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73576/448842.aspx#448842 MasterBlud does an interview with @Xalterax http://twitter.com/MasterBlud/statuses/28510774812999680 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7102 Luke Schneider of Radiangames posts about The Radiangames Style http://radiangames.com/?p=532 Holmade Games had a “vote for the new playable character” poll going on for Hurdle Turtle this past week http://holmadegames.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-level-pack-vote-for-your-favorite.html IGF v0.1.0.0 release post mortem http://indiefreaks.com/2011/01/24/v0-1-0-0-release-post-mortem/ James an Super Dunner post Good Morning Gato #46 and a look at the Vampire Smile box art http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/21/good-morning-gato-46/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/20/vampire-smiles-digital-box-art/ Alfredo Di Napoli creates Cow Pong using XNA and F#! http://alfredodinapoli.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/cow-pong-a-simple-xna-game-in-f/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games Signed In Podcast posts Episode #61 http://www.signedinpodcast.com/?p=559 Gamergeddon posts the January 23rd edition of XBLIG Round Up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/01/23/xbox-indie-games-round-up-january-23rd/ Indie Asylum posts Antipole Review http://www.indieasylum.com/reviews/38-xblig/112-antipole.html 1UPOrPosion Reviews OSR Unhinged http://www.1uporpoison.com/xblig/osr-unhinged/ DarkstarMatryx review Warbirds at Work http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=185 Review of Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/24/xbox-indie-review-aban-hawkins-the-1000-spikes/ XboxHornet reviews Corrupted http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7123 XBLIG 2010: The Best And The Worst http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieMann/20110121/6840/ Xbox LIVE Arcade Sales Analysis - an interesting read for XBLIG developers wondering how they’re doing compared to arcade.. http://www.gamerbytes.com/2011/01/xbla_sales_analysis_dec_2010.php Best of Indies for January 25th http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/games/best-of-the-indies-25th-january-2011 Decimation X3 appears as an arcade machine in the wild! http://twitter.com/mdoucette/statuses/29605562484260864 XNA Game Development Guiseppe De Francesco (@PinoEire) announced Torque X 4.0 CEV is now in RC phase! http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20779 DrMistry of mstargames shares his struggle (and mistakes) with learning to use the Content Pipeline http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/181-pontent-cipeline-more-like-it.html New Tutorial posted XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection with Rotation from Ioannis Panagopoulos http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-2D-Basic-Collision-Detection-with-Rotation.aspx Sgt. Conker roars to life! Doing a much better (and prettier) job of collecting XNA news from around the interwebs. http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/dedication-for-captain-boki/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-2/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/indiefreaks-game-framework-0-1-0-0-released/ Offering a little free publicity for XBLIGs http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73465/448321.aspx#448321 Ben Kane writes about building loot tables from Excel using the Content Pipeline http://benkane.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/building-loot-tables-from-excel-using-the-content-pipeline/ Good tips on attracting a game artist AND an offer to create your cover art for FREE http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/72998.aspx If you’re an XBLIG developer keeping your eye on places to release on the PC, might want to be watching the IndieCity blog. Seems like these guys are well on their way to constructing something worth watching. http://www.indiecity.com/blog/ DVMGames spotted a new crowd-funding site for Indies http://twitter.com/DVMGames/statuses/29947274767372289 http://www.8bitfunding.com/ Transmute continues to make progress and there’s a nice dev blog to follow along here http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/

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TechEd 2012: Dude Where’s My Azure

- by Tim Murphy

It has been a fun first morning at TechEd North America. They keynote was both informative and entertaining. Some of the high points included a walk through of Windows Server 2012 and its new Hyper-V capabilities and use of ODX (offloaded data transfer). Between seeing stats like being able to being able run a Hyper-V VM with 1TB of memory and watching ODX move a 10GB file at a rate of 1GB per second was really impressive. The fun started when Scott Guthrie was doing his keynote demo and popped up an iPhone emulator from Visual Studio. There is just something wrong with that picture and the WPDev community agreed. This was followed by an iPad emulator and by that time the groans across Twitter were rolling. Later in the morning The Gu kept us laughing in the Azure Foundations session when he name a server Dude (I believe a suggestion from the crowd). After that I thought I was watching the turtle in Finding Nemo. Duuuuude! In the expo area the line for the Windows Phone booth was ridiculous. Granted this is a Microsoft event and is sure to be full of MS fan boys, but the only other time I have seen that much enthusiasm for Windows Phones in one place was on the flight down. I am sure there will be a lot more to get excited about over the next few days. Stay tuned. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd 2012,TechEd North America,Windows Phone,Azure,Scott Guthrie

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NServiceBus Generic Host and mqsvc.exe high CPU

- by Michael Stephenson

We have been doing some work with NServiceBus recently and observed some unusual behaviour which was caused by our mistake and seemed worthy of a small post. The Scenario In our solution we were doing some standard NServiceBus stuff by pushing a message to a queue using NServiceBus. We had a direct send/receive scenario rather than a publish/subscribe one. The background process which was meant to collect the message and then process it was a normal NServiceBus message handler. We would run the NServiceBus.Host.exe which would find the handler and then do the usual NServiceBus magic. The Problem In this solution we were creating some automated tests around this module of the integration process to ensure that it would work well. We had two tests. Test 1 This test would start NServiceBus.Host.exe using the Process object, then seed a message to the queue via our web service façade sitting above the queue which wrapped NServiceBus. The background process would then process the message and the test would check the message had been processed fine. If all was well then the NServiceBus.Host.exe process was stopped. Test 2 In test 2 we would do a very similar thing except that instead of starting the process the test would install NServiceBus.Host.exe as a windows service and then start the service before the test and once the test was executed it would stop the test. The Results of the Tests Test 1 worked really well, however in test 2 we found that it didn’t really work at all, instead of doing the background process we were finding that between mqsvc.exe and NServiceBus.Host.exe the CPU on the machine was maxed and nothing was really happening. The Solution After trying a few things we found it was the permissions on the queue were not set correctly. Once this was resolved it all worked fine and CPU was not excessive and ran just like the console application. I think the couple of take aways from this are: Make sure you set the windows service for NserviceBus Generic Host to the right credentials When you install the generic host as a windows service then by default it will use the default windows credentials. For any production like scenario you should be using a domain account to run the process as via the windows service. Make sure you have the queue set with the right permissions For the credentials you have used to configure the generic host as a windows service you should ensure that this user has the appropriate permissions for any queues it will interact with. Make sure you turn on the right logging configuration in NServiceBus When this wasnt working correctly we didnt know there was an issue, we were just experiencing the high CPU condition. I am a little surprised that there wasnt something logged and that the process didnt crash. I guess this could be by design bearing in mind that the process could be monitoring many queues. In this point Im just saying that originally we didnt have all of the log4net logging which is available from NServiceBus turned on. Its probably a good idea to have this turned on and configured until you are happy your solution is working fine. Thanks to Ahmed Hashmi on my team who got this working in the end.

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Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

- by Lewis Benge

One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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Silverlight Cream for January 03, 2011 -- #1021

- by Dave Campbell

In this all-Submittal Issue: Gill Cleeren(-2-), Brian Noyes, Brian Genisio, René Schulte, and Andy Schwam(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "The INavigationContentLoader interface in Silverlight 4" Gill Cleeren WP7: "Sending Windows Phone Screenshots in an Email" René Schulte WCF RIA Services: "WCF RIA Services Part 10 - Exposing Domain Services To Other Clients" Brian Noyes Shoutouts: Want to know what it takes to be an MVP? Check out René Schulte's recap of 2010: Goodbye 2010 - Hello 2011 ... awesome, René! Rui Marinho sent me this post... it's WPF, but wow... WPF and Kinect! Kinect & WPF From SilverlightCream.com: The INavigationContentLoader interface in Silverlight 4 Gill Cleeren has a couple posts up... this first is a break-out of the INavigationContentLoader... what all can be done with it, in addition to the flow of the page load process broken out. Working with the RaiseCanExecuteChanged in MVVM Light (Silverlight) Gill Cleeren' latest post is a discussion of the Silverlight ICommand interface and Laurent Bugnion's RaiseCanExecuteChanged in MVVM Light, with example code. WCF RIA Services Part 10 - Exposing Domain Services To Other Clients Brian Noyes has Part 10 in his WCF RIA Services Tutorial series up at SilverlightShow ... with info on, for example, exposint an OData, SOAP, or REST/JSON endpoint, or how to consume them. Cross-Training in Silverlight & Flex–MVVM vs Presentation Model Brian Genisio finished the year off with this post in his on-going Silverlight/Flex seris comparing MVVM vs Presentation Model .. lots of good MVVM/ViewModel tips and code in this post. Sending Windows Phone Screenshots in an Email René Schulte is the perfect guy to be doing this... how about emailing a screenshot directly from inside an app, for instance Laurent's taking a screenshot from inside an app... too cool, Rene! Windows Phone 7 Application Development Tips Andy Schwam has a post up with tips he learned while creating his first WP7 app... lots of good tips, Gestures, Camera, ISO... check it out, could save you some time and tears :) WP7 Tip: Using the CameraCaptureTask for Windows Phone 7 Andy Schwam's most recent post is WP7 dev as well, and has a bunch of tips and code for using the camera, such as capturing an image, resizing, saving... good stuff. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Nginx and PHP Fundamentals

- by Elton Stoneman

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/08/01/nginx-and-php-fundamentals.aspxHot on the heels of my .NET caching course, I’ve had my first “fundamentals” course released on Pluralsight: Nginx and PHP Fundamentals. It’s a practical look at two of the biggest technologies on the web – Nginx, which is the fastest growing HTTP server around (currently hosting 100+ million sites), and PHP, which powers more websites than any other server-side framework (currently 240+ million sites). The two technologies work well together, both are open-source and cross-platform and both are lightweight and easy to get started with - you just need to download and unzip the runtimes, and with a text editor you can create and host dynamic websites. I’ve used PHP as a second (sometimes third) language since 2005 when I was brought cold into an established codebase to help improve performance, and Nginx to host tier 2 apps for the last couple of years. As with any training course, you learn new things as you produce it, and it was good to focus on a different stack from my commercial .NET world. In the course I start with a website in two parts – one which is just static content, and one which processes a user registration form using ASP.NET MVC, both running in IIS. Over four modules I migrate the app to Nginx and PHP: Hosting Static Content in Nginx – how to deploy and configure Nginx for a basic website; PHP Part 1: Basic Web Forms – installing PHP and an IDE, and building a simple form with server-side validation; PHP Part 2: Packages and Integration – using PECL and Composer for packages to connect to Azure, AWS, Mongo and reCAPTCHA; Hosting PHP in Nginx – configuring Nginx to host our PHP site. Along the way I run some performance stats with JMeter, and the headlines are that Nginx running on Linux outperforms IIS on Windows for static content,by 800 requests per second over 1000 concurrent requests; and Linux+Ngnix+PHP outperforms Windows+IIS+ASP.NET MVC by 700 request per second with the same load. Of course, the headline stats don’t tell the whole story, and when you add OpCode caching for PHP and the ASP.NET Output Cache, the results are very different. As Web architecture moves away from heavy server-side processing, to Single Page Apps with client-side frameworks like AngularJS and Knockout, I think there’s an increasing need for high-performance, low-cost server technologies, and the combination of Nginx and PHP makes a compelling case.

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LinqToXML removing empty xmlns attributes & adding attributes like xmlns:xsi, xsi:schemaLocation

- by Rohit Gupta

Suppose you need to generate the following XML: 1: <GenevaLoader xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 2: xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd" 3: xmlns="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"> 4: <PriceRecords> 5: <PriceRecord> 6: </PriceRecord> 7: </PriceRecords> 8: </GenevaLoader> Normally you would write the following C# code to accomplish this: 1: const string ns = "http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"; 2: XNamespace xnsp = ns; 3: XNamespace xsi = XNamespace.Get("http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"); 4: 5: XElement root = new XElement( xnsp + "GenevaLoader", 6: new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "xsi", xsi.NamespaceName), 7: new XAttribute( xsi + "schemaLocation", "http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd")); 8: 9: XElement priceRecords = new XElement("PriceRecords"); 10: root.Add(priceRecords); 11: 12: for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) 13: { 14: XElement price = new XElement("PriceRecord"); 15: priceRecords.Add(price); 16: } 17: 18: doc.Save("geneva.xml"); The problem with this approach is that it adds a additional empty xmlns arrtribute on the “PriceRecords” element, like so : 1: <GenevaLoader xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd" xmlns="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"> 2: <PriceRecords xmlns=""> 3: <PriceRecord> 4: </PriceRecord> 5: </PriceRecords> 6: </GenevaLoader> The solution is to add the xmlns NameSpace in code to each child and grandchild elements of the root element like so : 1: XElement priceRecords = new XElement( xnsp + "PriceRecords"); 2: root.Add(priceRecords); 3: 4: for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) 5: { 6: XElement price = new XElement(xnsp + "PriceRecord"); 7: priceRecords.Add(price); 8: }

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Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

- by Michael Stephenson

In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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ASP.NET MVC localization DisplayNameAttribute alternatives: a good way

- by Brian Schroer

The ASP.NET MVC HTML helper methods like .LabelFor and .EditorFor use model metadata to autogenerate labels for model properties. By default it uses the property name for the label text, but if that’s not appropriate, you can use a DisplayName attribute to specify the desired label text: [DisplayName("Remember me?")] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } I’m working on a multi-language web site, so the labels need to be localized. I tried pointing the DisplayName attribute to a resource string: [DisplayName(MyResource.RememberMe)] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } …but that results in the compiler error "An attribute argument must be a constant expression, typeof expression or array creation expression of an attribute parameter type”. I got around this by creating a custom LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute class that inherits from DisplayNameAttribute: 1: public class LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute : DisplayNameAttribute 2: { 3: public LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute(string resourceKey) 4: { 5: ResourceKey = resourceKey; 6: } 7: 8: public override string DisplayName 9: { 10: get 11: { 12: string displayName = MyResource.ResourceManager.GetString(ResourceKey); 13: 14: return string.IsNullOrEmpty(displayName) 15: ? string.Format("[[{0}]]", ResourceKey) 16: : displayName; 17: } 18: } 19: 20: private string ResourceKey { get; set; } 21: } Instead of a display string, it takes a constructor argument of a resource key. The DisplayName method is overridden to get the display string from the resource file (line 12). If the key is not found, I return a formatted string containing the key (e.g. “[[RememberMe]]”) so I can tell by looking at my web pages which resource keys I haven’t defined yet (line 15). The usage of my custom attribute in the model looks like this: [LocalizedDisplayName("RememberMe")] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } That was my first attempt at localized display names, and it’s a technique that I still use in some cases, but in my next post I’ll talk about the method that I now prefer, a custom DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider class…

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Claims-based Identity Terminology

- by kaleidoscope

There are several terms commonly used to describe claims-based identity, and it is important to clearly define these terms. · Identity In terms of Access Control, the term identity will be used to refer to a set of claims made by a trusted issuer about the user. · Claim You can think of a claim as a bit of identity information, such as name, email address, age, and so on. The more claims your service receives, the more you’ll know about the user who is making the request. · Security Token The user delivers a set of claims to your service piggybacked along with his or her request. In a REST Web service, these claims are carried in the Authorization header of the HTTP(S) request. Regardless of how they arrive, claims must somehow be serialized, and this is managed by security tokens. A security token is a serialized set of claims that is signed by the issuing authority. · Issuing Authority & Identity Provider An issuing authority has two main features. The first and most obvious is that it issues security tokens. The second feature is the logic that determines which claims to issue. This is based on the user’s identity, the resource to which the request applies, and possibly other contextual data such as time of day. This type of logic is often referred to as policy[1]. There are many issuing authorities, including Windows Live ID, ADFS, PingFederate from Ping Identity (a product that exposes user identities from the Java world), Facebook Connect, and more. Their job is to validate some credential from the user and issue a token with an identifier for the user's account and possibly other identity attributes. These types of authorities are called identity providers (sometimes shortened as IdP). It’s ultimately their responsibility to answer the question, “who are you?” and ensure that the user knows his or her password, is in possession of a smart card, knows the PIN code, has a matching retinal scan, and so on. · Security Token Service (STS) A security token service (STS) is a technical term for the Web interface in an issuing authority that allows clients to request and receive a security token according to interoperable protocols that are discussed in the following section. This term comes from the WS-Trust standard, and is often used in the literature to refer to an issuing authority. STS when used from developer point of view indicates the URL to use to request a token from an issuer. For more details please refer to the link http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/developers/dotnetservices/ Geeta, G

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Joy of Anonymous Types

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the .NET 3 Framework, Microsoft introduced the concept of anonymous types, which provide a way to create a quick, compiler-generated types at the point of instantiation. These may seem trivial, but are very handy for concisely creating lightweight, strongly-typed objects containing only read-only properties that can be used within a given scope. Creating an Anonymous Type In short, an anonymous type is a reference type that derives directly from object and is defined by its set of properties base on their names, number, types, and order given at initialization. In addition to just holding these properties, it is also given appropriate overridden implementations for Equals() and GetHashCode() that take into account all of the properties to correctly perform property comparisons and hashing. Also overridden is an implementation of ToString() which makes it easy to display the contents of an anonymous type instance in a fairly concise manner. To construct an anonymous type instance, you use basically the same initialization syntax as with a regular type. So, for example, if we wanted to create an anonymous type to represent a particular point, we could do this: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; Note the similarity between anonymous type initialization and regular initialization. The main difference is that the compiler generates the type name and the properties (as readonly) based on the names and order provided, and inferring their types from the expressions they are assigned to. It is key to remember that all of those factors (number, names, types, order of properties) determine the anonymous type. This is important, because while these two instances share the same anonymous type: 1: // same names, types, and order 2: var point1 = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; 3: var point2 = new { X = 5, Y = 0 }; These similar ones do not: 1: var point3 = new { Y = 3, X = 5 }; // different order 2: var point4 = new { X = 3, Y = 5.0 }; // different type for Y 3: var point5 = new {MyX = 3, MyY = 5 }; // different names 4: var point6 = new { X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3 }; // different count Limitations on Property Initialization Expressions The expression for a property in an anonymous type initialization cannot be null (though it can evaluate to null) or an anonymous function. For example, the following are illegal: 1: // Null can't be used directly. Null reference of what type? 2: var cantUseNull = new { Value = null }; 3: 4: // Anonymous methods cannot be used. 5: var cantUseAnonymousFxn = new { Value = () => Console.WriteLine(“Can’t.”) }; Note that the restriction on null is just that you can’t use it directly as the expression, because otherwise how would it be able to determine the type? You can, however, use it indirectly assigning a null expression such as a typed variable with the value null, or by casting null to a specific type: 1: string str = null; 2: var fineIndirectly = new { Value = str }; 3: var fineCast = new { Value = (string)null }; All of the examples above name the properties explicitly, but you can also implicitly name properties if they are being set from a property, field, or variable. In these cases, when a field, property, or variable is used alone, and you don’t specify a property name assigned to it, the new property will have the same name. For example: 1: int variable = 42; 2: 3: // creates two properties named varriable and Now 4: var implicitProperties = new { variable, DateTime.Now }; Is the same type as: 1: var explicitProperties = new { variable = variable, Now = DateTime.Now }; But this only works if you are using an existing field, variable, or property directly as the expression. If you use a more complex expression then the name cannot be inferred: 1: // can't infer the name variable from variable * 2, must name explicitly 2: var wontWork = new { variable * 2, DateTime.Now }; In the example above, since we typed variable * 2, it is no longer just a variable and thus we would have to assign the property a name explicitly. ToString() on Anonymous Types One of the more trivial overrides that an anonymous type provides you is a ToString() method that prints the value of the anonymous type instance in much the same format as it was initialized (except actual values instead of expressions as appropriate of course). For example, if you had: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; And then print it out: 1: Console.WriteLine(point.ToString()); You will get: 1: { X = 13, Y = 42 } While this isn’t necessarily the most stunning feature of anonymous types, it can be handy for debugging or logging values in a fairly easy to read format. Comparing Anonymous Type Instances Because anonymous types automatically create appropriate overrides of Equals() and GetHashCode() based on the underlying properties, we can reliably compare two instances or get hash codes. For example, if we had the following 3 points: 1: var point1 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 2: var point2 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 3: var point3 = new { Y = 2, X = 1 }; If we compare point1 and point2 we’ll see that Equals() returns true because they overridden version of Equals() sees that the types are the same (same number, names, types, and order of properties) and that the values are the same. In addition, because all equal objects should have the same hash code, we’ll see that the hash codes evaluate to the same as well: 1: // true, same type, same values 2: Console.WriteLine(point1.Equals(point2)); 3: 4: // true, equal anonymous type instances always have same hash code 5: Console.WriteLine(point1.GetHashCode() == point2.GetHashCode()); However, if we compare point2 and point3 we get false. Even though the names, types, and values of the properties are the same, the order is not, thus they are two different types and cannot be compared (and thus return false). And, since they are not equal objects (even though they have the same value) there is a good chance their hash codes are different as well (though not guaranteed): 1: // false, different types 2: Console.WriteLine(point2.Equals(point3)); 3: 4: // quite possibly false (was false on my machine) 5: Console.WriteLine(point2.GetHashCode() == point3.GetHashCode()); Using Anonymous Types Now that we’ve created instances of anonymous types, let’s actually use them. The property names (whether implicit or explicit) are used to access the individual properties of the anonymous type. The main thing, once again, to keep in mind is that the properties are readonly, so you cannot assign the properties a new value (note: this does not mean that instances referred to by a property are immutable – for more information check out C#/.NET Fundamentals: Returning Data Immutably in a Mutable World). Thus, if we have the following anonymous type instance: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; We can get the properties as you’d expect: 1: Console.WriteLine(“The point is: ({0},{1})”, point.X, point.Y); But we cannot alter the property values: 1: // compiler error, properties are readonly 2: point.X = 99; Further, since the anonymous type name is only known by the compiler, there is no easy way to pass anonymous type instances outside of a given scope. The only real choices are to pass them as object or dynamic. But really that is not the intention of using anonymous types. If you find yourself needing to pass an anonymous type outside of a given scope, you should really consider making a POCO (Plain Old CLR Type – i.e. a class that contains just properties to hold data with little/no business logic) instead. Given that, why use them at all? Couldn’t you always just create a POCO to represent every anonymous type you needed? Sure you could, but then you might litter your solution with many small POCO classes that have very localized uses. It turns out this is the key to when to use anonymous types to your advantage: when you just need a lightweight type in a local context to store intermediate results, consider an anonymous type – but when that result is more long-lived and used outside of the current scope, consider a POCO instead. So what do we mean by intermediate results in a local context? Well, a classic example would be filtering down results from a LINQ expression. For example, let’s say we had a List<Transaction>, where Transaction is defined something like: 1: public class Transaction 2: { 3: public string UserId { get; set; } 4: public DateTime At { get; set; } 5: public decimal Amount { get; set; } 6: // … 7: } And let’s say we had this data in our List<Transaction>: 1: var transactions = new List<Transaction> 2: { 3: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 2200.00m }, 4: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -1100.00m }, 5: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1), Amount = 900.00m }, 6: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2), Amount = 300.00m }, 7: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -10.00m }, 8: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 200.00m }, 9: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -50.00m }, 10: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = -100.00m }, 11: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = 300.00m }, 12: }; So let’s say we wanted to get the transactions for each day for each user. That is, for each day we’d want to see the transactions each user performed. We could do this very simply with a nice LINQ expression, without the need of creating any POCOs: 1: // group the transactions based on an anonymous type with properties UserId and Date: 2: byUserAndDay = transactions 3: .GroupBy(tx => new { tx.UserId, tx.At.Date }) 4: .OrderBy(grp => grp.Key.Date) 5: .ThenBy(grp => grp.Key.UserId); Now, those of you who have attempted to use custom classes as a grouping type before (such as GroupBy(), Distinct(), etc.) may have discovered the hard way that LINQ gets a lot of its speed by utilizing not on Equals(), but also GetHashCode() on the type you are grouping by. Thus, when you use custom types for these purposes, you generally end up having to write custom Equals() and GetHashCode() implementations or you won’t get the results you were expecting (the default implementations of Equals() and GetHashCode() are reference equality and reference identity based respectively). As we said before, it turns out that anonymous types already do these critical overrides for you. This makes them even more convenient to use! Instead of creating a small POCO to handle this grouping, and then having to implement a custom Equals() and GetHashCode() every time, we can just take advantage of the fact that anonymous types automatically override these methods with appropriate implementations that take into account the values of all of the properties. Now, we can look at our results: 1: foreach (var group in byUserAndDay) 2: { 3: // the group’s Key is an instance of our anonymous type 4: Console.WriteLine("{0} on {1:MM/dd/yyyy} did:", group.Key.UserId, group.Key.Date); 5: 6: // each grouping contains a sequence of the items. 7: foreach (var tx in group) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", tx.Amount); 10: } 11: } And see: 1: Jaime on 06/18/2012 did: 2: -100.00 3: 300.00 4: 5: John on 06/19/2012 did: 6: 300.00 7: 8: Jim on 06/20/2012 did: 9: 900.00 10: 11: Jane on 06/21/2012 did: 12: 200.00 13: -50.00 14: 15: Jim on 06/21/2012 did: 16: 2200.00 17: -1100.00 18: 19: John on 06/21/2012 did: 20: -10.00 Again, sure we could have just built a POCO to do this, given it an appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() method, but that would have bloated our code with so many extra lines and been more difficult to maintain if the properties change. Summary Anonymous types are one of those Little Wonders of the .NET language that are perfect at exactly that time when you need a temporary type to hold a set of properties together for an intermediate result. While they are not very useful beyond the scope in which they are defined, they are excellent in LINQ expressions as a way to create and us intermediary values for further expressions and analysis. Anonymous types are defined by the compiler based on the number, type, names, and order of properties created, and they automatically implement appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() overrides (as well as ToString()) which makes them ideal for LINQ expressions where you need to create a set of properties to group, evaluate, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Anonymous Types,LINQ

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Silverlight Cream for March 20, 2010 -- #815

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Andy Beaulieu(-2-, -3-), Alex Golesh, Damian Schenkelman, Adam Kinney(-2-), Jeremy Likness, Laurent Bugnion, and John Papa. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney has a good summary up of where to go for all the tools and toys: Install checklist for Silverlight 4 RC, Blend 4 Beta and Windows Phone Developer tools from MIX10 ... tons of links Laurent Bugnion had a few announcements at MIX10: MVVM Light V3 released at #MIX10, and he followed that with What’s new in MVVM Light V3 ... now for Windows Phone! Laurent Bugnion also has announced Sample code for my #mix10 talk online From SilverlightCream.com: Physics Games in Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 Andy Beaulieu has the Physics Helper working for WP7 already... read his post, check out all the links and get going on something fun... was great seeing you at MIX, too, Andy! Silverlight 4: GPU Accelerated PlaneProjection Andy Beaulieu has a comparison up of Plane Projection with and without the new GPU acceleration... be sure to read his notes section. Silverlight 4 PathListBox for Motion Path Animation Have you heard of the PathListBox? Well, showing is better than telling, so check out Andy Beaulieu's post on it Silverlight at Windows Phone 7 Alex Golesh has a quick overview on developing a Windows Phone 7 app in Silverlight using the new toys, and executiting it in the emulator Prism v2.1: Creating a Region Adapter for the Accordion control Damian Schenkelman shows how to use the Accordian control from the toolkit as a region in a Prism app. Expression Blend 4 Beta Feature Overview available for download Adam Kinney announced the presence of an Expression Blend whitepaper as well... you should go grab that too .toolbox – Free online Silverlight and Expression Blend training Want to improve your Silverlight chops or gain some Expression Blend chops? Check out .toolbox post that Adam Kinney posted Introducing the Visual State Aggregator Jeremy Likness describes the basic panel A/panel B problem, describes ways he and other folks have flipped between them, then describes his Visual State Aggregator ... and it's downloadable for you to give it a dance! Multithreading in Windows Phone 7 emulator: A bug Laurent Bugnion found a bug wit multi-threading on the Windows Phone emulator. He confirmed this with the team, and has a workaround you'll be needing... thanks Laurent. Silverlight Overview - Technical Whitepaper John Papa has reiterated the existence of this Silverlight 4 whitepaper ... it was updated this week, and we all should be aware of it. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Google TV Gets Bad Reception. Can Media Center Pull in the Signal?

- by andrewbrust

The news hit Monday morning that Google has decided to delay the release of its Google TV platform, and has asked its OEMs to delay any products that embed the software. Coming just about two weeks prior to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google’s timing is about the worst imaginable. CES is where the platform should have had its coming out party, especially given all the anticipation that has built up since its initial announcement came 7 months ago. At last year’s CES, it seemed every consumer electronics company had fashioned its own software stack for Internet-based video programming and applications/widgets on its TVs, optical disc players and set top boxes. In one case, I even saw two platforms on a single TV set (one provided by Yahoo and the other one native to the TV set). The whole point of Google TV was to solve this problem and offer a standard, embeddable platform. But that won’t be happening, at least not for a while. Google seems unable to get it together, and more proprietary approaches, like Apple TV, don’t seem to be setting the world of TV-Internet convergence on fire, either. It seems to me, that when it comes to building a “TV operating system,” Windows Media Center is still the best of a bad bunch. But it won’t stay so for much longer without some changes. Will Redmond pick up the ball that Google has fumbled? I’m skeptical, but hopeful. Regardless, here are some steps that could help Microsoft make the most of Google’s faux pas: Introduce a new Media Center version that uses XBox 360, rather than Windows 7 (or 8), as the platform. TV platforms should be appliance-like, not PC-like. Combine that notion with the runaway sales numbers for Xbox 360 Kinect, and the mass appeal it has delivered for Xbox, and the switch form Windows makes even more sense. As I have pointed out before, Microsoft’s Xbox implementation of its Mediaroom platform (announced and demoed at last year’s CES) gets Redmond 80% of the way toward this goal. Nothing stops Microsoft from going the other 20%, other than its own apathy, which I hope has dissipated. Reverse the decision to remove Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (WHS), and create deep integration between WHS and Media Center. I have suggested this previously as well, but the recent announcement that Drive Extender would be dropped from WHS 2.0 creates the need for me to a) join the chorus of people urging Microsoft to reconsider and b) reiterate the importance of Media Center-WHS integration in the context of a Google compete scenario. Enable Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a Media Center client. This would tighten the integration loop already established between WP7, Xbox and Zune. But it would also counter Echostar/DISH Network/Sling Media, strike a blow against Google/Android (and even Apple/iOS) and could be the final strike against TiVO. Bring the WP7 user interface to Media Center and Kinect-enable it. This would further the integration discussed above and would be appropriate recognition of WP7’s Metro UI having been built on the heritage of the original Media Center itself. And being able to run your DVR even if you can’t find the remote (or can’t see its buttons in the dark) could be a nifty gimmick. Microsoft can do this but its consumer-oriented organization, responsible for Xbox, Zune and WP7, has to take the reins here, or none of this will likely work. There’s a significant chance that won’t happen, but I won’t let that stop me from hoping that it does and insisting that it must. Honestly, this fight is Microsoft’s to lose.

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Great Surprise – MSDN Ultimate

- by MarkPearl

So, I attended the Microsoft Community Evening. The attendance was better than I was expecting for December and we had our first Programming Languages Meeting where Gary did a great presentation on an intro to Ruby. The best surprize of the evening happened when I was about to leave, Robert MacLean asked me how we did our MS licensing – the fact being that we were about to reach the end of our empower license with Microsoft and that I had no idea how we were going to afford upgrading it early next year. Well, out comes a Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN 12 month subscription. An absolute awesome gift – thanks Robert! Best gift ever!

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Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 - 2 -- #1013

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Pete Brown, Robby Ingebretsen, Bill Reiss, Jordan Knight, Mike Taulty, Justin Angel, Jeff Blankenburg. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Creating the Silverlight View Model (MVVM) Control: Calendar Icon" Michael Washington WP7: "United Nations News for Windows Phone 7" Justin Angel Silverlight, WP7/WPF: "CameraPanel: A Parallax Panel for Silverlight, WP7 or WPF" Robby Ingebretsen Shoutouts: Michael Scherotter produced a Silverlight Webcam photo app that he's providing as a free install: A Free Webcam Photo Application in Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: Creating the Silverlight View Model (MVVM) Control: Calendar Icon Michael Washington has a stunning Calendar Control/Icon up on his blog... walking through how he built it and how you can easily use it in your Silverlight or WP7 app. Strategies for Improving INotifyPropertyChanged in WPF and Silverlight Pete Brown takes a look at INPC and some of the ways this is dealt with to avoid some of the tedius code-reuse errors we all make. CameraPanel: A Parallax Panel for Silverlight, WP7 or WPF Robby Ingebretsen gives up the code for that cool panel he's got on his homepage where the small panels move about seemingly in space. Writing a Windows Phone 7 game? Have a fallback plan Bill Reiss, who has a great WP7 game up - Popper 2 - has a very well-thought-out post up about WP7 'indie' games and the future thereof... great comments from reader/authors as well Automatic template selection – marrying a view to a view model Jordan Knight has the 2nd post of his series on MVVM up... he's talking about it in context of their XamlingCore, but concepts are all good. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 5) Mike Taulty's next episode in describing the development of the PDC10 app he wrote is up ... again lots of Blend goodness in this one where he's adding buttons to let the user (us) download whatever is available for the chosen session. United Nations News for Windows Phone 7 In a munificent gesture, Justin Angel not only made his United Nation News app free on the marketplace, but he's posted the source to CodePlex! Justin had sent me a XAP a couple weeks ago, but for some reason, I can no longer sideload so wasn't able to try it until now... too cool, Justin! What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #6 Jeff Blankenburg has his latest "What I learned in WP7" tip up ... and this is one about the marketplace written by someone that's been there and back a few times... Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS)

- by Laurent Bugnion

Last Thursday, the Silverlight Firestarter event took place in Redmond, and was streamed live to a large audience worldwide (around 20’000 people). Approximately 30 if them were in Wallisellen near Zurich, in Microsoft Switzerland’s offices. This was not only a great occasion to learn more about the future of Silverlight and to see great demos, but also it was the very first meeting of the Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS). Having 30 people for a first meeting was a great success, especially if we consider that it was REALLY cold that night, that it had snowed 20 cm the night before! We all had a good time, and 3 lucky winners went back home with a prize: One LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone and two copies of Silverlight 4 Unleashed. Congratulations to the winners! After the keynote (which went in a whirlwind, shortest 90 minutes ever!), we all had pizza and beverages generously sponsored by the Swiss DPE team, of which not less than 5 guys came to the event! Thanks to Stefano, Ronnie, Sascha, Big Mike and Ken for attending! We decided to have meetings every month. Stay tuned for announcements on when and where the events will take place. We are also in the process of creating various groups online where the attendees can find more information. For instance, I created a group on Flickr where the pictures taken at events will be published. The group is public, and the pictures of the first event are already online! We also have the already known page at http://www.slugs.ch/, check it out. A national group Even though the first event was in Zurich, and that 3 of the founding members live nearby, we would like to try and be a national group. That means having events sometimes in other parts of Switzerland, collaborating with other local user groups, etc. Stay tuned for more Join! We want you, we need you If you are doing Silverlight, for a living or as a hobby, if you are interested in user experience, XAML, Expression Blend and many more topics, you should consider joining! This is a great occasion to exchange experiences, to learn from Silverlight experts, to hear sessions about various topics related to Silverlight, etc. If you want to talk about a topic that is of interest to you, If you want to propose a topic of discussion Or if you just want to hang out then go to http://www.slugs.ch and register! Cheers, Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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‘Publish…’ Resulting in Directory With No Files

- by ToStringTheory

I was pulling my hair out with this one… Which isn’t good considering I have so little of it left! I had just upgraded to the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK the day before with no problems, and used the upgraded ‘Publish…’ dialog to successfully publish a website to my hard disk for hosting on an internal development server. However, when trying to deploy another project to my file system, it said it was successful, but there were no files in the directory. The only difference, the first project was an Azure project, the second was a standard ASP.Net Web Application. If you installed the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK, you may want to read this. The Problem At first it appears that there is no problem: However you may remember that when publishing a web application, the output window will generally iterate through each of the directories as it copies the files from that directory over. Sure enough, when looking at the output directory – there are no files, no bin directory, no nothing… Troubleshooting Since one site published and the other did not, I believed that the failure may have been to a failed SQL Server 2012 installation that happened between publish. I rolled back the installation, however that did not work either. I also checked the Configuration Manager dialog, and ensured that the projects were selected to actually build (just checking, even though the output said it built them..) I checked the properties of the solution and the projects, and a selection of files in the project to make sure that they were selected for content… Nothing seemed to work. I then decided to uninstall the Azure 1.7 SDK to see if that was the culprit. When I opened the Windows 7 ‘Uninstall a Program’ dialog, I noticed that the Azure SDK came with 2 extra packages that just so happen to be in a Release Candidate state from Microsoft – ‘Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0’ and ‘Microsoft Web Publish – Visual Studio 2010’. It dawned on me that the publish dialog must not be just for Azure, since it appeared when I tried to deploy the regular web application as well. Therefore, it must have been an upgrade to the publish mechanism in Visual Studio. I uninstalled both of the programs and received my old publish dialog once again, and was able to successfully publish the solution above as I had done before. After celebrating solving the problem, I tried reinstalling the Azure package, to see if it would repair the publishing process. Even though it brought back the updated dialogs, it did not publish any files. Instead of uninstalling and retreating, I now KNEW what the cause was, and these were packages not just for Azure. I now knew a product name to search for. The Solution Sure enough, with the correct search term in Google – ‘microsoft web publish no files’, and setting the timeline to 1 week, I found what I needed - Microsoft Connect - Publish Web Application FAILS! (by Andrew Rits). I am surprised that I missed something that ended up being so simple… In the Configuration Manager, I had the following settings: This is how I had been building and debugging the solution always… However, apparently when installing the new Web Publishing package, it does things a little differently in its configuration for publishing: You see the difference? The configuration here is set to ‘x86’ instead of ‘Any CPU’. Sure enough, as soon as I switched the configuration to ‘Release – Any CPU’, the deployment built and published all of my files as I expected. Conclusion It was a small change, but apparently the new ‘Publish web application’ defaults to the x86 configuration, thereby not copying any of the project/bin files to the publish target directory. I spent forever trying things, but this small drop down eluded me until I was able to target that the dialog was actually working apparently, I just didn’t have the correct configuration. I hope that this saves you the hours of frustration and hastened hair loss that it caused me… I also hope that before Microsoft brings this publishing package out of RC status, that they change the behavior of that menu to default to the settings of the old publish menu for the first time. Happy Coding!

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Urban Turtle is such an awesome product !

- by Vincent Grondin

Mario Cardinal, the host of the Visual Studio Talk Show, is quite happy these days. He works with the Urban Turtle team and they received significant support from Microsoft. Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, has published an outstanding blog post about Urban Turtle that says: "...awesome Scrum experience for TFS.” You can read Brian Harry's blog post at the following URL: http://urbanturtle.com/awesome.

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Need help with software licensing? Read on…

- by juanlarios

Figuring out which software licensing options best suit your needs while being cost-effective can be confusing. Some businesses end up making their purchases through retail stores which means they miss out on volume licensing opportunities and others may unknowingly be using unlicensed software which means their business may be at risk. So let me help you make the best decision for your situation. You may want to review this blog post that lays out licensing basics for any organization that needs to license software for more than 5 or less than 250 devices or users. It details the different ways you can buy a license and what choices are available for volume licensing, which can give you pricing advantages and provide flexible options for your business. As technology evolves and more organizations move to online services such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Azure Platform, Windows Intune and others, it’s important to understand how to purchase, activate and use online service subscriptions to get the most out of your investment. Once purchased through a volume licensing agreement or the Microsoft Online Subscription Program, these services can be managed through web portals: · Online Services Customer Portal (Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Intune) · Dynamics CRM Online Customer Portal (Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online) · Windows Azure Customer Portal (Windows Azure Platform) · Volume Licensing Service Center (other services) Learn more >> Licensing Resources: The SMB How to Buy Portal – receive clear purchasing and licensing information that is easy to understand in order to help facilitate quick decision making. Microsoft License Advisor (MLA) – Use MLA to research Microsoft Volume Licensing products, programs and pricing. Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) – Already have a volume License? Use the VLSC to get you easy access to all your licensing information in one location. Online Services – licensing information for off-premise options. Windows 7 Comparison: – Compare versions of Windows and find out which one is right for you. Office 2010 Comparison: – Find out which Office suite is right for you. Licensing FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions About Product Licensing. Additional Resources You May Find Useful: · TechNet Evaluation Center Try some of our latest Microsoft products For free, Like System Center 2012 Pre-Release Products, and evaluate them before you buy. · Springboard Series Your destination for technical resources, free tools and expert guidance to ease the deployment and management of your Windows-based client infrastructure. · AlignIT Manager Tech Talk Series A monthly streamed video series with a range of topics for both infrastructure and development managers. Ask questions and participate real-time or watch the on-demand recording.

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Silverlight Cream for March 21, 2010 -- #816

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, John Papa(-2-, -3-, -4-), Jonas Follesø, David Anson, Scott Guthrie, Andrej Tozon, Bill Reiss(-2-), Pete Blois, and Lee. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has a Mix10 Session Downloader for us all to use... thanks Frank! Read what Ward Bell has to say about MVVM, Josh Smith’s Way ... it's all good. Robby Ingebretsen posts on his 10 Favorite Open Source Fonts You Can Embed in WPF or Silverlight Mike Harsh posted Slides and Demos from my MIX10 Session . The download link at Drop.io is down for maintenance until Sunday evening, March 21. From SilverlightCream.com: Blend 4: TreeView SelectedItemChanged using MVVM Michael Washington has a post up about doing SelectedItemChanged on a TreeView with MVVM, oh and he's starting out in Blend 4... Silverlight TV 14: Developing for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight John Papa hit Silverlight TV pretty hard at the beginning of MIX10. This first one is with Mike Harsh talking about WP7. (Hi Mike ... wondered where you'd run off to!), and you can go to the shoutout section to get Mike's session material from MIX as well. Silverlight TV 15: Announcing Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 In this next Silverlight TV(15), John Papa and Adam Kinney discuss Silverlight 4RC ... thank goodness it's out, we can all let go of the breath we've been holding in :) Silverlight TV 16: Tim Heuer and Jesse Liberty Talk about Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 Silverlight TV 16 has John Papa sharing the spotlight with Jesse Liberty and Tim Heuer ... geez... can you find 3 more kowledgable Silverlight folks to listen to? No? then go listen to this :) Silverlight TV 17: Build a Twitter Client for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight The latest Silverlight TV has John Papa bringing Mike Harsh back to produce a Twitter Client for WP7. Simulating multitouch on the Windows Phone 7 Emulator Jonas Follesø has a great post up about simulating multi-touch on WP7 using multiple mice ... yeah, you read that right :) Using IValueConverter to create a grouped list of items simply and flexibly David Anson demonstrates grouping items in a ListBox using IValueConverter. I think I can pretty well guarantee I would NOT have thought of doing this.. :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight In the MIX10 first-day keynote, Scott Guthrie did File->New Project and built a WP7 Twitter app. He has that up as a tutorial with all sorts of external links including one to the keynote itself. Named and optional parameters in Silverlight 4 Andrej Tozon delves into the optional parameters that are now available to Silverlight developers... pretty cool stuff. Space Rocks game step 4: Inheriting from Sprite Bill Reiss continues with his game development series with this one on inheriting from the Sprite class and centering objects Space Rocks game step 5: Rotating the ship Bill Reiss's episode 5 is on rotating the ship you setup in episode 4. Don't worry about the transforms, Bill gives it all to us :) Labyrinth Sample for Windows Phone Wow... check out the sample Pete Blois did for the Phone... Silverlight coolness :) PathListBox in SL4 – firstlook Lee has a post up on the PathListBox. I think this is going to catch on quick... it's just too cool not to! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs & Regular Expressions

- by MarkPearl

So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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Tricks and Optimizations for you Sitecore website

- by amaniar

When working with Sitecore there are some optimizations/configurations I usually repeat in order to make my app production ready. Following is a small list I have compiled from experience, Sitecore documentation, communicating with Sitecore Engineers etc. This is not supposed to be technically complete and might not be fit for all environments. Simple configurations that can make a difference: 1) Configure Sitecore Caches. This is the most straight forward and sure way of increasing the performance of your website. Data and item cache sizes (/databases/database/ [id=web] ) should be configured as needed. You may start with a smaller number and tune them as needed. <cacheSizes hint="setting"> <data>300MB</data> <items>300MB</items> <paths>5MB</paths> <standardValues>5MB</standardValues> </cacheSizes> Tune the html, registry etc cache sizes for your website. <cacheSizes> <sites> <website> <html>300MB</html> <registry>1MB</registry> <viewState>10MB</viewState> <xsl>5MB</xsl> </website> </sites> </cacheSizes> Tune the prefetch cache settings under the App_Config/Prefetch/ folder. Sample /App_Config/Prefetch/Web.Config: <configuration> <cacheSize>300MB</cacheSize>  <template desc="mytemplate">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</template>  <item desc="myitem">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX }</item>  <children desc="childitems">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</children> </configuration> Break your page into sublayouts so you may cache most of them. Read the caching configuration reference: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/cache_configuration_reference_a4.pdf 2) Disable Analytics for the Shell Site <site name="shell" virtualFolder="/sitecore/shell" physicalFolder="/sitecore/shell" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" language="en" database="core" domain="sitecore" loginPage="/sitecore/login" content="master" contentStartItem="/Home" enableWorkflow="true" enableAnalytics="false" xmlControlPage="/sitecore/shell/default.aspx" browserTitle="Sitecore" htmlCacheSize="2MB" registryCacheSize="3MB" viewStateCacheSize="200KB" xslCacheSize="5MB" /> 3) Increase the Check Interval for the MemoryMonitorHook so it doesn’t run every 5 seconds (default). <hook type="Sitecore.Diagnostics.MemoryMonitorHook, Sitecore.Kernel"> <param desc="Threshold">800MB</param> <param desc="Check interval">00:05:00</param> <param desc="Minimum time between log entries">00:01:00</param> <ClearCaches>false</ClearCaches> <GarbageCollect>false</GarbageCollect> <AdjustLoadFactor>false</AdjustLoadFactor> </hook> 4) Set Analytics.PeformLookup (Sitecore.Analytics.config) to false if your environment doesn’t have access to the internet or you don’t intend to use reverse DNS lookup. <setting name="Analytics.PerformLookup" value="false" /> 5) Set the value of the “Media.MediaLinkPrefix” setting to “-/media”: <setting name="Media.MediaLinkPrefix" value="-/media" /> Add the following line to the customHandlers section: <customHandlers> <handler trigger="-/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/api/" handler="sitecore_api.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/xaml/" handler="sitecore_xaml.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/icon/" handler="sitecore_icon.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/feed/" handler="sitecore_feed.ashx" /> </customHandlers> Link: http://squad.jpkeisala.com/2011/10/sitecore-media-library-performance-optimization-checklist/ 6) Performance counters should be disabled in production if not being monitored <setting name="Counters.Enabled" value="false" /> 7) Disable Item/Memory/Timing threshold warnings. Due to the nature of this component, it brings no value in production.  <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StopMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel"> <TimingThreshold desc="Milliseconds">1000</TimingThreshold> <ItemThreshold desc="Item count">1000</ItemThreshold> <MemoryThreshold desc="KB">10000</MemoryThreshold> </processor>—> 8) The ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections setting is a hidden setting in the web.config file, which by default is true. Setting it to false will improve client performance for authoring environments. <setting name="ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections" value="false" /> 9) Add a machineKey section to your Web.Config file when using a web farm. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649308.aspx 10) If you get errors in the log files similar to: WARN Could not create an instance of the counter 'XXX.XXX' (category: 'Sitecore.System') Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException Message: Access to the registry key 'Global' is denied. Make sure the ApplicationPool user is a member of the system “Performance Monitor Users” group on the server. 11) Disable WebDAV configurations on the CD Server if not being used. More: http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/04/disable-webdav-in-sitecore.html 12) Change Log4Net settings to only log Errors on content delivery environments to avoid unnecessary logging. <root> <priority value="ERROR" /> <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" /> </root> 13) Disable Analytics for any content item that doesn’t add value. For example a page that redirects to another page. 14) When using Web User Controls avoid registering them on the page the asp.net way: <%@ Register Src="~/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" TagName="MyControl" TagPrefix="uc2" %> Use Sublayout web control instead – This way Sitecore caching could be leveraged <sc:Sublayout ID="ID" Path="/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" Cacheable="true" runat="server" /> 15) Avoid querying for all children recursively when all items are direct children. Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems("/sitecore/content/Home//*"); //Use: Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("/sitecore/content/Home"); 16) On IIS — you enable static & dynamic content compression on CM and CD More: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754668%28WS.10%29.aspx 17) Enable HTTP Keep-alive and content expiration in IIS. 18) Use GUID’s when accessing items and fields instead of names or paths. Its faster and wont break your code when things get moved or renamed. Context.Database.GetItem("{324DFD16-BD4F-4853-8FF1-D663F6422DFF}") Context.Item.Fields["{89D38A8F-394E-45B0-826B-1A826CF4046D}"]; //is better than Context.Database.GetItem("/Home/MyItem") Context.Item.Fields["FieldName"] Hope this helps.

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Speaking at SPTechCon SF 2011 and SPSNOLA 2011

- by Brian Jackett

From Feb 7th-9th I’ll be presenting two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011. My first presentation is a new session called “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to SharePoint 2010 developers. My second sessions is called “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” (presented at last SPTech Con Boston) which covers tips, tricks, and advice on deploying SharePoint 2007 solutions. If you hurry you may still be able to register for this SPTechCon. Click here for registration information. Hope to see you there. In addition to SPTechCon, I’ll also be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Orleans 2011 on Feb 26th. My presentation is called “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell”. I’ve given this presentation at a number of recent conferences and it has been popular. I’m excited for this weekend as well since it will be my first time visiting New Orleans. Click here for registration information. Sessions Where: SPTech Con San Francisco 2011 Title: The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010 Audience and Level: Developer, Beginner/Intermediate Abstract: LINQ to SharePoint, native Visual Studio 2010 support, easier access to logging, Business Connectivity Services… The list of new features and tools available to developers rapidly grew between SharePoint 2007 and 2010. In this session we will cover these and many of the other newest features added for SharePoint developers to utilize. This session is targeted to SharePoint 2007 developers upgrading their skills to SharePoint 2010 or developers new to SharePoint 2010. Where: SPTech Con San Francisco 2011 Title: Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions Audience and Level: Admin/Developer, Intermediate Abstract: “All I have to do is run some STSADM commands to deploy my SharePoint solutions, right?” If you are saying that to yourself then you are missing out on some of the more advanced processes you can employ to deploy and maintain your SharePoint solutions and farm. In this session we will cover lessons learned from 3 years of deploying and automating SharePoint solutions. This will include using a combination of STSADM, PowerShell, SharePoint API and a number of other tools in a real world situation to deploy an entire suite of custom SharePoint solutions. This session is targeted to farm administrators and developers. Prior experience with SharePoint solutions, STSADM and minimal PowerShell experience is suggested. Where: SharePoint Saturday New Orleans Title: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell Audience and Level: Admin, Beginner Abstract: Having you been using STSADM (or worse hand editing processes) to manage your SharePoint 2007 farms? Are you hearing about needing to learn PowerShell to manage SharePoint 2010 farms? This session will serve as part introduction to PowerShell and part overview of how you can use PowerShell to more efficiently and effectively manage your SharePoint 2010 farm. This session is targeted to farm administrators and IT pros and no previous experience with PowerShell is required. -Frog Out

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Understanding Collabnet’s LDAP binding

- by Robert May

We want to use both subversion usernames and passwords as well as Active Directory for our authentication on our Collabnet subversion server. This has proven to be more of a challenge than we thought, mostly because Collabnet’s documentation is pretty poor. To supplement that documentation, I add my own. The first thing to understand is that the attribute that you specify in the LDAP Login Attribute ONLY applies to lookups done for the user. It does NOT apply to the LDAP Bind DN field. Second, know that the debug logs (error is the one you want) don’t give you debug information for the bind DN, just the login attempts. Third, by default, Active Directory does not allow anonymous binds, so you MUST put in a user that has the authority to query the Active Directory ldap. Because of these items, the values to set in those fields can be somewhat confusing. You’ll want to have ADSI Edit handy (I also used ldp, which is installed by default on server 2008), since ADSI Edit can help you find stuff in your active directory. Be careful, you can also break stuff. Here’s what should go into those fields. LDAP Security Level: Should be set to None LDAP Server Host: Should be set to the full name of a domain controller in your domain. For example, dc.mydomain.com LDAP Server Port: Should be set to 3268. The default port of 389 will only query that specific server, not the global catalog. By setting it to 3268, the global catalog will be queried, which is probably what you want. LDAP Base DN: Should be set to the location where you want the search for users to begin. By default, the search scope is set to sub, so all child organizational units below this setting will be searched. In my case, I had created an OU specifically for users for group policies. My value ended up being: OU=MyOu,DC=domain,DC=org. However, if you’re pointing it to the default Users folder, you may end up with something like CN=Users,DC=domain,DC=org (or com or whatever). Again, use ADSI edit and use the Distinguished Name that it shows. LDAP Bind DN: This needs to be the Distinguished Name of the user that you’re going to use for binding (i.e. the user you’ll be impersonating) for doing queries. In my case, it ended up being CN=svn svn,OU=MyOu,DC=domain,DC=org. Why the double svn, you might ask? That’s because the first and last name fields are set to svn and by default, the distinguished name is the first and last name fields! That’s important. Its NOT the username or account name! Again, use ADSI edit, browse to the username you want to use, right click and select properties, and then search the attributes for the Distinguished Name. Once you’ve found that, select it and click View and you can copy and paste that into this field. LDAP Bind Password: This is the password for the account in the Bind DN LDAP login Attribute: sAMAccountName. If you leave this blank, uid is used, which may not even be set. This tells it to use the Account Name field that’s defined under the account tab for users in Active Directory Users and Computers. Note that this attribute DOES NOT APPLY to the LDAP Bind DN. You must use the full distinguished name of the bind DN. This attribute allows users to type their username and password for authentication, rather than typing their distinguished name, which they probably don’t know. LDAP Search Scope: Probably should stay at sub, but could be different depending on your situation. LDAP Filter: I left mine blank, but you could provide one to limit what you want to see. LDP would be helpful for determining what this is. LDAP Server Certificate Verification: I left it checked, but didn’t try it without it being checked. Hopefully, this will save some others pain when trying to get Collabnet setup. Technorati Tags: Subversion,collabnet

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BizTalk 2009 - Naming Guidelines

- by StuartBrierley

The following is effectively a repost of the BizTalk 2004 naming guidlines that I have previously detailed. I have posted these again for completeness under BizTalk 2009 and to allow an element of separation in case I find some reason to amend these for BizTalk 2009. These guidlines should be universal across any version of BizTalk you may wish to apply them to. General Rules All names should be named with a Pascal convention. Project Namespaces For message schemas: [CompanyName].XML.Schemas.[FunctionalName]* Examples: ABC.XML.Schemas.Underwriting DEF.XML.Schemas.MarshmellowTradingExchange * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Underwriting.Dictionary.Valuation For web services: [CompanyName].Web.Services.[FunctionalName] Examples: ABC.Web.Services.OrderJellyBeans For the main BizTalk Projects: [CompanyName].BizTalk.[AssemblyType].[FunctionalName]* Examples: ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting ABC.BizTalk.Orchestrations.Underwriting * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Mappings.Underwriting.Valuations Assemblies BizTalk Assembly names should match the associated Project Namespace, such as ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting. This pertains to the formal assembly name and the DLL name. The Solution name should take the name of the main project within the solution, and also therefore the namespace for that project. Although long names such as this can be unwieldy to work with, the benefits of having the full scope available when the assemblies are installed on the target server are generally judged to outweigh this inconvenience. Messaging Artifacts Artifact Standard Notes Example Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd .NET Type name should match, without file extension. .NET Namespace will likely match assembly name. PurchaseOrderAcknowledge_FF.xsd or FNMA100330_FF.xsd Property Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd Should be named to reflect possible common usage across multiple schemas IspecMessagePropertySchema.xsd UnderwritingOrchestrationKeys.xsd Map <SourceSchema>2<DestinationSchema>.btm Exceptions to this may be made where the source and destination schemas share the majority of the name, such as in mainframe web service maps InstructionResponse2CustomEmailRequest.btm (exception example) AccountCustomerAddressSummaryRequest2MainframeRequest.btm Orchestration <DescriptiveName>.odx GetValuationReports.odx SendMTEDecisionResponse.odx Send/Receive Pipeline <DescriptiveName>.btp ValidatingXMLReceivePipeline.btp FlatFileAssembler.btp Receive Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. FraudPreventionServices LetterProcessing Receive Location A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. ? Do we want to include the transport type here ? Arrears Web Service Send Port Group A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. Customer Updates Send Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function. ABCProductUpdater LogLendingPolicyOutput Parties A meaningful name for a Trading Partner. If dealing with multiple entities within a Trading Partner organization, the Organization name could be used as a prefix. Roles A meaningful name for the role that a Trading Partner plays. Orchestration Workflow Shapes Shape Standard Notes Example Scopes <DescriptionOfContainedWork> or <DescOfcontainedWork><TxType> Including info about transaction type may be appropriate in some situations where it adds significant documentation value to the diagram. HandleReportResponse Receive Receive<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being received “into”. ReceiveReportResponse Send Send<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being sent. SendValuationDetailsRequest Expression <DescriptionOfEffect> Expression shapes should be named to describe the net effect of the expression, similar to naming a method. The exception to this is the case where the expression is interacting with an external .NET component to perform a function that overlaps with existing BizTalk functionality – use closest BizTalk shape for this case. CreatePrintXML Decide <DescriptionOfDecision> A description of what will be decided in the “if” branch Report Type? Perform MF Save? If-Branch <DescriptionOfDecision> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what is being decided Mortgage Valuation Yes Else-Branch Else Else-branch shapes should always be named “Else” Else Construct Message (Assign) Create<Message> (for Construct) <ExpressionDescription> (for expression) If a Construct shape contains a message assignment, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned. The actual message assignment shape contained should be named to describe the expression that is contained. CreateReportDataMV which contains expression: ExtractReportData Construct Message (Transform) Create<Message> (for Construct) <SourceSchema>2<DestSchema> (for transform) If a Construct shape contains a message transform, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned. The actual message transform shape contained should generally be named the same as the called map. CreateReportDataMV which contains transform: ReportDataMV2ReportDataMV Construct Message (containing multiple shapes) If a Construct Message shape uses multiple assignments or transforms, the overall shape should be named to communicate the net effect, using no prefix. Call/Start Orchestration Call<OrchestrationName> Start<OrchestrationName> Throw Throw<ExceptionType> The corresponding variable name for the exception type should (often) be the same name as the exception type, only camel-cased. ThrowRuleException, which references the “ruleException” variable. Parallel <DescriptionOfParallelWork> Parallel shapes should be named by a description of what work will be done in parallel Delay <DescriptionOfWhatWaitingFor> Delay shapes should be named by a description of what is being waited for. POAcknowledgeTimeout Listen <DescriptionOfOutcomes> Listen shapes should be named by a description that captures (to the degree possible) all the branches of the Listen shape POAckOrTimeout FirstShippingBid Loop <DescriptionOfLoop> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what the loop is. ForEachValuationReport WhileErrorFlagTrue Role Link See “Roles” in messaging naming conventions above. Suspend <ReasonDescription> Describe what action an administrator must take to resume the orchestration. More detail can be passed to error property – and should include what should be done by the administrator before resuming the orchestration. ReEstablishCreditLink Terminate <ReasonDescription> Describe why the orchestration terminated. More detail can be passed to error property. TimeoutsExpired Call Rules Call<PolicyName> The policy name may need to be abbreviated. CallLendingPolicy Compensate Compensate or Compensate<TxName> If the shape compensates nested transactions, names should be suffixed with the name of the nested transaction – otherwise it should simple be Compensate. CompensateTransferFunds Orchestration Types Type Standard Notes Example Multi-Part Message Types <LogicalDocumentType> Multi-part types encapsulate multiple parts. The WSDL spec indicates “parts are a flexible mechanism for describing the logical abstract content of a message.” The name of the multi-part type should correspond to the “logical” document type, i.e. what the sum of the parts describes. InvoiceReceipt (which might encapsulate an invoice acknowledgement and a payment voucher.) Multi-Part Messsage Part <SchemaNameOfPart> Should be named (most often) simply for the schema (or simple type) associated with the part. InvoiceHeader Messages <SchemaName> or <MuliPartMessageTypeName> Should be named based on the corresponding schema type or multi-part message type. If there is more than one variable of a type, name for its use within the orchestration. ReportDataMV UpdatedReportDataMV Variables <DescriptiveName> TargetFilePath StringProcessor Port Types <FunctionDescription>PortType Should be named to suggest the nature of an endpoint, with pascal casing and suffixed with “PortType”. If there will be more than one Port for a Port Type, the Port Type should be named according to the abstract service supplied. The WSDL spec indicates port types are “a named set of abstract operations and the abstract messages involved” that also encapsulates the message pattern (i.e. one-way, request-response, solicit-response) that all operations on the port type adhere to. ReceiveReportResponsePortType or CallEAEPortType (This is a two way port, so Receove or Send alone would not be appropriate. Could have been ProcessEAERequestPortType etc....) Ports <FunctionDescription>Port Should be named to suggest a grouping of functionality, with pascal casing and suffixed with “Port.” ReceiveReportResponsePort CallEAEPort Correlation types <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the logical name of what is being used to correlate. PurchaseOrderNumber Correlation sets <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the corresponding correlation type. If there is more than one, it should be named to reflect its specific purpose within the orchestration. PurchaseOrderNumber Orchestration parameters <DescriptiveName> Should be named to match the caller’s names for the corresponding variables where appropriate.

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