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  • Why is Java EE 6 better than Spring ?

    - by arungupta
    Java EE 6 was released over 2 years ago and now there are 14 compliant application servers. In all my talks around the world, a question that is frequently asked is Why should I use Java EE 6 instead of Spring ? There are already several blogs covering that topic: Java EE wins over Spring by Bill Burke Why will I use Java EE instead of Spring in new Enterprise Java projects in 2012 ? by Kai Waehner (more discussion on TSS) Spring to Java EE migration (Part 1 and 2, 3 and 4 coming as well) by David Heffelfinger Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience by Lincoln Baxter Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker at NLJUG Moving from Spring to Java EE 6 - The Age of Frameworks is Over at TSS Java EE vs Spring Shootout by Rohit Kelapure and Reza Rehman at JavaOne 2011 Java EE 6 and the Ewoks by Murat Yener Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever - Bert Ertman and Arun Gupta I will try to share my perspective in this blog. First of all, I'd like to start with a note: Thank you Spring framework for filling the interim gap and providing functionality that is now included in the mainstream Java EE 6 application servers. The Java EE platform has evolved over the years learning from frameworks like Spring and provides all the functionality to build an enterprise application. Thank you very much Spring framework! While Spring was revolutionary in its time and is still very popular and quite main stream in the same way Struts was circa 2003, it really is last generation's framework - some people are even calling it legacy. However my theory is "code is king". So my approach is to build/take a simple Hello World CRUD application in Java EE 6 and Spring and compare the deployable artifacts. I started looking at the official tutorial Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step but it is using the older version 2.5. I wasn't able to find any updated version in the current 3.1 release. Next, I downloaded Spring Tool Suite and thought that would provide some template samples to get started. A least a quick search did not show any handy tutorials - either video or text-based. So I searched and found a link to their SVN repository at src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/. I tried the "mvc-basic" sample and the generated WAR file was 4.43 MB. While it was named a "basic" sample it seemed to come with 19 different libraries bundled but it was what I could find: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-jsptags-1.0.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar And it is not even using any database! The app deployed fine on GlassFish 3.1.2 but the "@Controller Example" link did not work as it was missing the context root. With a bit of tweaking I could deploy the application and assume that the account got created because no error was displayed in the browser or server log. Next I generated the WAR for "mvc-ajax" and the 5.1 MB WAR had 20 JARs (1 removed, 2 added): ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar 2 more JARs for just doing Ajax. Anyway, deploying this application gave the following error: Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.codehaus.jackson.map.SerializationConfig.<init>(Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/ClassIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/AnnotationIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/introspect/VisibilityChecker;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/jsontype/SubtypeResolver;)V    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.<init>(ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.java:20)    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.postProcessAfterInitialization(JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.java:40)    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyBeanPostProcessorsAfterInitialization(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:407) Seems like some incorrect repos in the "pom.xml". Next one is "mvc-showcase" and the 6.49 MB WAR now has 28 JARs as shown below: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/aspectjrt-1.6.10.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-fileupload-1.2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-io-2.0.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/el-api-2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/javax.inject-1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jdom-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-api-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-impl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/rome-1.0.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar The app at least deployed and showed results this time. But still no database! Next I tried building "jpetstore" and got the error: [ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:Could not resolve dependencies for project org.springframework.samples:org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:war:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies for [commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload:jar:1.2.1 (compile), org.apache.struts:com.springsource.org.apache.struts:jar:1.2.9 (compile), javax.xml.rpc:com.springsource.javax.xml.rpc:jar:1.1.0 (compile), org.apache.commons:com.springsource.org.apache.commons.dbcp:jar:1.2.2.osgi (compile), commons-io:commons-io:jar:1.3.2 (compile), hsqldb:hsqldb:jar:1.8.0.7 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-core:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-jsp:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.tuckey:urlrewritefilter:jar:3.1.0 (compile), org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-orm:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-context-support:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework.webflow:spring-js:jar:2.0.7.RELEASE (compile), org.apache.ibatis:com.springsource.com.ibatis:jar:2.3.4.726 (runtime), com.caucho:com.springsource.com.caucho:jar:3.2.1 (compile), org.apache.axis:com.springsource.org.apache.axis:jar:1.4.0 (compile), javax.wsdl:com.springsource.javax.wsdl:jar:1.6.1 (compile), javax.servlet:jstl:jar:1.2 (runtime), org.aspectj:aspectjweaver:jar:1.6.5 (compile), javax.servlet:servlet-api:jar:2.5 (provided), javax.servlet.jsp:jsp-api:jar:2.1 (provided), junit:junit:jar:4.6 (test)]: Failed to read artifact descriptor for org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT: Could not transfer artifact org.springframework:spring-webmvc:pom:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT from/to JBoss repository (http://repository.jboss.com/maven2): Access denied to: http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/org/springframework/spring-webmvc/3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-webmvc-3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT.pom It appears the sample is broken - maybe I was pulling from the wrong repository - would be great if someone were to point me at a good target to use here. With a 50% hit on samples in this repository, I started searching through numerous blogs, most of which have either outdated information (using XML-heavy Spring 2.5), some piece of configuration (which is a typical "feature" of Spring) is missing, or too much complexity in the sample. I finally found this blog that worked like a charm. This blog creates a trivial Spring MVC 3 application using Hibernate and MySQL. This application performs CRUD operations on a single table in a database using typical Spring technologies.  I downloaded the sample code from the blog, deployed it on GlassFish 3.1.2 and could CRUD the "person" entity. The source code for this application can be downloaded here. More details on the application statistics below. And then I built a similar CRUD application in Java EE 6 using NetBeans wizards in a couple of minutes. The source code for the application can be downloaded here and the WAR here. The Spring Source Tool Suite may also offer similar wizard-driven capabilities but this blog focus primarily on comparing the runtimes. The lack of STS tutorials was slightly disappointing as well. NetBeans however has tons of text-based and video tutorials and tons of material even by the community. One more bit on the download size of tools bundle ... NetBeans 7.1.1 "All" is 211 MB (which includes GlassFish and Tomcat) Spring Tool Suite  2.9.0 is 347 MB (~ 65% bigger) This blog is not about the tooling comparison so back to the Java EE 6 version of the application .... In order to run the Java EE version on GlassFish, copy the MySQL Connector/J to glassfish3/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/ext directory and create a JDBC connection pool and JDBC resource as: ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-connection-pool --datasourceclassname \\ com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource --restype \\ javax.sql.DataSource --property \\ portNumber=3306:user=mysql:password=mysql:databaseName=mydatabase \\ myConnectionPool ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-resource --connectionpoolid myConnectionPool jdbc/myDataSource I generated WARs for the two projects and the table below highlights some differences between them: Java EE 6 Spring WAR File Size 0.021030 MB 10.87 MB (~516x) Number of files 20 53 (> 2.5x) Bundled libraries 0 36 Total size of libraries 0 12.1 MB XML files 3 5 LoC in XML files 50 (11 + 15 + 24) 129 (27 + 46 + 16 + 11 + 19) (~ 2.5x) Total .properties files 1 Bundle.properties 2 spring.properties, log4j.properties Cold Deploy 5,339 ms 11,724 ms Second Deploy 481 ms 6,261 ms Third Deploy 528 ms 5,484 ms Fourth Deploy 484 ms 5,576 ms Runtime memory ~73 MB ~101 MB Some points worth highlighting from the table ... 516x WAR file, 10x deployment time - With 12.1 MB of libraries (for a very basic application) bundled in your application, the WAR file size and the deployment time will naturally go higher. The WAR file for Spring-based application is 516x bigger and the deployment time is double during the first deployment and ~ 10x during subsequent deployments. The Java EE 6 application is fully portable and will run on any Java EE 6 compliant application server. 36 libraries in the WAR - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today. Each of those servers provide all the functionality like transactions, dependency injection, security, persistence, etc typically required of an enterprise or web application. There is no need to bundle 36 libraries worth 12.1 MB for a trivial CRUD application. These 14 compliant application servers provide all the functionality baked in. Now you can also deploy these libraries in the container but then you don't get the "portability" offered by Spring in that case. Does your typical Spring deployment actually do that ? 3x LoC in XML - The number of XML files is about 1.6x and the LoC is ~ 2.5x. So much XML seems circa 2003 when the Java language had no annotations. The XML files can be further reduced, e.g. faces-config.xml can be replaced without providing i18n, but I just want to compare stock applications. Memory usage - Both the applications were deployed on default GlassFish 3.1.2 installation and any additional memory consumed as part of deployment/access was attributed to the application. This is by no means scientific but at least provides an initial ballpark. This area definitely needs more investigation. Another table that compares typical Java EE 6 compliant application servers and the custom-stack created for a Spring application ... Java EE 6 Spring Web Container ? 53 MB (tcServer 2.6.3 Developer Edition) Security ? 12 MB (Spring Security 3.1.0) Persistence ? 6.3 MB (Hibernate 4.1.0, required) Dependency Injection ? 5.3 MB (Framework) Web Services ? 796 KB (Spring WS 2.0.4) Messaging ? 3.4 MB (RabbitMQ Server 2.7.1) 936 KB (Java client 936) OSGi ? 1.3 MB (Spring OSGi 1.2.1) GlassFish and WebLogic (starting at 33 MB) 83.3 MB There are differentiating factors on both the stacks. But most of the functionality like security, persistence, and dependency injection is baked in a Java EE 6 compliant application server but needs to be individually managed and patched for a Spring application. This very quickly leads to a "stack explosion". The Java EE 6 servers are tested extensively on a variety of platforms in different combinations whereas a Spring application developer is responsible for testing with different JDKs, Operating Systems, Versions, Patches, etc. Oracle has both the leading OSS lightweight server with GlassFish and the leading enterprise Java server with WebLogic Server, both Java EE 6 and both with lightweight deployment options. The Web Container offered as part of a Java EE 6 application server not only deploys your enterprise Java applications but also provide operational management, diagnostics, and mission-critical capabilities required by your applications. The Java EE 6 platform also introduced the Web Profile which is a subset of the specifications from the entire platform. It is targeted at developers of modern web applications offering a reasonably complete stack, composed of standard APIs, and is capable out-of-the-box of addressing the needs of a large class of Web applications. As your applications grow, the stack can grow to the full Java EE 6 platform. The GlassFish Server Web Profile starting at 33MB (smaller than just the non-standard tcServer) provides most of the functionality typically required by a web application. WebLogic provides battle-tested functionality for a high throughput, low latency, and enterprise grade web application. No individual managing or patching, all tested and commercially supported for you! Note that VMWare does have a server, tcServer, but it is non-standard and not even certified to the level of the standard Web Profile most customers expect these days. Customers who choose this risk proprietary lock-in since VMWare does not seem to want to formally certify with either Java EE 6 Enterprise Platform or with Java EE 6 Web Profile but of course it would be great if they were to join the community and help their customers reduce the risk of deploying on VMWare software. Some more points to help you decide choose between Java EE 6 and Spring ... Freedom to choose container - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today, with a variety of open source and commercial offerings. A Java EE 6 application can be deployed on any of those containers. So if you deployed your application on GlassFish today and would like to scale up with your demands then you can deploy the same application to WebLogic. And because of the portability of a Java EE 6 application, you can even take it a different vendor altogether. Spring requires a runtime which could be any of these app servers as well. But why use Spring when all the required functionality is already baked into the application server itself ? Spring also has a different definition of portability where they claim to bundle all the libraries in the WAR file and move to any application server. But we saw earlier how bloated that archive could be. The equivalent features in Spring runtime offerings (mainly tcServer) are not all open source, not as mature, and often require manual assembly.  Vendor choice - The Java EE 6 platform is created using the Java Community Process where all the big players like Oracle, IBM, RedHat, and Apache are conritbuting to make the platform successful. Each application server provides the basic Java EE 6 platform compliance and has its own competitive offerings. This allows you to choose an application server for deploying your Java EE 6 applications. If you are not happy with the support or feature of one vendor then you can move your application to a different vendor because of the portability promise offered by the platform. Spring is a set of products from a single company, one price book, one support organization, one sustaining organization, one sales organization, etc. If any of those cause a customer headache, where do you go ? Java EE, backed by multiple vendors, is a safer bet for those that are risk averse. Production support - With Spring, typically you need to get support from two vendors - VMWare and the container provider. With Java EE 6, all of this is typically provided by one vendor. For example, Oracle offers commercial support from systems, operating systems, JDK, application server, and applications on top of them. VMWare certainly offers complete production support but do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket ? Do you really use tcServer ? ;-) Maintainability - With Spring, you are likely building your own distribution with multiple JAR files, integrating, patching, versioning, etc of all those components. Spring's claim is that multiple JAR files allow you to go à la carte and pick the latest versions of different components. But who is responsible for testing whether all these versions work together ? Yep, you got it, its YOU! If something does not work, who patches and maintains the JARs ? Of course, you! Commercial support for such a configuration ? On your own! The Java EE application servers manage all of this for you and provide a well-tested and commercially supported bundle. While it is always good to realize that there is something new and improved that updates and replaces older frameworks like Spring, the good news is not only does a Java EE 6 container offer what is described here, most also will let you deploy and run your Spring applications on them while you go through an upgrade to a more modern architecture. End result, you get the best of both worlds - keeping your legacy investment but moving to a more agile, lightweight world of Java EE 6. A message to the Spring lovers ... The complexity in J2EE 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 led to the genesis of Spring but that was in 2004. This is 2012 and the name has changed to "Java EE 6" :-) There are tons of improvements in the Java EE platform to make it easy-to-use and powerful. Some examples: Adding @Stateless on a POJO makes it an EJB EJBs can be packaged in a WAR with no special packaging or deployment descriptors "web.xml" and "faces-config.xml" are optional in most of the common cases Typesafe dependency injection is now part of the Java EE platform Add @Path on a POJO allows you to publish it as a RESTful resource EJBs can be used as backing beans for Facelets-driven JSF pages providing full MVC Java EE 6 WARs are known to be kilobytes in size and deployed in milliseconds Tons of other simplifications in the platform and application servers So if you moved away from J2EE to Spring many years ago and have not looked at Java EE 6 (which has been out since Dec 2009) then you should definitely try it out. Just be at least aware of what other alternatives are available instead of restricting yourself to one stack. Here are some workshops and screencasts worth trying: screencast #37 shows how to build an end-to-end application using NetBeans screencast #36 builds the same application using Eclipse javaee-lab-feb2012.pdf is a 3-4 hours self-paced hands-on workshop that guides you to build a comprehensive Java EE 6 application using NetBeans Each city generally has a "spring cleanup" program every year. It allows you to clean up the mess from your house. For your software projects, you don't need to wait for an annual event, just get started and reduce the technical debt now! Move away from your legacy Spring-based applications to a lighter and more modern approach of building enterprise Java applications using Java EE 6. Watch this beautiful presentation that explains how to migrate from Spring -> Java EE 6: List of files in the Java EE 6 project: ./index.xhtml./META-INF./person./person/Create.xhtml./person/Edit.xhtml./person/List.xhtml./person/View.xhtml./resources./resources/css./resources/css/jsfcrud.css./template.xhtml./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/Bundle.properties./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/persistence.xml./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/AbstractFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person_.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$1.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$PersonControllerConverter.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/JsfUtil.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/PaginationHelper.class./WEB-INF/faces-config.xml./WEB-INF/web.xml List of files in the Spring 3.x project: ./META-INF ./META-INF/MANIFEST.MF./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller/MainController.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain/Person.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service/PersonService.class ./WEB-INF/hibernate-context.xml ./WEB-INF/hibernate.cfg.xml ./WEB-INF/jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/deletedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/personspage.jsp ./WEB-INF/lib ./WEB-INF/lib/antlr-2.7.6.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/c3p0-0.9.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/cglib-nodep-2.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-beanutils-1.8.3.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-digester-2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/dom4j-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/ejb3-persistence-1.0.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-commons-annotations-3.1.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-core-3.3.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/javassist-3.7.ga.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jta-1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/junit-4.8.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.1.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/persistence-api-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-jdbc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-orm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-tx-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/standard-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/xml-apis-1.0.b2.jar ./WEB-INF/spring-servlet.xml ./WEB-INF/spring.properties ./WEB-INF/web.xml So, are you excited about Java EE 6 ? Want to get started now ? Here are some resources: Java EE 6 SDK (including runtime, samples, tutorials etc) GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.1.2 (Community) Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1.2 (Commercial) Java EE 6 using WebLogic 12c and NetBeans (Video) Java EE 6 with NetBeans and GlassFish (Video) Java EE with Eclipse and GlassFish (Video)

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  • SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

    - by Jon Galloway
    The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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  • Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

    - by ScottGu
    I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • SQL Authority News – Download Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack and Microsoft SQL Server Developer’s Edition

    - by Pinal Dave
    Yesterday I attended the SQL Server Community Launch in Bangalore and presented on Performing an effective Presentation. It was a fun presentation and people very well received it. No matter on what subject, I present, I always end up talking about SQL. Here are two of the questions I had received during the event. Q1) I want to install SQL Server on my development server, where can we get it for free or at an economical price (I do not have MSDN)? A1) If you are not going to use your server in a production environment, you can just get SQL Server Developer’s Edition and you can read more about it over here. Here is another favorite question which I keep on receiving it during the event. Q2) I already have SQL Server installed on my machine, what are different feature pack should I install and where can I get them from. A2) Just download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Service Pack. Here is the link for downloading it. The Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for Microsoft SQL Server. It includes tool and components for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and add-on providers for Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Here is the list of component this product contains: Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool Microsoft SQL Server Cloud Adapter Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Semantic Language Statistics Microsoft SQL Server Data-Tier Application Framework Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Language Service Microsoft Windows PowerShell Extensions for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Command Line Utilities 11 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for Microsoft SQL Server – Windows Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP for Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL ScriptDom Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Transact-SQL Compiler Service Microsoft System CLR Types for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Remote Blob Store SQL RBS codeplex samples page SQL Server Remote Blob Store blogs Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker External Activator for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft OData Source for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Balanced Data Distributor for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft Change Data Capture Designer and Service for Oracle by Attunity for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Master Data Service Add-in for Microsoft Excel Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight Microsoft Connector for SAP BW for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Upgrade Advisor Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2 v5.0 for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 ADOMD.NET Microsoft Analysis Services OLE DB Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Analysis Management Objects Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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  • Oracle Insurance Unveils Next Generation of Enterprise Document Automation: Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition

    - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com
    Oracle today announced the introduction of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition, the next generation of the company's market-leading Enterprise Document Automation (EDA) solution for dynamically creating, managing and delivering adaptive enterprise communications across multiple channels. "Insurers and other organizations need enterprise document automation that puts the power to manage the complete document lifecycle in the hands of the business user," said Srini Venkatasanthanam, vice president, Product Strategy, Oracle Insurancein the press release. "Built with features such as rules-based configurability and interactive processing, Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition makes possible an adaptive approach to enterprise document automation - documents when, where and in the form they're needed." Key enhancements in Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition include: Documaker Interactive, the newly renamed and redesigned Web-based iDocumaker module. Documaker Interactive enables users to quickly and interactively create and assemble compliant communications such as policy and claims correspondence directly from their desktops. Users benefits from built-in accelerators and rules-based configurability, pre-configured content as well as embedded workflow leveraging Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Documaker Documaker Factory, which helps enterprises reduce cost and improve operational efficiency through better management of their enterprise publishing operations. Dashboards, analytics, reporting and an administrative console provide insurers with greater insight and centralized control over document production allowing them to better adapt their resources based on business demands. Other enhancements include: enhanced business user empowerment; additional multi-language localization capabilities; and benefits from the use of powerful Oracle technologies such as the Oracle Application Development Framework for all interfaces and Oracle Universal Content Management (Oracle UCM) for enterprise content management. Drive Competitive Advantage and Growth: Deb Smallwood, founder of SMA Strategy Meets Action, a leading industry insurance analyst consulting firm and co-author of 3CM in Insurance: Customer Communications and Content Management published last month, noted in the press release that "maximum value can be gained from investments when Enterprise Document Automation (EDA) is viewed holistically and all forms of communication and all types of information are integrated across the entire enterprise. "Insurers that choose an approach that takes all communications, both structured and unstructured data, coming into the company from a wide range of channels, and then create seamless flows of information will have a real competitive advantage," Smallwood said. "This capability will soon become essential for selling, servicing, and ultimately driving growth through new business and retention." Learn More: Click here to watch a short flash demo that demonstrates the real business value offered by Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition. You can also see how an insurance company can use Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition to dynamically create, manage and publish adaptive enterprise content throughout the insurance business lifecycle for delivery across multiple channels by visiting Alamere Insurance, a fictional model insurance company created by Oracle to showcase how Oracle applications can be leveraged within the insurance enterprise. Meet Our Newest Oracle Insurance Blogger: I'm pleased to introduce our newest Oracle Insurance blogger, Susanne Hale. Susanne, who manages product marketing for Oracle Insurance EDA solutions, will be sharing insights about this topic along with examples of how our customers are transforming their enterprise communications using Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition in future Oracle Insurance blog entries. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.

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  • SQL Server – Learning SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics – Video

    - by pinaldave
    Today I remember one of my older cartoon years ago created for Indexing and Performance. Every single time when Performance is discussed, Indexes are mentioned along with it. In recent times, data and application complexity is continuously growing.  The demand for faster query response, performance, and scalability by organizations is increasing and developers and DBAs need to now write efficient code to achieve this. DBA and Developers A DBA’s role is critical, because a production environment has to run 24×7, hence maintenance, trouble shooting, and quick resolutions are the need of the hour.  The first baby step into any performance tuning exercise in SQL Server involves creating, analysing, and maintaining indexes. Though we have learnt indexing concepts from our college days, indexing implementation inside SQL Server can vary.  Understanding this behaviour and designing our applications appropriately will make sure the application is performed to its highest potential. Video Learning Vinod Kumar and myself we often thought about this and realized that practical understanding of the indexes is very important. One can not master every single aspects of the index. However there are some minimum expertise one should gain if performance is one of the concern. We decided to build a course which just addresses the practical aspects of the performance. In this course, we explored some of these indexing fundamentals and we elaborated on how SQL Server goes about using indexes.  At the end of this course of you will know the basic structure of indexes, practical insights into implementation, and maintenance tips and tricks revolving around indexes.  Finally, we will introduce SQL Server 2012 column store indexes.  We have refrained from discussing internal storage structure of the indexes but have taken a more practical, demo-oriented approach to explain these core concepts. Course Outline Here are salient topics of the course. We have explained every single concept along with a practical demonstration. Additionally shared our personal scripts along with the same. Introduction Fundamentals of Indexing Index Fundamentals Index Fundamentals – Visual Representation Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques Primary Key Over Indexing Duplicate Index Clustered Index Unique Index Included Columns Filtered Index Disabled Index Index Maintenance and Defragmentation Introduction to Columnstore Index Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks Index and Page Types Index and Non Deterministic Columns Index and SET Values Importance of Clustered Index Effect of Compression and Fillfactor Index and Functions Dynamic Management Views (DMV) – Fillfactor Table Scan, Index Scan and Index Seek Index and Order of Columns Final Checklist: Index and Performance Well, we believe we have done our part, now waiting for your comments and feedback. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution 3 – Powershell

    - by pinaldave
    Laerte Junior If you are a Powershell user, the name of the Laerte Junior is not a new name. He is the one man with exceptional knowledge of Powershell. He is not only very knowledgeable, but also very kind and eager to those in need. I have been attempting to setup Powershell for many days, but constantly facing issues. I was not able to get going with this tool. Finally, yesterday I sent email to Laerte in response to his comment posted here. Within 5 minutes, Laerte came online and helped me with the solution. He spend nearly 15 minutes working along with me to solve my problem with installation. And yes, he did resolve it remotely without looking at my screen – What a skilled and exceptional person!! I will soon post a detail note about the issue I faced and resolved with the help of Laerte. Here is his solution to my earlier puzzle in his own words. Read the original puzzle here and Laerte’s solution from here. Hi Pinal, I do not say better, but maybe another approach to enthusiasts in powershell and SQLSPX library would be: 1 – All indexes in all tables and all databases Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused 2 – All Indexes in all tables and specific database Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” “Yourdb” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused 3 – All Indexes in specific table and database Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” “Yourdb” | Get-SqlTable “YourTable” | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused and to output to txt.. pipe Out-File Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused | out-file c:\IndexesSize.txt If you have one txt with all your servers, can be for all of them also. Lets say you have all your servers in servers.txt: something like NameServer1 NameServer2 NameServer3 NameServer4 We could Use : foreach ($Server in Get-content c:\temp\servers.txt) { Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver $Server | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused } :) After fixing my issue with Powershell, I ran Laerte‘s second suggestion – “All Indexes in all tables and specific database” and found the following accurate output. Click to Enlarge Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Powershell

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  • SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution 3 – Powershell

    - by pinaldave
    Laerte Junior If you are a Powershell user, the name of the Laerte Junior is not a new name. He is the one man with exceptional knowledge of Powershell. He is not only very knowledgeable, but also very kind and eager to those in need. I have been attempting to setup Powershell for many days, but constantly facing issues. I was not able to get going with this tool. Finally, yesterday I sent email to Laerte in response to his comment posted here. Within 5 minutes, Laerte came online and helped me with the solution. He spend nearly 15 minutes working along with me to solve my problem with installation. And yes, he did resolve it remotely without looking at my screen – What a skilled and exceptional person!! I will soon post a detail note about the issue I faced and resolved with the help of Laerte. Here is his solution to my earlier puzzle in his own words. Read the original puzzle here and Laerte’s solution from here. Hi Pinal, I do not say better, but maybe another approach to enthusiasts in powershell and SQLSPX library would be: 1 – All indexes in all tables and all databases Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused 2 – All Indexes in all tables and specific database Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” “Yourdb” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused 3 – All Indexes in specific table and database Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” “Yourdb” | Get-SqlTable “YourTable” | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused and to output to txt.. pipe Out-File Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver “Yourserver” | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused | out-file c:\IndexesSize.txt If you have one txt with all your servers, can be for all of them also. Lets say you have all your servers in servers.txt: something like NameServer1 NameServer2 NameServer3 NameServer4 We could Use : foreach ($Server in Get-content c:\temp\servers.txt) { Get-SqlDatabase -sqlserver $Server | Get-SqlTable | Get-SqlIndex | Format-table Server,dbname,schema,table,name,id,spaceused } :) After fixing my issue with Powershell, I ran Laerte‘s second suggestion – “All Indexes in all tables and specific database” and found the following accurate output. Click to Enlarge Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Powershell

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  • Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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  • Entity Framework Code-First, OData & Windows Phone Client

    - by Jon Galloway
    Entity Framework Code-First is the coolest thing since sliced bread, Windows  Phone is the hottest thing since Tickle-Me-Elmo and OData is just too great to ignore. As part of the Full Stack project, we wanted to put them together, which turns out to be pretty easy… once you know how.   EF Code-First CTP5 is available now and there should be very few breaking changes in the release edition, which is due early in 2011.  Note: EF Code-First evolved rapidly and many of the existing documents and blog posts which were written with earlier versions, may now be obsolete or at least misleading.   Code-First? With traditional Entity Framework you start with a database and from that you generate “entities” – classes that bridge between the relational database and your object oriented program. With Code-First (Magic-Unicorn) (see Hanselman’s write up and this later write up by Scott Guthrie) the Entity Framework looks at classes you created and says “if I had created these classes, the database would have to have looked like this…” and creates the database for you! By deriving your entity collections from DbSet and exposing them via a class that derives from DbContext, you "turn on" database backing for your POCO with a minimum of code and no hidden designer or configuration files. POCO == Plain Old CLR Objects Your entity objects can be used throughout your applications - in web applications, console applications, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications, etc. In our case, we'll want to read and update data from a Windows Phone client application, so we'll expose the entities through a DataService and hook the Windows Phone client application to that data via proxies.  Piece of Pie.  Easy as cake. The Demo Architecture To see this at work, we’ll create an ASP.NET/MVC application which will act as the host for our Data Service.  We’ll create an incredibly simple data layer using EF Code-First on top of SQLCE4 and we’ll expose the data in a WCF Data Service using the oData protocol.  Our Windows Phone 7 client will instantiate  the data context via a URI and load the data asynchronously. Setting up the Server project with MVC 3, EF Code First, and SQL CE 4 Create a new application of type ASP.NET MVC 3 and name it DeadSimpleServer.  We need to add the latest SQLCE4 and Entity Framework Code First CTP's to our project. Fortunately, NuGet makes that really easy. Open the Package Manager Console (View / Other Windows / Package Manager Console) and type in "Install-Package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact" at the PM> command prompt. Since NuGet handles dependencies for you, you'll see that it installs everything you need to use Entity Framework Code First in your project. PM> install-package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 'SQLCE (= 4.0.8435.1)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'EFCodeFirst (= 0.8)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'WebActivator (= 1.0.0.0)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done You are downloading SQLCE from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' You are downloading EFCodeFirst from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206497. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' Successfully installed 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' You are downloading EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' Successfully added 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Note: We're using SQLCE 4 with Entity Framework here because they work really well together from a development scenario, but you can of course use Entity Framework Code First with other databases supported by Entity framework. Creating The Model using EF Code First Now we can create our model class. Right-click the Models folder and select Add/Class. Name the Class Person.cs and add the following code: using System.Data.Entity; namespace DeadSimpleServer.Models { public class Person { public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class PersonContext : DbContext { public DbSet<Person> People { get; set; } } } Notice that the entity class Person has no special interfaces or base class. There's nothing special needed to make it work - it's just a POCO. The context we'll use to access the entities in the application is called PersonContext, but you could name it anything you wanted. The important thing is that it inherits DbContext and contains one or more DbSet which holds our entity collections. Adding Seed Data We need some testing data to expose from our service. The simplest way to get that into our database is to modify the CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class in AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework.cs by adding some seed data to the Seed method: protected virtual void Seed( TContext context ) { var personContext = context as PersonContext; personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 1, Name = "George Washington" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 2, Name = "John Adams" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 3, Name = "Thomas Jefferson" } ); personContext.SaveChanges(); } The CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class name is pretty self-explanatory - when our DbContext is accessed and the database isn't found, a new one will be created and populated with the data in the Seed method. There's one more step to make that work - we need to uncomment a line in the Start method at the top of of the AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework class and set the context name, as shown here, public static class AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework { public static void Start() { DbDatabase.DefaultConnectionFactory = new SqlCeConnectionFactory("System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"); // Sets the default database initialization code for working with Sql Server Compact databases // Uncomment this line and replace CONTEXT_NAME with the name of your DbContext if you are // using your DbContext to create and manage your database DbDatabase.SetInitializer(new CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists<PersonContext>()); } } Now our database and entity framework are set up, so we can expose data via WCF Data Services. Note: This is a bare-bones implementation with no administration screens. If you'd like to see how those are added, check out The Full Stack screencast series. Creating the oData Service using WCF Data Services Add a new WCF Data Service to the project (right-click the project / Add New Item / Web / WCF Data Service). We’ll be exposing all the data as read/write.  Remember to reconfigure to control and minimize access as appropriate for your own application. Open the code behind for your service. In our case, the service was called PersonTestDataService.svc so the code behind class file is PersonTestDataService.svc.cs. using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.ServiceModel; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; namespace DeadSimpleServer { [ServiceBehavior( IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true )] public class PersonTestDataService : DataService<PersonContext> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService( DataServiceConfiguration config ) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule( "*", EntitySetRights.All ); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; config.UseVerboseErrors = true; } } } We're enabling a few additional settings to make it easier to debug if you run into trouble. The ServiceBehavior attribute is set to include exception details in faults, and we're using verbose errors. You can remove both of these when your service is working, as your public production service shouldn't be revealing exception information. You can view the output of the service by running the application and browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/: <service xml:base="http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:app="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app"> <workspace> <atom:title>Default</atom:title> <collection href="People"> <atom:title>People</atom:title> </collection> </workspace> </service> This indicates that the service exposes one collection, which is accessible by browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/People <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes"?> <feed xml:base=http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/ xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <title type="text">People</title> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People</id> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <link rel="self" title="People" href="People" /> <entry> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People(1)</id> <title type="text"></title> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <link rel="edit" title="Person" href="People(1)" /> <category term="DeadSimpleServer.Models.Person" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:ID m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:ID> <d:Name>George Washington</d:Name> </m:properties> </content> </entry> <entry> ... </entry> </feed> Let's recap what we've done so far. But enough with services and XML - let's get this into our Windows Phone client application. Creating the DataServiceContext for the Client Use the latest DataSvcUtil.exe from http://odata.codeplex.com. As of today, that's in this download: http://odata.codeplex.com/releases/view/54698 You need to run it with a few options: /uri - This will point to the service URI. In this case, it's http://localhost:59342/PersonTestDataService.svc  Pick up the port number from your running server (e.g., the server formerly known as Cassini). /out - This is the DataServiceContext class that will be generated. You can name it whatever you'd like. /Version - should be set to 2.0 /DataServiceCollection - Include this flag to generate collections derived from the DataServiceCollection base, which brings in all the ObservableCollection goodness that handles your INotifyPropertyChanged events for you. Here's the console session from when we ran it: <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> Next, to keep things simple, change the Binding on the two TextBlocks within the DataTemplate to Name and ID, <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding ID}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Getting The Context In the code-behind you’ll first declare a member variable to hold the context from the Entity Framework. This is named using convention over configuration. The db type is Person and the context is of type PersonContext, You initialize it by providing the URI, in this case using the URL obtained from the Cassini web server, PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); Create a second member variable of type DataServiceCollection<Person> but do not initialize it, DataServiceCollection<Person> people; In the constructor you’ll initialize the DataServiceCollection using the PersonContext, public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); Finally, you’ll load the people collection using the LoadAsync method, passing in the fully specified URI for the People collection in the web service, people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); Note that this method runs asynchronously and when it is finished the people  collection is already populated. Thus, since we didn’t need or want to override any of the behavior we don’t implement the LoadCompleted. You can use the LoadCompleted event if you need to do any other UI updates, but you don't need to. The final code is as shown below: using System; using System.Data.Services.Client; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; namespace WindowsPhoneODataTest { public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); DataServiceCollection<Person> people; // Constructor public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); // Set the data context of the listbox control to the sample data // DataContext = App.ViewModel; people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); DataContext = people; this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler( MainPage_Loaded ); } // Handle selection changed on ListBox private void MainListBox_SelectionChanged( object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e ) { // If selected index is -1 (no selection) do nothing if ( MainListBox.SelectedIndex == -1 ) return; // Navigate to the new page NavigationService.Navigate( new Uri( "/DetailsPage.xaml?selectedItem=" + MainListBox.SelectedIndex, UriKind.Relative ) ); // Reset selected index to -1 (no selection) MainListBox.SelectedIndex = -1; } // Load data for the ViewModel Items private void MainPage_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { if ( !App.ViewModel.IsDataLoaded ) { App.ViewModel.LoadData(); } } } } With people populated we can set it as the DataContext and run the application; you’ll find that the Name and ID are displayed in the list on the Mainpage. Here's how the pieces in the client fit together: Complete source code available here

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  • An Open Letter from Lyle Ekdahl, Group Vice President and General Manager, Oracle's JD Edwards

    - by Brian Dayton
    From Lyle Ekdahl, Group Vice President and General Manager, Oracle's JD Edwards As you may have heard, we recently announced some changes to the way Oracle will offer licensing of technology products with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. Specifically, we have withdrawn from new sales the product known as JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Technology Foundation ("Blue Stack"). Our motivation for this change is simply to streamline licensing for our customers. Going forward, customers will license Oracle products from Oracle and IBM products from IBM. Customers who are currently licensed for Technology Foundation will continue to receive support--unchanged--through September 30, 2016. This announcement affects how customers license these IBM products; it does not affect Oracle's certification roadmap for IBM products with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. Customers who are currently running their JD Edwards EnterpriseOne infrastructure using IBM platform components can continue to do so regardless of whether they license these components via Technology Foundation or directly from IBM. New customers choosing to run JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on IBM technology should license JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Core Tools from Oracle while licensing Infrastructure and any licenses of IBM products from IBM. For more information about this announcement, customers should refer to My Oracle Support article 1232453.1 Questions included in the "Frequently Asked Questions" document on My Oracle Support: Is Oracle dropping support for IBM DB2 and IBM WebSphere with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne? No. This announcement affects how customers license these IBM products; it does not affect Oracle's certification roadmap for these products. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne matrix of supported databases, web servers, and portals remains unchanged, including planned support for IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere Application Server, and IBM WebSphere Portal. Customers who are currently running their JD Edwards EnterpriseOne infrastructure using IBM platform components can continue to do so regardless of whether they license these components via Technology Foundation or directly from IBM. As always, the timing and versions of such third-party certifications remain at Oracle's discretion. Does this announcement mean that Oracle is withdrawing support for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on the IBM i platform? Absolutely not. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne support on the IBM i platform remains unchanged. This announcement simply states that customers will acquire Oracle products from Oracle and IBM products from IBM. In fact, as evidenced by the recent "IBM i Solution Edition for JD Edwards" offering, IBM and the JD Edwards product teams continue to innovate and offer attractive, cost-competitive solutions to the ERP marketplace. For more information about this offering see: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/advantages/oracle/. I hope this clarifies any concerns. Let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns. -Lyle

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  • Older SAS1 hardware Vs. newer SAS2 hardware

    - by user12620172
    I got a question today from someone asking about the older SAS1 hardware from over a year ago that we had on the older 7x10 series. They didn't leave an email so I couldn't respond directly, but I said this blog would be blunt, frank, and open so I have no problem addressing it publicly. A quick history lesson here: When Sun first put out the 7x10 family hardware, the 7410 and 7310 used a SAS1 backend connection to a JBOD that had SATA drives in it. This JBOD was not manufactured by Sun nor did Sun own the IP for it. Now, when Oracle took over, they had a problem with that, and I really can’t blame them. The decision was made to cut off that JBOD and it’s manufacturer completely and use our own where Oracle controlled both the IP and the manufacturing. So in the summer of 2010, the cut was made, and the 7410 and 7310 had a hardware refresh and now had a SAS2 backend going to a SAS2 JBOD with SAS2 drives instead of SATA. This new hardware had two big advantages. First, there was a nice performance increase, mostly due to the faster backend. Even better, the SAS2 interface on the drives allowed for a MUCH faster failover between cluster heads, as the SATA drives were the bottleneck on the older hardware. In September of 2010 there was a major refresh of the rest of the 7000 hardware, the controllers and the other family members, and that’s where we got today’s current line-up of the 7x20 series. So the 7x20 has always used the new trays, and the 7410 and 7310 have used the new SAS2 trays since last July of 2010. Now for the bad news. People who have the 7410 and 7310 from BEFORE the July 2010 cutoff have the models with SAS1 HBAs in them to connect to the older SAS1 trays. Remember, that manufacturer cut all ties with us and stopped making the JBOD, so there’s just no way to get more of them, as they don’t exist. There are some options, however. Oracle support does support taking out the SAS1 HBAs in the old 7410 and 7310 and put in newer SAS2 HBAs which can talk to the new trays. Hey, I didn’t say it was a great option, I just said it’s an option. I fully realize that you would then have a SAS1 JBOD full of SATA drives that you could no longer connect. I do know a client that did this, and took the SAS1 JBOD and connected it to another server and formatted the drives and is using it as a plain, non-7000 JBOD. This is not supported by Oracle support. The other option is to just keep it as-is, as it works just fine, but you just can’t expand it. Then you can get a newer 7x20 series, and use the built-in ZFSSA replication feature to move the data over. Now you can use the newer one for your production data and use the older one for DR, snaps and clones.

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  • Toorcon14

    - by danx
    Toorcon 2012 Information Security Conference San Diego, CA, http://www.toorcon.org/ Dan Anderson, October 2012 It's almost Halloween, and we all know what that means—yes, of course, it's time for another Toorcon Conference! Toorcon is an annual conference for people interested in computer security. This includes the whole range of hackers, computer hobbyists, professionals, security consultants, press, law enforcement, prosecutors, FBI, etc. We're at Toorcon 14—see earlier blogs for some of the previous Toorcon's I've attended (back to 2003). This year's "con" was held at the Westin on Broadway in downtown San Diego, California. The following are not necessarily my views—I'm just the messenger—although I could have misquoted or misparaphrased the speakers. Also, I only reviewed some of the talks, below, which I attended and interested me. MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections, Aditya K. Sood Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata, Rebecca "bx" Shapiro Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules?, Valkyrie Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI, Dan Griffin You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program, Boris Sverdlik What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking, Dave Maas & Jason Leopold Accessibility and Security, Anna Shubina Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance, Adam Brand McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend, Jay James & Shane MacDougall MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections Aditya K. Sood, IOActive, Michigan State PhD candidate Aditya talked about Android smartphone malware. There's a lot of old Android software out there—over 50% Gingerbread (2.3.x)—and most have unpatched vulnerabilities. Of 9 Android vulnerabilities, 8 have known exploits (such as the old Gingerbread Global Object Table exploit). Android protection includes sandboxing, security scanner, app permissions, and screened Android app market. The Android permission checker has fine-grain resource control, policy enforcement. Android static analysis also includes a static analysis app checker (bouncer), and a vulnerablity checker. What security problems does Android have? User-centric security, which depends on the user to grant permission and make smart decisions. But users don't care or think about malware (the're not aware, not paranoid). All they want is functionality, extensibility, mobility Android had no "proper" encryption before Android 3.0 No built-in protection against social engineering and web tricks Alternative Android app markets are unsafe. Simply visiting some markets can infect Android Aditya classified Android Malware types as: Type A—Apps. These interact with the Android app framework. For example, a fake Netflix app. Or Android Gold Dream (game), which uploads user files stealthy manner to a remote location. Type K—Kernel. Exploits underlying Linux libraries or kernel Type H—Hybrid. These use multiple layers (app framework, libraries, kernel). These are most commonly used by Android botnets, which are popular with Chinese botnet authors What are the threats from Android malware? These incude leak info (contacts), banking fraud, corporate network attacks, malware advertising, malware "Hackivism" (the promotion of social causes. For example, promiting specific leaders of the Tunisian or Iranian revolutions. Android malware is frequently "masquerated". That is, repackaged inside a legit app with malware. To avoid detection, the hidden malware is not unwrapped until runtime. The malware payload can be hidden in, for example, PNG files. Less common are Android bootkits—there's not many around. What they do is hijack the Android init framework—alteering system programs and daemons, then deletes itself. For example, the DKF Bootkit (China). Android App Problems: no code signing! all self-signed native code execution permission sandbox — all or none alternate market places no robust Android malware detection at network level delayed patch process Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata Rebecca "bx" Shapiro, Dartmouth College, NH https://github.com/bx/elf-bf-tools @bxsays on twitter Definitions. "ELF" is an executable file format used in linking and loading executables (on UNIX/Linux-class machines). "Weird machine" uses undocumented computation sources (I think of them as unintended virtual machines). Some examples of "weird machines" are those that: return to weird location, does SQL injection, corrupts the heap. Bx then talked about using ELF metadata as (an uintended) "weird machine". Some ELF background: A compiler takes source code and generates a ELF object file (hello.o). A static linker makes an ELF executable from the object file. A runtime linker and loader takes ELF executable and loads and relocates it in memory. The ELF file has symbols to relocate functions and variables. ELF has two relocation tables—one at link time and another one at loading time: .rela.dyn (link time) and .dynsym (dynamic table). GOT: Global Offset Table of addresses for dynamically-linked functions. PLT: Procedure Linkage Tables—works with GOT. The memory layout of a process (not the ELF file) is, in order: program (+ heap), dynamic libraries, libc, ld.so, stack (which includes the dynamic table loaded into memory) For ELF, the "weird machine" is found and exploited in the loader. ELF can be crafted for executing viruses, by tricking runtime into executing interpreted "code" in the ELF symbol table. One can inject parasitic "code" without modifying the actual ELF code portions. Think of the ELF symbol table as an "assembly language" interpreter. It has these elements: instructions: Add, move, jump if not 0 (jnz) Think of symbol table entries as "registers" symbol table value is "contents" immediate values are constants direct values are addresses (e.g., 0xdeadbeef) move instruction: is a relocation table entry add instruction: relocation table "addend" entry jnz instruction: takes multiple relocation table entries The ELF weird machine exploits the loader by relocating relocation table entries. The loader will go on forever until told to stop. It stores state on stack at "end" and uses IFUNC table entries (containing function pointer address). The ELF weird machine, called "Brainfu*k" (BF) has: 8 instructions: pointer inc, dec, inc indirect, dec indirect, jump forward, jump backward, print. Three registers - 3 registers Bx showed example BF source code that implemented a Turing machine printing "hello, world". More interesting was the next demo, where bx modified ping. Ping runs suid as root, but quickly drops privilege. BF modified the loader to disable the library function call dropping privilege, so it remained as root. Then BF modified the ping -t argument to execute the -t filename as root. It's best to show what this modified ping does with an example: $ whoami bx $ ping localhost -t backdoor.sh # executes backdoor $ whoami root $ The modified code increased from 285948 bytes to 290209 bytes. A BF tool compiles "executable" by modifying the symbol table in an existing ELF executable. The tool modifies .dynsym and .rela.dyn table, but not code or data. Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules? "Valkyrie" (Christie Dudley, Santa Clara Law JD candidate) Valkyrie talked about mobile handset privacy. Some background: Senator Franken (also a comedian) became alarmed about CarrierIQ, where the carriers track their customers. Franken asked the FCC to find out what obligations carriers think they have to protect privacy. The carriers' response was that they are doing just fine with self-regulation—no worries! Carriers need to collect data, such as missed calls, to maintain network quality. But carriers also sell data for marketing. Verizon sells customer data and enables this with a narrow privacy policy (only 1 month to opt out, with difficulties). The data sold is not individually identifiable and is aggregated. But Verizon recommends, as an aggregation workaround to "recollate" data to other databases to identify customers indirectly. The FCC has regulated telephone privacy since 1934 and mobile network privacy since 2007. Also, the carriers say mobile phone privacy is a FTC responsibility (not FCC). FTC is trying to improve mobile app privacy, but FTC has no authority over carrier / customer relationships. As a side note, Apple iPhones are unique as carriers have extra control over iPhones they don't have with other smartphones. As a result iPhones may be more regulated. Who are the consumer advocates? Everyone knows EFF, but EPIC (Electrnic Privacy Info Center), although more obsecure, is more relevant. What to do? Carriers must be accountable. Opt-in and opt-out at any time. Carriers need incentive to grant users control for those who want it, by holding them liable and responsible for breeches on their clock. Location information should be added current CPNI privacy protection, and require "Pen/trap" judicial order to obtain (and would still be a lower standard than 4th Amendment). Politics are on a pro-privacy swing now, with many senators and the Whitehouse. There will probably be new regulation soon, and enforcement will be a problem, but consumers will still have some benefit. Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI Dan Griffin, JWSecure, Inc., Seattle, @JWSdan Dan talked about hacking measured UEFI boot. First some terms: UEFI is a boot technology that is replacing BIOS (has whitelisting and blacklisting). UEFI protects devices against rootkits. TPM - hardware security device to store hashs and hardware-protected keys "secure boot" can control at firmware level what boot images can boot "measured boot" OS feature that tracks hashes (from BIOS, boot loader, krnel, early drivers). "remote attestation" allows remote validation and control based on policy on a remote attestation server. Microsoft pushing TPM (Windows 8 required), but Google is not. Intel TianoCore is the only open source for UEFI. Dan has Measured Boot Tool at http://mbt.codeplex.com/ with a demo where you can also view TPM data. TPM support already on enterprise-class machines. UEFI Weaknesses. UEFI toolkits are evolving rapidly, but UEFI has weaknesses: assume user is an ally trust TPM implicitly, and attached to computer hibernate file is unprotected (disk encryption protects against this) protection migrating from hardware to firmware delays in patching and whitelist updates will UEFI really be adopted by the mainstream (smartphone hardware support, bank support, apathetic consumer support) You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program Boris Sverdlik, ISDPodcast.com co-host Boris talked about problems typical with current security audits. "IT Security" is an oxymoron—IT exists to enable buiness, uptime, utilization, reporting, but don't care about security—IT has conflict of interest. There's no Magic Bullet ("blinky box"), no one-size-fits-all solution (e.g., Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs)). Regulations don't make you secure. The cloud is not secure (because of shared data and admin access). Defense and pen testing is not sexy. Auditors are not solution (security not a checklist)—what's needed is experience and adaptability—need soft skills. Step 1: First thing is to Google and learn the company end-to-end before you start. Get to know the management team (not IT team), meet as many people as you can. Don't use arbitrary values such as CISSP scores. Quantitive risk assessment is a myth (e.g. AV*EF-SLE). Learn different Business Units, legal/regulatory obligations, learn the business and where the money is made, verify company is protected from script kiddies (easy), learn sensitive information (IP, internal use only), and start with low-hanging fruit (customer service reps and social engineering). Step 2: Policies. Keep policies short and relevant. Generic SANS "security" boilerplate policies don't make sense and are not followed. Focus on acceptable use, data usage, communications, physical security. Step 3: Implementation: keep it simple stupid. Open source, although useful, is not free (implementation cost). Access controls with authentication & authorization for local and remote access. MS Windows has it, otherwise use OpenLDAP, OpenIAM, etc. Application security Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel—use existing static analysis tools. Review high-risk apps and major revisions. Don't run different risk level apps on same system. Assume host/client compromised and use app-level security control. Network security VLAN != segregated because there's too many workarounds. Use explicit firwall rules, active and passive network monitoring (snort is free), disallow end user access to production environment, have a proxy instead of direct Internet access. Also, SSL certificates are not good two-factor auth and SSL does not mean "safe." Operational Controls Have change, patch, asset, & vulnerability management (OSSI is free). For change management, always review code before pushing to production For logging, have centralized security logging for business-critical systems, separate security logging from administrative/IT logging, and lock down log (as it has everything). Monitor with OSSIM (open source). Use intrusion detection, but not just to fulfill a checkbox: build rules from a whitelist perspective (snort). OSSEC has 95% of what you need. Vulnerability management is a QA function when done right: OpenVas and Seccubus are free. Security awareness The reality is users will always click everything. Build real awareness, not compliance driven checkbox, and have it integrated into the culture. Pen test by crowd sourcing—test with logging COSSP http://www.cossp.org/ - Comprehensive Open Source Security Project What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking Dave Maas, San Diego CityBeat Jason Leopold, Truthout.org The difference between hackers and investigative journalists: For hackers, the motivation varies, but method is same, technological specialties. For investigative journalists, it's about one thing—The Story, and they need broad info-gathering skills. J-School in 60 Seconds: Generic formula: Person or issue of pubic interest, new info, or angle. Generic criteria: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence. Media awareness of hackers and trends: journalists becoming extremely aware of hackers with congressional debates (privacy, data breaches), demand for data-mining Journalists, use of coding and web development for Journalists, and Journalists busted for hacking (Murdock). Info gathering by investigative journalists include Public records laws. Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is good, but slow. California Public Records Act is a lot stronger. FOIA takes forever because of foot-dragging—it helps to be specific. Often need to sue (especially FBI). CPRA is faster, and requests can be vague. Dumps and leaks (a la Wikileaks) Journalists want: leads, protecting ourselves, our sources, and adapting tools for news gathering (Google hacking). Anonomity is important to whistleblowers. They want no digital footprint left behind (e.g., email, web log). They don't trust encryption, want to feel safe and secure. Whistleblower laws are very weak—there's no upside for whistleblowers—they have to be very passionate to do it. Accessibility and Security or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Halting Problem Anna Shubina, Dartmouth College Anna talked about how accessibility and security are related. Accessibility of digital content (not real world accessibility). mostly refers to blind users and screenreaders, for our purpose. Accessibility is about parsing documents, as are many security issues. "Rich" executable content causes accessibility to fail, and often causes security to fail. For example MS Word has executable format—it's not a document exchange format—more dangerous than PDF or HTML. Accessibility is often the first and maybe only sanity check with parsing. They have no choice because someone may want to read what you write. Google, for example, is very particular about web browser you use and are bad at supporting other browsers. Uses JavaScript instead of links, often requiring mouseover to display content. PDF is a security nightmare. Executible format, embedded flash, JavaScript, etc. 15 million lines of code. Google Chrome doesn't handle PDF correctly, causing several security bugs. PDF has an accessibility checker and PDF tagging, to help with accessibility. But no PDF checker checks for incorrect tags, untagged content, or validates lists or tables. None check executable content at all. The "Halting Problem" is: can one decide whether a program will ever stop? The answer, in general, is no (Rice's theorem). The same holds true for accessibility checkers. Language-theoretic Security says complicated data formats are hard to parse and cannot be solved due to the Halting Problem. W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines: "Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust" Not much help though, except for "Robust", but here's some gems: * all information should be parsable (paraphrasing) * if not parsable, cannot be converted to alternate formats * maximize compatibility in new document formats Executible webpages are bad for security and accessibility. They say it's for a better web experience. But is it necessary to stuff web pages with JavaScript for a better experience? A good example is The Drudge Report—it has hand-written HTML with no JavaScript, yet drives a lot of web traffic due to good content. A bad example is Google News—hidden scrollbars, guessing user input. Solutions: Accessibility and security problems come from same source Expose "better user experience" myth Keep your corner of Internet parsable Remember "Halting Problem"—recognize false solutions (checking and verifying tools) Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance Adam Brand, protiviti @adamrbrand, http://www.picfun.com/ Adam talked about PCI compliance for retail sales. Take an example: for PCI compliance, 50% of Brian's time (a IT guy), 960 hours/year was spent patching POSs in 850 restaurants. Often applying some patches make no sense (like fixing a browser vulnerability on a server). "Scanner worship" is overuse of vulnerability scanners—it gives a warm and fuzzy and it's simple (red or green results—fix reds). Scanners give a false sense of security. In reality, breeches from missing patches are uncommon—more common problems are: default passwords, cleartext authentication, misconfiguration (firewall ports open). Patching Myths: Myth 1: install within 30 days of patch release (but PCI §6.1 allows a "risk-based approach" instead). Myth 2: vendor decides what's critical (also PCI §6.1). But §6.2 requires user ranking of vulnerabilities instead. Myth 3: scan and rescan until it passes. But PCI §11.2.1b says this applies only to high-risk vulnerabilities. Adam says good recommendations come from NIST 800-40. Instead use sane patching and focus on what's really important. From NIST 800-40: Proactive: Use a proactive vulnerability management process: use change control, configuration management, monitor file integrity. Monitor: start with NVD and other vulnerability alerts, not scanner results. Evaluate: public-facing system? workstation? internal server? (risk rank) Decide:on action and timeline Test: pre-test patches (stability, functionality, rollback) for change control Install: notify, change control, tickets McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend Jay James, Shane MacDougall, Tactical Intelligence Inc., Canada "McAfee Secure Trustmark" is a website seal marketed by McAfee. A website gets this badge if they pass their remote scanning. The problem is a removal of trustmarks act as flags that you're vulnerable. Easy to view status change by viewing McAfee list on website or on Google. "Secure TrustGuard" is similar to McAfee. Jay and Shane wrote Perl scripts to gather sites from McAfee and search engines. If their certification image changes to a 1x1 pixel image, then they are longer certified. Their scripts take deltas of scans to see what changed daily. The bottom line is change in TrustGuard status is a flag for hackers to attack your site. Entire idea of seals is silly—you're raising a flag saying if you're vulnerable.

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  • SQL SERVER – WRITELOG – Wait Type – Day 17 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    WRITELOG is one of the most interesting wait types. So far we have seen a lot of different wait types, but this log type is associated with log file which makes it interesting to deal with. From Book On-Line: WRITELOG Occurs while waiting for a log flush to complete. Common operations that cause log flushes are checkpoints and transaction commits. WRITELOG Explanation: This wait type is usually seen in the heavy transactional database. When data is modified, it is written both on the log cache and buffer cache. This wait type occurs when data in the log cache is flushing to the disk. During this time, the session has to wait due to WRITELOG. I have recently seen this wait type’s persistence at my client’s place, where one of the long-running transactions was stopped by the user causing it to roll back. In the future, I will see if I could re-create this situation once again on my machine to validate the relation. Reducing WRITELOG wait: There are several suggestions to reduce this wait stats: Move Transaction Log to Separate Disk from mdf and other files. Avoid cursor-like coding methodology and frequent committing of statements. Find the most active file based on IO stall time based on the script written over here. You can also use fn_virtualfilestats to find IO-related issues using the script mentioned over here. Check the IO-related counters (PhysicalDisk:Avg.Disk Queue Length, PhysicalDisk:Disk Read Bytes/sec and PhysicalDisk :Disk Write Bytes/sec) for additional details. Read about them over here. There are two excellent resources by Paul Randal, I suggest you understand the subject from those videos. The links to videos are here and here. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • Using DNFS for test purposes

    - by rene.kundersma
    Because of other priorities such as bringing the first v2 Database Machine in Netherlands into production I did spend less time on my blog that planned. I do however like to tell some things about DNFS, the build-in NFS client we have in Oracle RDBMS since 11.1. What DNFS is and how to set it up can all be found here . As you see this documentation is actually the "Clusterware Installation Guide". I think that is weird, I would expect this to be part of the Admin Guide, especially the "Tablespace" chapter. I do however want to show what I did not find in the documentation that quickly (and solved after talking to my famous colleague "the prutser"): First, a quick setup: 1. The standard ODM library needs to be replaced with the NFS ODM library: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cp $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so_stub [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ ln -s $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libnfsodm11.so $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libodm11.so After changing to this library you will notice the following in your alert.log: Oracle instance running with ODM: Oracle Direct NFS ODM Library Version 2.0 2. The intention is to mount the datafiles over normal NAS (like NetApp). But, in case you want to test yourself and use an exported NFS filesystem, it should look like the following: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cat /etc/exports /u01/scratch/nfs *(rw,sync,insecure) Please note the "insecure" option in the export, since you will not be able to use DNFS without it if you export a filesystem from a host. Without the "insecure" option the NFS server considers the port used by the database "insecure" and the database is unable to acquire the mount: Direct NFS: NFS3ERR 1 Not owner. path ocm01.nl.oracle.com mntport 930 nfsport 2049 3. Before configuring the new Oracle stanza for NFS we still need to configure a regular kernel NFS mount: [root@ocm01 ~]# cat /etc/fstab | grep nfs ocm01.nl.oracle.com:/u01/scratch/nfs /incoming nfs rw,bg,hard,nointr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,tcp,actimeo=0,vers=3,timeo=600 4. Then a so called Oracle-'nfstab' needs to be created that specifies what the available exports to use: [oracle@ocm01 ~]$ cat /etc/oranfstab server:ocm01.nl.oracle.com path:192.168.1.40 export:/u01/scratch/nfs mount:/incoming 5. Creating a tablespace with a datafile on the NFS location: SQL create tablespace rk datafile '/incoming/rk.dbf' size 10M; Tablespace created. Be sure to know that it may happen that you do not specify the insecure option (like I did). In that case you will still see output from the query v$dnfs_servers: SQL select * from v$dnfs_servers; ID SVRNAME DIRNAME MNTPORT NFSPORT WTMAX RTMAX -- -------------------- ----------------- --------- ---------- ------ ------ 1 ocm01.nl.oracle.com /u01/scratch/nfs 684 2049 32768 32768 But, querying v$dnfsfiles and v$dnfs_channels will now return any result, and indeed, you will see the following message in the alert-log when you create a file : Direct NFS: NFS3ERR 1 Not owner. path ocm01.nl.oracle.com mntport 930 nfsport 2049 After correcting the export: SQL select * from v$dnfs_files; FILENAME FILESIZE PNUM SVR_ID --------------- -------- ------ ------ /incoming/rk.dbf 10493952 20 1 Rene Kundersma Oracle Technology Services, The Netherlands

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  • SQL SERVER – FT_IFTS_SCHEDULER_IDLE_WAIT – Full Text – Wait Type – Day 13 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    In the last few days during this series, I got many question about this Wait type. It would be great if you read my original related wait stats query in the first post because I have filtered it out in WHERE clause. However, I still get questions about this being one of the most wait types they encounter. The truth is, this is a background task processing and it really does not matter and it should be filtered out. There are many new Wait types related to Full Text Search that are introduced in SQL Server 2008. If you run the following query, you will be able to find them in the list. Currently there is not enough information for all of them available on BOL or any other place. But don’t worry; I will write an in-depth article when I learn more about them. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats WHERE wait_type LIKE 'FT_%' The result set will contain following rows. FT_RESTART_CRAWL FT_METADATA_MUTEX FT_IFTSHC_MUTEX FT_IFTSISM_MUTEX FT_IFTS_RWLOCK FT_COMPROWSET_RWLOCK FT_MASTER_MERGE FT_IFTS_SCHEDULER_IDLE_WAIT We have understood so far that there is not much information available. But the problem is when you have this Wait type, what should you do?  The answer is to filter them out for the moment (i.e, do not pay attention on them) and focus on other pressing issues in wait stats or performance tuning. Here are two of my informal suggestions, which are totally independent from wait stats: Turn off the Full Text Search service in your system if you are  not necessarily using it on your server. Learn proper Full Text Search methodology. You can get Michael Coles’ book: Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008. Now I invite you to speak out your suggestions or any input regarding Full Text-related best practices and wait stats issue. Please leave a comment. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • Oracle SQL Developer is for Oracle Database

    - by thatjeffsmith
    What is Oracle SQL Developer? Well, according to this document on OTN… What is SQL Developer? Date: May 2014 Oracle SQL Developer is the Oracle Database IDE. A free graphical user interface, Oracle SQL Developer allows database users and administrators to do their database tasks in fewer clicks and keystrokes. A productivity tool, SQL Developer’s main objective is to help the end user save time and maximize the return on investment in the Oracle Database technology stack. Ok, sounds pretty straightforward. Where does the confusion lie then? Some People Use SQL Developer to Connect to 3rd Party Databases SQL Developer allows you to register 3rd party database JDBC drivers. The 3rd party being a company OTHER than Oracle that makes a database product. You know who they are (SAP, MSFT, IBM, etc.) Registering 3rd party JDBC drivers in SQL Developer But maybe you don’t understand why we support these types of connections? It’s for one driving reason. To Help You Migrate to Oracle Database Yes, you get a worksheet and a tree to query and browse those systems. But, the real meat and bones there are around our migration projects and our translation scratch editor. At the end of the day, it’s there so you can move your data from say Sybase ASE to Oracle Database. On a side note, the migration technology was previously available in a separate application, the Migration Workbench. The technology and the awesome people behind it were folded into SQL Developer. So when asked what SQL Developer is, I say it’s the Database IDE and the official 3rd party database migration to Oracle platform. So anyways, when you ask for better support for another 3rd party provider, we deliver that support based on that business driver. If another 3rd party database jdbc driver is introduced, it’s because we have a lot of customers migrating from that platform. We’re not adding it to make it easier for you to work with SQL Server on your Mac. But, if you find that useful – that is cool. It’s just not why we’ve got the support for SQL Server connections in SQL Developer.

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  • Oracle Service Registry 11gR1 Support for Oracle Fusion Middleware/SOA Suite 11g PatchSet 2

    - by Dave Berry
    As you might be aware, a few days back we released Patchset 2 (PS2) for several products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 stack including WebLogic Server and SOA Suite. Though there was no patchset released for Oracle Service Registry (OSR) 11g, being an integral part of Fusion Middleware & SOA, OSR 11g R1 ( 11.1.1.2 ) is fully certified with this release. Below is some recommended reading before installing OSR 11g with the new PS2 : OSR 11g R1 & SOA Suite 11g PS2 in a Shared WebLogic Domain If you intend to deploy OSR 11g in the same domain as the SOA Suite 11g, the primary recommendation is to install OSR 11g in its own Managed Server within the same Weblogic Domain as the SOA Suite, as the following diagram depicts : An important pre-requisite for this setup is to apply Patch 9499508, after installation. It basically replaces a registry library - wasp.jar - in the registry application deployed on your server, so as to enable co-deployment of OSR 11g & SOA Suite 11g in the same WLS Domain. The patch fixes a java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation that appears in your OSR system log and is now available for download. The second, equally important, pre-requisite is to modify the setDomainEnv.sh/.cmd file for your WebLogic Domain to conditionally set the CLASSPATH so that the oracle.soa.fabric.jar library is not included in it for the Managed Server(s) hosting OSR 11g. Both these pre-requisites and other OSR 11g Topology Best Practices are covered in detail in the new Knowledge Base article Oracle Service Registry 11g Topology : Best Practices. Architecting an OSR 11g High Availability Setup Typically you would want to create a High Availability (HA) OSR 11g setup, especially on your production system. The following illustrates the recommended topology. The article, Hands-on Guide to Creating an Oracle Service Registry 11g High-Availability Setup on Oracle WebLogic Server 11g on OTN provides step-by-step instructions for creating such an active-active HA setup of multiple OSR 11g nodes with a Load Balancer in an Oracle WebLogic Server cluster environment. Additional Info The OSR Home Page on OTN is the hub for OSR and is regularly updated with latest information, articles, white papers etc. For further reading, this FAQ answers some common questions on OSR. The OSR Certification Matrix lists the Application Servers, Databases, Artifact Storage Tools, Web Browsers, IDEs, etc... that OSR 11g is certified against. If you hit any problems during OSR 11g installation, design time or runtime, the first place to look into is the logs. To find more details about which logs to check when & where, take a look at Where to find Oracle Service Registry Logs? Finally, if you have any questions or problems, there are various ways to reach us - on the SOA Governance forum on OTN, on the Community Forums or by contacting Oracle Support. Yogesh Sontakke and Dave Berry

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  • ASP.NET Dynamic Data Deployment Error

    - by rajbk
    You have an ASP.NET 3.5 dynamic data website that works great on your local box. When you deploy it to your production machine and turn on debug, you get the YSD Server Error in '/MyPath/MyApp' Application. Parser Error Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Unknown server tag 'asp:DynamicDataManager'. Source Error: Line 5:  Line 6:  <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" Runat="Server"> Line 7:      <asp:DynamicDataManager ID="DynamicDataManager1" runat="server" AutoLoadForeignKeys="true" /> Line 8:  Line 9:      <h2><%= table.DisplayName%></h2> Probable Causes The server does not have .NET 3.5 SP1, which includes ASP.NET Dynamic Data, installed. Download it here. The third tagPrefix shown below is missing from web.config <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.DynamicData" assembly="System.Web.DynamicData, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> </controls></pages>     Hope that helps!

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  • Developer’s Life – Every Developer is a Spiderman

    - by Pinal Dave
    I have to admit, Spiderman is my favorite superhero.  The most recent movie recently was released in theaters, so it has been at the front of my mind for some time. Spiderman was my favorite superhero even before the latest movie came out, but of course I took my whole family to see the movie as soon as I could!  Every one of us loved it, including my daughter.  We all left the movie thinking how great it would be to be Spiderman.  So, with that in mind, I started thinking about how we are like Spiderman in our everyday lives, especially developers. Let me list some of the reasons why I think every developer is a Spiderman. We have special powers, just like a superhero.  There is a reason that when there are problems or emergencies, we get called in, just like a superhero!  Our powers might not be the ability to swing through skyscrapers on a web, our powers are our debugging abilities, but there are still similarities! Spiderman never gives up.  He might not be the strongest superhero, and the ability to shoot web from your wrists is a pretty cool power, it’s not as impressive as being able to fly, or be invisible, or turn into a hulking green monster.  Developers are also human.  We have cool abilities, but our true strength lies in our willingness to work hard, find solutions, and go above and beyond to solve problems. Spiderman and developers have “spidey sense.”  This is sort of a joke in the comics and movies as well – that Spiderman can just tell when something is about to go wrong, or when a villain is just around the corner.  Developers also have a spidey sense about when a server is about to crash (usually at midnight on a Saturday). Spiderman makes a great superhero because he doesn’t look like one.  Clark Kent is probably fooling no one, hiding his superhero persona behind glasses.  But Peter Parker actually does blend in.  Great developers also blend in.  When they do their job right, no one knows they were there at all. “With great power comes great responsibility.”  There is a joke about developers (sometimes we even tell the jokes) about how if they are unhappy, the server or databases might mysteriously develop problems.  The truth is, very few developers would do something to harm a company’s computer system – they take their job very seriously.  It is a big responsibility. These are just a few of the reasons why I love Spiderman, why I love being a developer, and why I think developers are the greatest.  Let me know other reasons you love Spiderman and developers, or if you can shoot webs from your wrists – I might have a job for you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login – T-SQL Demo Script

    - by pinaldave
    Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login and my friend and SQL Expert Vinod Kumar has written excellent follow up blog post about Contained Databases inside SQL Server 2012. Now lots of people asked me if I can also explain the same concept again so here is the small demonstration for it. Let me show you how login without user can help. Before we continue on this subject I strongly recommend that you read my earlier blog post here. In following demo I am going to demonstrate following situation. Login using the System Admin account Create a user without login Checking Access Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Give Permission to user without login Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Clean up USE [AdventureWorks2012] GO -- Step 1 : Login using the SA -- Step 2 : Create Login Less User CREATE USER [testguest] 9ITHOUT LOGIN WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA=[dbo] GO -- Step 3 : Checking access to Tables SELECT * FROM sys.tables; -- Step 4 : Changing the execution contest EXECUTE AS USER   = 'testguest'; GO -- Step 5 : Checking access to Tables SELECT * FROM sys.tables; GO -- Step 6 : Reverting Permissions REVERT; -- Step 7 : Giving more Permissions to testguest user GRANT SELECT ON [dbo].[ErrorLog] TO [testguest]; GRANT SELECT ON [dbo].[DatabaseLog] TO [testguest]; GO -- Step 8 : Changing the execution contest EXECUTE AS USER   = 'testguest'; GO -- Step 9 : Checking access to Tables SELECT * FROM sys.tables; GO -- Step 10 : Reverting Permissions REVERT; GO -- Step 11: Clean up DROP USER [testguest]Step 3 GO Here is the step 9 we will be able to notice that how a user without login gets access to some of the data/object which we gave permission. What I am going to prove with this example? Well there can be different rights with different account. Once the login is authenticated it makes sense for impersonating a user with only necessary permissions to be used for further operation. Again this is very basic and fundamental example. There are lots of more points to be discussed as we go in future posts. Just do not take this blog post as a template and implement everything as it is. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Now It’s Personal (Although It Should Always Be): Campus Recruitment

    - by user769227
    One of the things that I think is important and I want our Campus Recruitment Team here at Oracle to be known for is outstanding customer service. When I say customer service, I mean both students and hiring managers should feel they have had a great experience in our campus hiring process. I think one of the keys to providing outstanding customer service is being able to provide as best as we can a personalised experience where the students who are interviewing with us feel like individuals in our process and not just part a ‘campus drive’. In the campus world this can be challenging at times especially in countries where there is high volume hiring. It can be tricky to create a personal experience when you are hiring for a large number of open graduate roles at one time. I think Campus Recruitment is one of the areas in the recruitment industry that is just waiting for a change. We have all seen the proliferation of Social Media in Recruitment over the past 4-6 years. Every Recruiter has a LinkedIn account or uses Twitter or G+ or FB, etc… and some individuals and organisations do it really well. Even in Campus Hiring there is great Social Media initiatives where companies reach out to students and talk to them. However one thing that has not really changed (and this is a generalisation) is the campus hiring interview process. Do these words inspire enthusiasm to you: “Group Interview, Assessment Centre, On-Campus Drive, Off-Campus Drive, etc...” I don’t know about you but to me these words don’t really sound very personal or individual to students. It almost conjures up images of a factory production line or those long queues you see where the person behind the counter says ‘take a number’. Campus Recruitment has come a long way don’t get me wrong – companies can share data with and talk to students in so many different ways now it really has become a much more transparent and open process. There are some times such as at IIT’s in India where it really is a bit old school in terms of interviewing with students running from company to company interviewing on campus over the course of a few days but I want students talking to Oracle to have as great an experience as possible (the outcome of getting a job or not is separate to the customer experience). As students, what are your thoughts? Do you feel like ‘just a number’ when you are interviewing or is there ways that companies can make the process more personalised. Let us know your thoughts. If you are interviewing with Oracle and have questions, want to talk to us or want to know what it is like working here – email us and we will help where we can. If you can’t reach your local Recruiter in your region email me at [email protected] and I will put you in touch with the appropriate person.

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  • MySQL on Windows - Why, Where and How

    - by bertrand.matthelie(at)oracle.com
    @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Over the years Windows has become a major development and deployment platform for MySQL. As a matter of fact, Windows consistently ranks as the #1 development platform in our surveys, and now also ranks higher than any Linux distribution as a deployment platform among MySQL Community Edition users.   We've made various technical resources available in our MySQL on Windows Resource Center including articles, whitepapers and archived webinars. MySQL users are also sharing their experiences and writing how-to articles, and it's great to see former MySQL/Sun/Oracle employees still contributing! Thanks Anders for a recent step-by-step part 1 article on working with MySQL on Windows.   We also got feedback from customers wishing to get higher-level information about MySQL on Windows, to help them and others in their organizations better understand:   ·       Why is the world's most popular open source database so popular on Windows?   ·       What are the applications for which one should consider MySQL on Microsoft's platform?   ·       How should Windows shops relying on Microsoft databases get going with MySQL?   Those are the questions we aim to answer in our guide "MySQL on Windows - Why, Where and How", that you can download here.

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  • Packing a DBF

    - by Tom Hines
    I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database before issuing the PACK command.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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  • Packing a DBF

    - by Tom Hines
    I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content.  After several rounds of testing CRUD, the output DBF was huge. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database (and re-open) before issuing the PACK command or you will get the "File is in use" error.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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