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  • SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

    - by pinaldave
    Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

    - by Laila
    Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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  • Why lock-free data structures just aren't lock-free enough

    - by Alex.Davies
    Today's post will explore why the current ways to communicate between threads don't scale, and show you a possible way to build scalable parallel programming on top of shared memory. The problem with shared memory Soon, we will have dozens, hundreds and then millions of cores in our computers. It's inevitable, because individual cores just can't get much faster. At some point, that's going to mean that we have to rethink our architecture entirely, as millions of cores can't all access a shared memory space efficiently. But millions of cores are still a long way off, and in the meantime we'll see machines with dozens of cores, struggling with shared memory. Alex's tip: The best way for an application to make use of that increasing parallel power is to use a concurrency model like actors, that deals with synchronisation issues for you. Then, the maintainer of the actors framework can find the most efficient way to coordinate access to shared memory to allow your actors to pass messages to each other efficiently. At the moment, NAct uses the .NET thread pool and a few locks to marshal messages. It works well on dual and quad core machines, but it won't scale to more cores. Every time we use a lock, our core performs an atomic memory operation (eg. CAS) on a cell of memory representing the lock, so it's sure that no other core can possibly have that lock. This is very fast when the lock isn't contended, but we need to notify all the other cores, in case they held the cell of memory in a cache. As the number of cores increases, the total cost of a lock increases linearly. A lot of work has been done on "lock-free" data structures, which avoid locks by using atomic memory operations directly. These give fairly dramatic performance improvements, particularly on systems with a few (2 to 4) cores. The .NET 4 concurrent collections in System.Collections.Concurrent are mostly lock-free. However, lock-free data structures still don't scale indefinitely, because any use of an atomic memory operation still involves every core in the system. A sync-free data structure Some concurrent data structures are possible to write in a completely synchronization-free way, without using any atomic memory operations. One useful example is a single producer, single consumer (SPSC) queue. It's easy to write a sync-free fixed size SPSC queue using a circular buffer*. Slightly trickier is a queue that grows as needed. You can use a linked list to represent the queue, but if you leave the nodes to be garbage collected once you're done with them, the GC will need to involve all the cores in collecting the finished nodes. Instead, I've implemented a proof of concept inspired by this intel article which reuses the nodes by putting them in a second queue to send back to the producer. * In all these cases, you need to use memory barriers correctly, but these are local to a core, so don't have the same scalability problems as atomic memory operations. Performance tests I tried benchmarking my SPSC queue against the .NET ConcurrentQueue, and against a standard Queue protected by locks. In some ways, this isn't a fair comparison, because both of these support multiple producers and multiple consumers, but I'll come to that later. I started on my dual-core laptop, running a simple test that had one thread producing 64 bit integers, and another consuming them, to measure the pure overhead of the queue. So, nothing very interesting here. Both concurrent collections perform better than the lock-based one as expected, but there's not a lot to choose between the ConcurrentQueue and my SPSC queue. I was a little disappointed, but then, the .NET Framework team spent a lot longer optimising it than I did. So I dug out a more powerful machine that Red Gate's DBA tools team had been using for testing. It is a 6 core Intel i7 machine with hyperthreading, adding up to 12 logical cores. Now the results get more interesting. As I increased the number of producer-consumer pairs to 6 (to saturate all 12 logical cores), the locking approach was slow, and got even slower, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect to be so clear was the drop-off in performance of the lock-free ConcurrentQueue. I could see the machine only using about 20% of available CPU cycles when it should have been saturated. My interpretation is that as all the cores used atomic memory operations to safely access the queue, they ended up spending most of the time notifying each other about cache lines that need invalidating. The sync-free approach scaled perfectly, despite still working via shared memory, which after all, should still be a bottleneck. I can't quite believe that the results are so clear, so if you can think of any other effects that might cause them, please comment! Obviously, this benchmark isn't realistic because we're only measuring the overhead of the queue. Any real workload, even on a machine with 12 cores, would dwarf the overhead, and there'd be no point worrying about this effect. But would that be true on a machine with 100 cores? Still to be solved. The trouble is, you can't build many concurrent algorithms using only an SPSC queue to communicate. In particular, I can't see a way to build something as general purpose as actors on top of just SPSC queues. Fundamentally, an actor needs to be able to receive messages from multiple other actors, which seems to need an MPSC queue. I've been thinking about ways to build a sync-free MPSC queue out of multiple SPSC queues and some kind of sign-up mechanism. Hopefully I'll have something to tell you about soon, but leave a comment if you have any ideas.

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  • Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

    - by Aaron Lazenby
    COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

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  • Cloud Computing Architecture Patterns: Don’t Focus on the Client

    - by BuckWoody
    Normally I try to put topics in the positive in other words "Do this" not "Don't do that". Sometimes its clearer to focus on what *not* to do. Popular development processes often start with screen mockups, or user input descriptions. In a scale-out pattern like Cloud Computing on Windows Azure, that's the wrong place to start. Start with the Data    Instead, I recommend that you start with the data that a process requires. That data might be temporary or persisted, but starting with the data and its requirements helps to define not only the storage engine you need but also drives everything from security to the integrity of the application. For instance, assume the requirements show that the user must enter their phone number, and that this datum is used in a contact management system further down the application chain. For that datum, you can determine what data type you need (U.S. only or International?) the security requirements, whether it needs ACID compliance, how it will be searched, indexed and so on. From one small data point you can extrapolate out your options for storing and processing the data. Here's the interesting part, which begins to break the patterns that we've used for decades: all of the data doesn't have the same requirements. The phone number might be best suited for a list, or an element, or a string, with either BASE or ACID requirements, based on how it is used. That means we don't have to dump everything into XML, an RDBMS, a NoSQL engine, or a flat file exclusively. In fact, one record might use all of those depending on the use-case requirements. Next Is Data Management  With the data defined, we can move on to how to store the data. Again, the requirements now dictate whether we need a full relational calculus or set-based operations, or we can choose another method based on the requirements for the data. And breaking another pattern its OK to store in more than once, in more than one location. We do this all the time for reporting systems and Business Intelligence systems, so this is a pattern we need to think about even for OLTP data. Move to Data Transport How does the data get around? We can use a connection-based method, sending the data along a transport to the storage engine, but in some cases we may want to use a cache, a queue, the Service Bus, or Complex Event Processing. Finally, Data Processing Most RDBMS engines, NoSQL, and certainly Big Data engines not only store data, but can process and manipulate it as well. Its doubtful that you'll calculate that phone number right? Well, if you're the phone company, you most certainly will. And so we see that even once we've chosen the data type, storage and engine, the same element can have different computing requirements based on how it is used. Sure, We Need A Front-End At Some Point Not all data is entered by human hands in fact most data isn't. We don't really need a Graphical User Interface (GUI) we need some way for a GUI to get data into and out of the systems listed earlier.   But when we do need to allow users to enter or examine data, that should be left to the GUI that best fits the device the user has. Ever tried to use an application designed for a web browser on a phone? Or one designed for a tablet on a phone? Its usually quite painful. The siren song of "We'll just write one interface for all devices" is strong, and has beguiled many an unsuspecting architect. But they just don't work out.   Instead, focus on the data, its transport and processing. Create API calls or a message system that allows for resilient transport to the device or interface, and let it do what it does best. References Microsoft Architecture Journal:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx Patterns and Practices:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345.aspx Windows Azure iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile Devices SDK: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started-ios/ Windows Azure Facebook SDK: http://ntotten.com/2013/03/14/using-windows-azure-mobile-services-with-the-facebook-sdk-for-windows-phone/

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  • Creating a Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite for IIS

    - by OWScott
    There are times when you need to reverse proxy through a server. The most common example is when you have an internal web server that isn’t exposed to the internet, and you have a public web server accessible to the internet. If you want to serve up traffic from the internal web server, you can do this through the public web server by creating a tunnel (aka reverse proxy). Essentially, you can front the internal web server with a friendly URL, even hiding custom ports. For example, consider an internal web server with a URL of http://10.10.0.50:8111. You can make that available through a public URL like http://tools.mysite.com/ as seen in the following image. The URL can be made public or it can be used for your internal staff and have it password protected and/or locked down by IP address. This is easy to do with URL Rewrite and IIS. You will also need Application Request Routing (ARR) installed even though for a simple reverse proxy you won’t use most of ARR’s functionality. If you don’t already have URL Rewrite and ARR installed you can do so easily with the Web Platform Installer. A lot can be said about reverse proxies and many different situations and ways to route the traffic and handle different URL patterns. However, my goal here is to get you up and going in the easiest way possible. Then you can dig in deeper after you get the base configuration in place. URL Rewrite makes a reverse proxy very easy to set up. Note that the URL Rewrite Add Rules template doesn’t include Reverse Proxy at the server level. That’s not to say that you can’t create a server-level reverse proxy, but the URL Rewrite rules template doesn’t help you with that. Getting Started First you must create a website on your public web server that has the public bindings that you need. Alternately, you can use an existing site and route using conditions for certain traffic. After you’ve created your site then open up URL Rewrite at the site level. Using the “Add Rule(s)…” template that is opened from the right-hand actions pane, create a new Reverse Proxy rule. If you receive a prompt (the first time) that the proxy functionality needs to be enabled, select OK. This is telling you that a proxy can route traffic outside of your web server, which happens to be our goal in this case. Be aware that reverse proxy rules can be dangerous if you open sites from inside you network to the world, so just be aware of what you’re doing and why. The next and final step of the template asks a few questions. The first textbox asks the name of the internal web server. In our example, it’s 10.10.0.50:8111. This can be any URL, including a subfolder like internal.mysite.com/blog. Don’t include the http or https here. The template assumes that it’s not entered. You can choose whether to perform SSL Offloading or not. If you leave this checked then all requests to the internal server will be over HTTP regardless of the original web request. This can help with performance and SSL bindings if all requests are within a trusted network. If the network path between the two web servers is not completely trusted and safe then uncheck this. Next, the template enables you to create an outbound rule. This is used to rewrite links in the page to look like your public domain name rather than the internal domain name. Outbound rules have a lot of CPU overhead because the entire web content needs to be parsed and updated. However, if you need it, then it’s well worth the extra CPU hit on the web server. If you check the “Rewrite the domain names of the links in HTTP responses” checkbox then the From textbox will be filled in with what you entered for the inbound rule. You can enter your friendly public URL for the outbound rule. This will essentially replace any reference to 10.10.0.50:8111 (or whatever you enter) with tools.mysite.com in all <a>, <form>, and <img> tags on your site. That’s it! Well, there is a lot more that you can do, this but will give you the base configuration. You can now visit www.mysite.com on your public web server and it will serve up the site from your internal web server. You should see two rules show up; one inbound and one outbound. You can edit these, add conditions, and tweak them further as needed. One common issue that can occur without outbound rules has to do with compression. If you run into errors with the new proxied site, try turning off compression to confirm if that’s the issue. Here’s a link with details on how to deal with compression and outbound rules. I hope this was helpful to get started and to see how easy it is to create a simple reverse proxy using URL Rewrite for IIS.

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  • Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp - Reading (UK) - October 1-12, 2012

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    REGISTER NOW: Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp Reading, UK, October 1-12, 2012! OPN invites you to join us for a 10-day implementation bootcamp on Oracle ATG Web Commerce in Reading, UK from October 1-12, 2012.This 10-day boot camp is designed to provide partners with hands-on experience and technical training to successfully build and deploy Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Applications. This particular boot camp is focused on helping partners develop the essential skills needed to implement every aspect of an ATG Commerce Application from scratch, (not CRS-based), with a specific goal of enabling experienced Java/J2EE developers with a path towards becoming functional, effective, and contributing members of an ATG implementation team. Built for both new and experienced ATG developers alike, the collaborative nature of this program and its exercises, have proven to be highly effective and extremely valuable in learning the best practices for implementing ATG solutions. Though not required, this bootcamp provides a structured path to earning a Certified Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Specialization! What Is Covered: This boot camp is for Application Developers and Software Architects wanting to gain valuable insight into ATG application development best practices, as well as relevant and applicable implementation experience on projects modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform. The following learning objectives are all critical, and are of equal priority in enabling this role to succeed. This learning boot camp will help with: Building a basic functional transaction-ready ATG Web Commerce 10 Application. Utilizing ATG’s platform features such as scenarios, slots, targeters, user profiles and segments, to create a personalized user experience. Building Nucleus components to support and/or extend application functionality. Understanding the intricacies of ATG order checkout and fulfillment. Specifying, designing and implementing new commerce features in ATG 10. Building a functional commerce application modeled after four of the most common types of applications built on the ATG platform, within an agile-based project team environment and under simulated real-world project conditions. Duration: The Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp is an instructor-led workshop spanning 10 days. Audience: Application Developers Software Architects Prerequisite Training and Environment Requirements: Programming and Markup Experience with Java J2EE, JavaScript, XML, HTML and CSS Completion of Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Specialist Development Guided Learning Path modules Participants will be required to bring their own laptop that meets the minimum specifications:   64-bit PC and OS (e.g. Windows 7 64-bit) 4GB RAM or more 40GB Hard Disk Space Laptops will require access to the Internet through Remote Desktop via Windows. Agenda Topics: Week 1 – Day 1 through 5 Build a Basic Commerce Application In week one of the boot camp training, we will apply knowledge learned from the ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Guided Learning Path modules, towards building a basic transaction-ready commerce application. There will be little to no lectures delivered in this boot camp, as developers will be fully engaged in ATG Application Development activities and best practices. Developers will work independently on the following lab assignments from day's 1 through 5: Lab Assignments  1 Environment Setup 2 Build a dynamic Home Page 3 Site Authentication 4 Build Customer Registration 5 Display Top Level Categories 6 Display Product Sub-Categories 7 Display Product List Page 8 Display Product Detail Page 9 ATG Inventory 10 Build “Add to Cart” Functionality 11 Build Shopping Cart 12 Build Checkout Page  13 Build Checkout Review Page 14 Create an Order and Build Order Confirmation Page 15 Implement Slots and Targeters for Personalization 16 Implement Pricing and Promotions 17 Order Fulfillment Back to top Week 2 – Day 6 through 10 Team-based Case Project In the second week of the boot camp training, participants will be asked to join a project team that will select a case project for the team to implement. Teams will be able to choose from four of the most common application types developed and deployed on the ATG platform. They are as follows: Hard goods with physical fulfillment, Soft goods with electronic fulfillment, a Service or subscription case example, a Course/Event registration case example. Team projects will have approximately 160 hours of use cases/stories for each team to build (40 hours per developer). Each day's Use Cases/Stories will build upon the prior day's work, and therefore must be fully completed at the end of each day. Please note that this boot camp intends to simulate real-world project conditions, and as such will likely require the need for project teams to possibly work beyond normal business hours. To promote further collaboration and group learning, each team will be asked to present their work and share the methodologies and solutions that they've applied to their cases at the end of each day. Location: Oracle Reading CVC TPC510 Room: Wraysbury Reading, UK 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM  Registration Fee (10 Days): US $3,375 Please click on the following link to REGISTER or  visit the Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Boot Camp page for more information. Questions: Patrick Ty Partner Enablement, Oracle Commerce Phone: 310.343.7687 Mobile: 310.633.1013 Email: [email protected]

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  • How to Share Files Between User Accounts on Windows, Linux, or OS X

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Your operating system provides each user account with its own folders when you set up several different user accounts on the same computer. Shared folders allow you to share files between user accounts. This process works similarly on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. These are all powerful multi-user operating systems with similar folder and file permission systems. Windows On Windows, the “Public” user’s folders are accessible to all users. You’ll find this folder under C:\Users\Public by default. Files you place in any of these folders will be accessible to other users, so it’s a good way to share music, videos, and other types of files between users on the same computer. Windows even adds these folders to each user’s libraries by default. For example, a user’s Music library contains the user’s music folder under C:\Users\NAME\as well as the public music folder under C:\Users\Public\. This makes it easy for each user to find the shared, public files. It also makes it easy to make a file public — just drag and drop a file from the user-specific folder to the public folder in the library. Libraries are hidden by default on Windows 8.1, so you’ll have to unhide them to do this. These Public folders can also be used to share folders publically on the local network. You’ll find the Public folder sharing option under Advanced sharing settings in the Network and Sharing Control Panel. You could also choose to make any folder shared between users, but this will require messing with folder permissions in Windows. To do this, right-click a folder anywhere in the file system and select Properties. Use the options on the Security tab to change the folder’s permissions and make it accessible to different user accounts. You’ll need administrator access to do this. Linux This is a bit more complicated on Linux, as typical Linux distributions don’t come with a special user folder all users have read-write access to. The Public folder on Ubuntu is for sharing files between computers on a network. You can use Linux’s permissions system to give other user accounts read or read-write access to specific folders. The process below is for Ubuntu 14.04, but it should be identical on any other Linux distribution using GNOME with the Nautilus file manager. It should be similar for other desktop environments, too. Locate the folder you want to make accessible to other users, right-click it, and select Properties. On the Permissions tab, give “Others” the “Create and delete files” permission. Click the Change Permissions for Enclosed Files button and give “Others” the “Read and write” and “Create and Delete Files” permissions. Other users on the same computer will then have read and write access to your folder. They’ll find it under /home/YOURNAME/folder under Computer. To speed things up, they can create a link or bookmark to the folder so they always have easy access to it. Mac OS X Mac OS X creates a special Shared folder that all user accounts have access to. This folder is intended for sharing files between different user accounts. It’s located at /Users/Shared. To access it, open the Finder and click Go > Computer. Navigate to Macintosh HD > Users > Shared. Files you place in this folder can be accessed by any user account on your Mac. These tricks are useful if you’re sharing a computer with other people and you all have your own user accounts — maybe your kids have their own limited accounts. You can share a music library, downloads folder, picture archive, videos, documents, or anything else you like without keeping duplicate copies.

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  • SQL SERVER – SSMS: Database Consistency History Report

    - by Pinal Dave
    Doctor and Database The last place I like to visit is always a hospital. With the monsoon season starting, intermittent rains, it has become sort of a routine to get a cycle of fever every other year (seriously I hate it). So when I visit my doctor, it is always interesting in the way he quizzes me. The routine question of – “How many days have you had this?”, “Is there any pattern?”, “Did you drench in rain?”, “Do you have any other symptom?” and so on. The idea here is that the doctor wants to find any anomaly or a pattern that will guide him to a viral or bacterial type. Most of the time they get it based on experience and sometimes after a battery of tests. So if there is consistent behavior to your problem, there is always a solution out. SQL Server has its way to find if the server data / files are in consistent state using the DBCC commands. Back to SQL Server In real life, Database consistency check is one of the critical operations a DBA generally doesn’t give much priority. Many readers of my blogs have asked many times, how do we know if the database is consistent? How do I read output of DBCC CHECKDB and find if everything is right or not? My common answer to all of them is – look at the bottom of checkdb (or checktable) output and look for below line. CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 0 consistency errors in database ‘DatabaseName’. Above is a “good sign” because we are seeing zero allocation and zero consistency error. If you are seeing non-zero errors then there is some problem with the database. Sample output is shown as below: CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 2 consistency errors in database ‘DatabaseName’. repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB (DatabaseName). If we see non-zero error then most of the time (not always) we get repair options depending on the level of corruption. There is risk involved with above option (repair_allow_data_loss), that is – we would lose the data. Sometimes the option would be repair_rebuild which is little safer. Though these options are available, it is important to find the root cause to the problem. In standard report, there is a report which can show the history of checkdb executed for the selected database. Since this is a database level report, we need to right click on database, click Reports, click Standard Reports and then choose “Database Consistency History” report. The information in this report is picked from default trace. If default trace is disabled or there is no checkdb run or information is not there in default trace (because it’s rolled over), we would get report like below. As we can see report says it very clearly: Currently, no execution history of CHECKDB is available or default trace is not enabled. To demonstrate, I have caused corruption in one of the database and did below steps. Run CheckDB so that errors are reported. Fix the corruption by losing the data using repair option Run CheckDB again to check if corruption is cleared. After that I have launched the report and below is what we would see. If you are lazy like me and don’t want to run the report manually for each database then below query would be handy to provide same report for all database. This query is runs behind the scenes by the report. All I have done is remove the filter for database name (at the last – highlighted). DECLARE @curr_tracefilename VARCHAR(500); DECLARE @base_tracefilename VARCHAR(500); DECLARE @indx INT; SELECT @curr_tracefilename = path FROM sys.traces WHERE is_default = 1; SET @curr_tracefilename = REVERSE(@curr_tracefilename); SELECT @indx  = PATINDEX('%\%', @curr_tracefilename) ; SET @curr_tracefilename = REVERSE(@curr_tracefilename); SET @base_tracefilename = LEFT( @curr_tracefilename,LEN(@curr_tracefilename) - @indx) + '\log.trc'; SELECT  SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),36, PATINDEX('%executed%',TEXTData)-36) AS command ,       LoginName ,       StartTime ,       CONVERT(INT,SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%found%',TEXTData) +6,PATINDEX('%errors %',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%found%',TEXTData)-6)) AS errors ,       CONVERT(INT,SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%repaired%',TEXTData) +9,PATINDEX('%errors.%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%repaired%',TEXTData)-9)) repaired ,       SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%time:%',TEXTData)+6,PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%time:%',TEXTData)-6)+':'+SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData) +6,PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%hours%',TEXTData)-6)+':'+SUBSTRING(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),TEXTData),PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData) +8,PATINDEX('%seconds.%',TEXTData)-PATINDEX('%minutes%',TEXTData)-8) AS time FROM::fn_trace_gettable( @base_tracefilename, DEFAULT) WHERE EventClass = 22 AND SUBSTRING(TEXTData,36,12) = 'DBCC CHECKDB' -- AND DatabaseName = @DatabaseName; Don’t get worried about the logic above. All it is doing is reading the trace files, parsing below entry and getting out information for underlined words. DBCC CHECKDB (CorruptedDatabase) executed by sa found 2 errors and repaired 0 errors. Elapsed time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds.  Internal database snapshot has split point LSN = 00000029:00000030:0001 and first LSN = 00000029:00000020:0001. Hopefully now onwards you would run checkdb and understand the importance of it. As responsible DBAs I am sure you are already doing it, let me know how often do you actually run them on you production environment? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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  • Find the best OpenWorld sessions for learning about UX highlights

    - by mvaughan
    By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  Have you clicked through the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 catalog? It’s amazingly dense, as usual. But one thing we noticed this year is that nearly half of the sessions mention some component of user experience, which is a sea change in our world. It means that more people understand, appreciate, and desire an effective user experience, and it also means that Oracle’s investment in its next-generation applications user experience, such as Oracle Fusion Applications, is increasingly apparent and interesting to its customers. So how do you choose the user experience sessions that make the most sense for you and your organization? Read our list to find out which sessions we think offer the most value for those interested in finding out more about the Oracle Applications user experience. If you’re interested in Oracle’s strategy for its user experience: CON9438: Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2007 CON9467: Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience3:30 - 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8718: Oracle Fusion Applications: Customizing and Extending with Oracle Composers11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4; Moscone West – 2008 GEN9663: General Session: A Panel of Masterminds—Where Are Oracle Applications Headed?1:45 - 2:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone North - Hall D If you’re interested in PeopleSoft/PeopleTools: GEN8928: General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product Roadmap3:15 - 4:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON9183: PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap4:45 - 5:45 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 3002/3004 CON8932: New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business User5:00 - 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 3007 If you’re interested in E-Business Suite: GEN8474: General Session: Oracle E-Business Suite—Strategy, Update, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West - 2002/2004 CON9026: Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability Enhancements1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2016 If you’re interested in Siebel: CON9700: Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap12:15 - 1:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1; Moscone West – 2009 CON9703: User Interface Innovations with the New Siebel “Open UI”10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2; Moscone West – 2009 If you’re interested in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: HOL10452: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 User Interface Changes10:15 - 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; Marriott Marquis - Nob Hill AB CON9160: Showcase of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience1:15 - 2:15 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B CON9159: Euphoria with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne User Experience11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3; InterContinental - Grand Ballroom B If you’re interested in Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns: Functional design patterns that helped create the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience are now available. Learn more about these new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices at the Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF demopods during Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Or visit the OTN Lounge between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3, to talk to Ultan O'Broin from the Oracle Applications User Experience team.    Demopod location: Moscone Center, South Exhibition Hall Level 1, S-207 OTN (Oracle Technology Network) Lounge: Howard Street tent On the demogrounds: Head to the demogrounds to see new demos from the Applications User Experience team, including the new look for Fusion Applications and what we’re building for mobile platforms. Take a spin on our eye tracker, a very cool tool that we use to research the usability of a particular design. Visit the Usable Apps OpenWorld page to find out where our demopods will be located.Photo by Martin Taylor, Oracle Applications User ExperienceA tour takes place in one of the usability labs at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. At our labs, on-site and at HQ: We are also recruiting participants for our on-site lab, in which we gather feedback on new user experience designs, and taking reservations for a charter bus that will bring you to Oracle headquarters for a lab tour Thursday, Oct. 4, or Friday, Oct. 5. Tours leave at 10 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. You’ll see more of our newest designs at the lab tour, and some of our research tools in action. For more information on any OpenWorld sessions, check the content catalog, also available at www.oracle.com/openworld. For information on Applications User Experience (Apps UX) sessions and activities, go to the Usable Apps OpenWorld page.

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  • Resetting Your Oracle User Password with SQL Developer

    - by thatjeffsmith
    There’s nothing more annoying than having to email, call, or log a support ticket to have one of your accounts reset. This is no less annoying in the Oracle database. Those pesky security folks have determined that your password should only be valid for X days, and your time is up. Time to reset the password! Except…you can’t log into the database to reset your password. What now? Wait a second, look at this nifty thing I see in SQL Developer: Right click on my connection, reset password not available! Why not? The JDBC Driver Doesn’t Support This Operation We can’t make this call over the Oracle JDBC layer, because it hasn’t been implemented. However our primary interface, OCI, does indeed support this. In order to use the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), you need to have an Oracle Client on your machine. The good news is that this is fairly easy to get going. The Instant Client will do. You have two options, the full or ‘Lite’ Instant Clients. If you want SQL*Plus and the other client tools, go for the full. If you just want the basic drivers, go for the Lite. Either of these is fine, but mind the bit level and version of Oracle! Make sure you get a 32 bit Instant Client if you run 32 bit SQL Developer or 64 bit if you run 64 Here’s the download link What, you didn’t believe me? Mind the version of Oracle too! You want to be at the same level or higher of the database you’re working with. You can use a 11.2.0.3 client with 11.2.0.1 database but not a 10gR2 client with 11gR2 database. Clear as mud? Download and Extract Put it where you want – Program Files is as good as place as any if you have the rights. When you’re done, copy that directory path you extracted the archive to, because we’re going to add it to your Windows PATH environment variable. The easiest way to find this in Windows 7 is to open the Start dialog and type ‘path’. In Windows 8 you’ll cast your spell and wave at your screen until something happens. I recommend you put it up front so we find our DLLs first. Now with that set, let’s start up SQL Developer. Check the Connection Context menu again Bingo! What happened there? SQL Developer looks to see if it can find the OCI resources. Guess where it looks? That’s right, the PATH. If it finds what it’s looking for, and confirms the bit level is right, it will activate the Reset Password option. We have a Preference to ‘force’ an OCI/THICK connection that gives you a few other edge case features, but you do not need to enable this to activate the Reset Password. Not necessary, but won’t hurt anything either. There are a few actual benefits to using OCI powered connections, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s blog post…to be continued. Ok, so we’re ready to go. Now, where was I again? Oh yeah, my password has expired… Right click on your connection and now choose ‘Reset Password’ You’ll need to know your existing password and select a new one that meets your databases’s security standards. I Need Another Option, This Ain’t Working! If you have another account in the database, you can use the DBA Panel to reset a user’s password, or of course you can spark up a SQL*Plus session and issue the ALTER USER JEFF IDENTIFIED BY _________; command – but you knew this already, yes? I need more help ‘installing’ the Instant Client, help! There are lots and lots of resources out there on this subject. But I also know from personal experience that many of you have problems getting this to ‘work.’ The key things to remember is to download the right bit level AND make sure the client install directory is in your path. I know many folks that will just ‘install’ the Instant Client directly to one of their ‘bin’ type directories. You can do that if you want, but I prefer the cleaner method. Of course if you lack admin privs to change the PATH variable, that might be your only option. Or you could do what the original ORA- message indicated and ‘contact your DBA.’

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  • Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

    - by pjohnson
    I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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  • Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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  • Windows 7 doesn't boot after Ubuntu install

    - by Omu
    I had windows 7 installed on my pc, then I installed Ubuntu 10.10/ During the installation process I have chosen to manually set my partitions: I set a 10GB drive for ubuntu root 1GB drive for swap and for boot drive I've chosen the one used by windows 7 Now I can boot ubuntu, I have the windows 7 option in the boot list, but when I choose Windows 7, it shows me a black screen for a second and returns back to boot screen. Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== = Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda sda1: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Grub 2 Boot sector info: Grub 2 is installed in the boot sector of sda1 and looks at sector 304908237 of the same hard drive for core.img, but core.img can not be found at this location. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda2: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: sda3: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu 10.10 Boot files/dirs: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sda4: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: =========================== Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda ___________________ _____________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start End Size Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 62,894,474 62,894,412 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 62,894,478 291,579,749 228,685,272 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 291,579,811 309,157,937 17,578,127 5 Extended /dev/sda5 291,579,813 309,157,937 17,578,125 83 Linux /dev/sda4 309,159,936 312,580,095 3,420,160 82 Linux swap / Solaris blkid -c /dev/null: ____________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/sda1 1266BB2766BB0A8D ntfs /dev/sda2 BEDBF1147C76F703 ntfs DATA /dev/sda3: PTTYPE="dos" /dev/sda4 dd38226d-c7c9-4ae5-a726-6d18d34a22e4 swap /dev/sda5 e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ext4 /dev/sda: PTTYPE="dos" ============================ "mount | grep ^/dev output: =========================== Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sda5 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) =========================== sda5/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=640x480 load_video insmod gfxterm fi terminal_output gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en insmod gettext if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 echo 'Loading Linux 2.6.35-22-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ro single echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 1266bb2766bb0a8d chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### =============================== sda5/etc/fstab: =============================== # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier # for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name # devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 /dev/sda5 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation UUID=dd38226d-c7c9-4ae5-a726-6d18d34a22e4 none swap sw 0 0 =================== sda5: Location of files loaded by Grub: =================== 156.1GB: boot/grub/core.img 156.3GB: boot/grub/grub.cfg 149.9GB: boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic 156.3GB: boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic 149.9GB: initrd.img 156.3GB: vmlinuz

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  • OS Analytics with Oracle Enterprise Manager (by Eran Steiner)

    - by Zeynep Koch
    Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. The recording of our call to discuss this blog is available here: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=71517797&rKey=4ec9d4a3508564b3Download the presentation here See also: Blog about Alert Monitoring and Problem Notification Blog about Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other content Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data Drill down into a process details Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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  • BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

    - by StuartBrierley
    At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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  • Web Site Performance and Assembly Versioning – Part 2 Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion

    - by capgpilk
    Ok so it took a while to post this second part. Many apologies, we had a big roll out of a new platform at work and many things had to get sidelined. So this is the second part in a short series of website performance and using versioning to help improve it. Minification and Concatination of JavaScript and CSS Files Versioning Combined Files Using Subversion – this post Versioning Combined Files Using Mercurial – published shortly In the previous post we used AjaxMin to shrink js and css files then concatenated them into one file each which had the file name of site-script.combined.min.js and site-style.combined.min.css. These file names are fine, but you can configure IIS 7 to cache these static files and so lower the amount of data transferred between server and client. This is done by editing the response headers in IIS. 1. In IIS7 Manager, choose the directory where these files are located and select HTTP Response Headers. 2. Check the Expire Web Content and set a time period well into the future. 3. When refreshing the web page, the server will respond with HTTP 304 forcing the browser to retrieve the file from its cache. 4. As can be seen in FireBug, the Cache-Control header has a max age of 31536000 seconds which equates to 365 days.   The server will always send this HTTP 304 message unless the file changes forcing it to send new content. To help force this we can change the file name based on the latest build using the SVN revision number in the filename. So we have lowered data transfer on content that hasn’t changed, but forced it to be sent when you have made a change to the css or js files. Now to get the SVN revision number in to the file name. 1. Import the MSBuildCommunityTasks targets which can be dowloaded from here. 1: <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath) 2: \MSBuildCommunityTasks 3: \MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets" /> 2. Edit the BeforeBuild target to call out to svn and get the latest revision 1: <SvnVersion LocalPath="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)" 2: ToolPath="$(ProgramFiles)\VisualSVN Server\bin"> 3: <Output TaskParameter="Revision" PropertyName="Revision" /> 4: </SvnVersion> 3. Set it to update the project AssemblyInfo.cs file for the svn revision. 1: <FileUpdate Files="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" 2: Regex="(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)" 3: ReplacementText="$1.$2.$3.$(Revision)" /> 4. Now edit the AfterBuild target to get the full dll version. You could combine these two steps and just get the version from svn, I am working on one project that updates the AssemblyInfo file and another project that allows manual editing of the file, but needs that version within the file name; so I just combined the two for this post. 1: <MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly 2: TaskAction="GetInfo" 3: NetAssembly="$(OutputPath)\mydll.dll"> 4: <Output TaskParameter="OutputItems" ItemName="Info" /> 5: </MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Framework.Assembly> 6: <Message Text="Version: %(Info.AssemblyVersion)" 7: Importance="High" /> 5. Use this Info.AssemblyVersion to write out the combined css and js files as described in the last post. 1: <WriteLinestoFile File="Scripts\site-%(Info.AssemblyVersion).combined.min.js" 2: Lines="@(JSLinesSite)" Overwrite="true" />   In the next post I will cover doing the same, but for a Mercurial repository.

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  • How to Force Graphics Options in PC Games with NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel Graphics

    - by Chris Hoffman
    PC games usually have built-in graphics options you can change. But you’re not limited to the options built into games — the graphics control panels bundled with graphics drivers allow you to tweak options from outside PC games. For example, these tools allow you to force-enabling antialiasing to make old games look better, even if they don’t normally support it. You can also reduce graphics quality to get more performance on slow hardware. If You Don’t See These Options If you don’t have the NVIDIA Control Panel, AMD Catalyst Control Center, or Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel installed, you may need to install the appropriate graphics driver package for your hardware from the hardware manufacturer’s website. The drivers provided via Windows Update don’t include additional software like the NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Catalyst Control Center. Drivers provided via Windows Update are also more out of date. If you’re playing PC games, you’ll want to have the latest graphics drivers installed on your system. NVIDIA Control Panel The NVIDIA Control Panel allows you to change these options if your computer has NVIDIA graphics hardware. To launch it, right-click your desktop background and select NVIDIA Control Panel. You can also find this tool by performing a Start menu (or Start screen) search for NVIDIA Control Panel or by right-clicking the NVIDIA icon in your system tray and selecting Open NVIDIA Control Panel. To quickly set a system-wide preference, you could use the Adjust image settings with preview option. For example, if you have old hardware that struggles to play the games you want to play, you may want to select “Use my preference emphasizing” and move the slider all the way to “Performance.” This trades graphics quality for an increased frame rate. By default, the “Use the advanced 3D image settings” option is selected. You can select Manage 3D settings and change advanced settings for all programs on your computer or just for specific games. NVIDIA keeps a database of the optimal settings for various games, but you’re free to tweak individual settings here. Just mouse-over an option for an explanation of what it does. If you have a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus technology — that is, both NVIDIA and Intel graphics — this is the same place you can choose which applications will use the NVIDIA hardware and which will use the Intel hardware. AMD Catalyst Control Center AMD’s Catalyst Control Center allows you to change these options on AMD graphics hardware. To open it, right-click your desktop background and select Catalyst Control Center. You can also right-click the Catalyst icon in your system tray and select Catalyst Control Center or perform a Start menu (or Start screen) search for Catalyst Control Center. Click the Gaming category at the left side of the Catalyst Control Center window and select 3D Application Settings to access the graphics settings you can change. The System Settings tab allows you to configure these options globally, for all games. Mouse over any option to see an explanation of what it does. You can also set per-application 3D settings and tweak your settings on a per-game basis. Click the Add option and browse to a game’s .exe file to change its options. Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel Intel integrated graphics is nowhere near as powerful as dedicated graphics hardware from NVIDIA and AMD, but it’s improving and comes included with most computers. Intel doesn’t provide anywhere near as many options in its graphics control panel, but you can still tweak some common settings. To open the Intel graphics control panel, locate the Intel graphics icon in your system tray, right-click it, and select Graphics Properties. You can also right-click the desktop and select Graphics Properties. Select either Basic Mode or Advanced Mode. When the Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel appears, select the 3D option. You’ll be able to set your Performance or Quality setting by moving the slider around or click the Custom Settings check box and customize your Anisotropic Filtering and Vertical Sync preference. Different Intel graphics hardware may have different options here. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see more advanced options appear in the future if Intel is serious about competing in the PC graphics market, as they say they are. These options are primarily useful to PC gamers, so don’t worry about them — or bother downloading updated graphics drivers — if you’re not a PC gamer and don’t use any intensive 3D applications on your computer. Image Credit: Dave Dugdale on Flickr     

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  • .NET Security Part 3

    - by Simon Cooper
    You write a security-related application that allows addins to be used. These addins (as dlls) can be downloaded from anywhere, and, if allowed to run full-trust, could open a security hole in your application. So you want to restrict what the addin dlls can do, using a sandboxed appdomain, as explained in my previous posts. But there needs to be an interaction between the code running in the sandbox and the code that created the sandbox, so the sandboxed code can control or react to things that happen in the controlling application. Sandboxed code needs to be able to call code outside the sandbox. Now, there are various methods of allowing cross-appdomain calls, the two main ones being .NET Remoting with MarshalByRefObject, and WCF named pipes. I’m not going to cover the details of setting up such mechanisms here, or which you should choose for your specific situation; there are plenty of blogs and tutorials covering such issues elsewhere. What I’m going to concentrate on here is the more general problem of running fully-trusted code within a sandbox, which is required in most methods of app-domain communication and control. Defining assemblies as fully-trusted In my last post, I mentioned that when you create a sandboxed appdomain, you can pass in a list of assembly strongnames that run as full-trust within the appdomain: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); Any assembly that is loaded into the sandbox with a strong name the same as one in the list of full-trust strong names is unconditionally given full-trust permissions within the sandbox, irregardless of permissions and sandbox setup. This is very powerful! You should only use this for assemblies that you trust as much as the code creating the sandbox. So now you have a class that you want the sandboxed code to call: // within assemblyWithApi public class MyApi { public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } } // within the sandboxed dll public class UntrustedSandboxedClass { public void DodgyMethod() { ... MyApi.MethodToDoThings(); ... } } However, if you try to do this, you get quite an ugly exception: MethodAccessException: Attempt by security transparent method ‘UntrustedSandboxedClass.DodgyMethod()’ to access security critical method ‘MyApi.MethodToDoThings()’ failed. Security transparency, which I covered in my first post in the series, has entered the picture. Partially-trusted code runs at the Transparent security level, fully-trusted code runs at the Critical security level, and Transparent code cannot under any circumstances call Critical code. Security transparency and AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute So the solution is easy, right? Make MethodToDoThings SafeCritical, then the transparent code running in the sandbox can call the api: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } However, this doesn’t solve the problem. When you try again, exactly the same exception is thrown; MethodToDoThings is still running as Critical code. What’s going on? By default, a fully-trusted assembly always runs Critical code, irregardless of any security attributes on its types and methods. This is because it may not have been designed in a secure way when called from transparent code – as we’ll see in the next post, it is easy to open a security hole despite all the security protections .NET 4 offers. When exposing an assembly to be called from partially-trusted code, the entire assembly needs a security audit to decide what should be transparent, safe critical, or critical, and close any potential security holes. This is where AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (APTCA) comes in. Without this attribute, fully-trusted assemblies run Critical code, and partially-trusted assemblies run Transparent code. When this attribute is applied to an assembly, it confirms that the assembly has had a full security audit, and it is safe to be called from untrusted code. All code in that assembly runs as Transparent, but SecurityCriticalAttribute and SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute can be applied to individual types and methods to make those run at the Critical or SafeCritical levels, with all the restrictions that entails. So, to allow the sandboxed assembly to call the full-trust API assembly, simply add APCTA to the API assembly: [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers] and everything works as you expect. The sandboxed dll can call your API dll, and from there communicate with the rest of the application. Conclusion That’s the basics of running a full-trust assembly in a sandboxed appdomain, and allowing a sandboxed assembly to access it. The key is AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute, which is what lets partially-trusted code call a fully-trusted assembly. However, an assembly with APTCA applied to it means that you have run a full security audit of every type and member in the assembly. If you don’t, then you could inadvertently open a security hole. I’ll be looking at ways this can happen in my next post.

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  • The Unspoken - The Why of GC Ergonomics

    - by jonthecollector
    Do you use GC ergonomics, -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, with the UseParallelGC collector? The jist of GC ergonomics for that collector is that it tries to grow or shrink the heap to meet a specified goal. The goals that you can choose are maximum pause time and/or throughput. Don't get too excited there. I'm speaking about UseParallelGC (the throughput collector) so there are definite limits to what pause goals can be achieved. When you say out loud "I don't care about pause times, give me the best throughput I can get" and then say to yourself "Well, maybe 10 seconds really is too long", then think about a pause time goal. By default there is no pause time goal and the throughput goal is high (98% of the time doing application work and 2% of the time doing GC work). You can get more details on this in my very first blog. GC ergonomics The UseG1GC has its own version of GC ergonomics, but I'll be talking only about the UseParallelGC version. If you use this option and wanted to know what it (GC ergonomics) was thinking, try -XX:AdaptiveSizePolicyOutputInterval=1 This will print out information every i-th GC (above i is 1) about what the GC ergonomics to trying to do. For example, UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 GC ergonomics tries to meet (in order) Pause time goal Throughput goal Minimum footprint The first line says that it's trying to meet the throughput goal. UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** This run has the default pause time goal (i.e., no pause time goal) so it is trying to reach a 98% throughput. The lines Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) say that we're currently spending about 16% of the time doing young GC's and about 5% of the time doing full GC's. These percentages are a decaying, weighted average (earlier contributions to the average are given less weight). The source code is available as part of the OpenJDK so you can take a look at it if you want the exact definition. GC ergonomics is trying to increase the throughput by growing the heap (so says the "attempted to grow"). The last line Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 says that the ergonomics is trying to balance the GC times between young GC's and full GC's by decreasing the tenuring threshold. During a young collection the younger objects are copied to the survivor spaces while the older objects are copied to the tenured generation. Younger and older are defined by the tenuring threshold. If the tenuring threshold hold is 4, an object that has survived fewer than 4 young collections (and has remained in the young generation by being copied to the part of the young generation called a survivor space) it is younger and copied again to a survivor space. If it has survived 4 or more young collections, it is older and gets copied to the tenured generation. A lower tenuring threshold moves objects more eagerly to the tenured generation and, conversely a higher tenuring threshold keeps copying objects between survivor spaces longer. The tenuring threshold varies dynamically with the UseParallelGC collector. That is different than our other collectors which have a static tenuring threshold. GC ergonomics tries to balance the amount of work done by the young GC's and the full GC's by varying the tenuring threshold. Want more work done in the young GC's? Keep objects longer in the survivor spaces by increasing the tenuring threshold. This is an example of the output when GC ergonomics is trying to achieve a pause time goal UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** pause time goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 20.74 (no change) Tenured generation: 31.70 (attempted to shrink) The pause goal was set at 50 millisecs and the last GC was 0.415: [Full GC (Ergonomics) [PSYoungGen: 2048K-0K(26624K)] [ParOldGen: 26095K-9711K(28992K)] 28143K-9711K(55616K), [Metaspace: 1719K-1719K(2473K/6528K)], 0.0758940 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] The full collection took about 76 millisecs so GC ergonomics wants to shrink the tenured generation to reduce that pause time. The previous young GC was 0.346: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 26624K-2048K(26624K)] 40547K-22223K(56768K), 0.0136501 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs] so the pause time there was about 14 millisecs so no changes are needed. If trying to meet a pause time goal, the generations are typically shrunk. With a pause time goal in play, watch the GC overhead numbers and you will usually see the cost of setting a pause time goal (i.e., throughput goes down). If the pause goal is too low, you won't achieve your pause time goal and you will spend all your time doing GC. GC ergonomics is meant to be simple because it is meant to be used by anyone. It was not meant to be mysterious and so this output was added. If you don't like what GC ergonomics is doing, you can turn it off with -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, but be pre-warned that you have to manage the size of the generations explicitly. If UseAdaptiveSizePolicy is turned off, the heap does not grow. The size of the heap (and the generations) at the start of execution is always the size of the heap. I don't like that and tried to fix it once (with some help from an OpenJDK contributor) but it unfortunately never made it out the door. I still have hope though. Just a side note. With the default throughput goal of 98% the heap often grows to it's maximum value and stays there. Definitely reduce the throughput goal if footprint is important. Start with -XX:GCTimeRatio=4 for a more modest throughput goal (%20 of the time spent in GC). A higher value means a smaller amount of time in GC (as the throughput goal).

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  • User Productivity Kit - Powerful Packages (Part 2)

    - by [email protected]
    In my first post on packages I described what a package is and how it can be used. I also started explaining some of the considerations that should be taken into account when determining how to arrange your packages. The first is when the files are interrelated and depend on one another such as an HTML file and it's graphics. A second consideration is how the files are used in your outlines. Let's say you're using a dozen Word doc files. You could place them all in a single package or put each Word doc file in a separate package but what's the right thing to do? There are several factors that will influence your decision. To understand the first, let me explain a function of UPK publishing. Take an outline in UPK that has an attachment (concept, frame link, or hyperlink) that points to a file in a package. When you publish this outline, the publishing engine will determine that there is a link to a file in the package and copy the contents of the package to the publishing destination directory. This is done to ensure that any interrelated files are kept together. For the situation where you have an HTML file with links to number of graphics files, this is a good thing. If, however, the package has a dozen unrelated Word doc files and you link to only one of them, all dozen Word documents will be copied to the publishing destination directory.  Whether or not this is a good thing is dependent on two things. First, are all of the files in the package used in the outline that you're publishing? Take an outline that includes links to all of the Word documents in that dozen document package I described earlier. For this situation, you may choose to keep all the files in a single package for convenience. A second consideration is how your organization leverages reuse in UPK. In this context, I'm referring to the link style of reuse such as when you link to the same topic from multiple UPK outlines and changes to the topic appear in both places. Take an example where you have the earlier mentioned dozen Word document package and an outline with a dozen topics in it. Each topic has an attachment pointing to one of the Word documents in the package (frame link, concept, etc.) If you're only publishing this outline, the single package probably works fine but what if you're reusing one of these topics in another outline? As I explained earlier, linking to one file in the package will result in all files in the package being copied to your published output. In this example, linking to one topic in the first outline will result in all dozen Word documents being copied to the published output. This may result in files in the output that you don't want there for business or size reasons. This is a situation in which you should consider placing each of the Word documents in it's own separate package. With each document in it's own package, that link to a single document will result in only that single package and single Word document being copied to the published output. In my last post I had described that packages are documents in the UPK library. When using the multi-user version of the UPK Developer you can leverage standard library capabilities for managing the files in these packages during the development process - capabilities such as check in / check out, history, etc. When structuring your packages take into consideration how the authors are going to be adding, modifying and deleting files from the packages. A single package is a single document in the UPK library. Like any other document in the library, a single user can check out the package and edit it at a time. If you have a large number of files in a single package and these must be modified by many users, you need to consider whether this will cause problems as multiple users compete to update the same package. If the files don't depend on each other consider placing the files in separate packages to reduce contention. I hope you've enjoyed these two posts on how you can leverage the power of packages in your content. In summary, consider the following when structuring your packages: Is the asset a single, standalone file or a set of files that depend on each other? Will all the files always be used together in a single outline or may only some of the files be needed based on how the content is reused across multiple outlines? Will multiple developers need to update the files in a single package or should you break it into multiple packages to reduce contention when checking out the document? We'd like to hear from you on how you're using packages in your content. Please add your comments below! Thank you and I hope these two posts have given you additional insights into how to use packages in your content and structure them for efficient use. John Zaums Senior Director, Product Development Oracle User Productivity Kit

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  • Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

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  • Yet another blog about IValueConverter

    - by codingbloke
    After my previous blog on a Generic Boolean Value Converter I thought I might as well blog up another IValueConverter implementation that I use. The Generic Boolean Value Converter effectively converters an input which only has two possible values to one of two corresponding objects.  The next logical step would be to create a similar converter that can take an input which has multiple (but finite and discrete) values to one of multiple corresponding objects.  To put it more simply a Generic Enum Value Converter. Now we already have a tool that can help us in this area, the ResourceDictionary.  A simple IValueConverter implementation around it would create a StringToObjectConverter like so:- StringToObjectConverter using System; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Data; using System.Linq; using System.Windows.Markup; namespace SilverlightApplication1 {     [ContentProperty("Items")]     public class StringToObjectConverter : IValueConverter     {         public ResourceDictionary Items { get; set; }         public string DefaultKey { get; set; }                  public StringToObjectConverter()         {             DefaultKey = "__default__";         }         public virtual object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             if (value != null && Items.Contains(value.ToString()))                 return Items[value.ToString()];             else                 return Items[DefaultKey];         }         public virtual object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             return Items.FirstOrDefault(kvp => value.Equals(kvp.Value)).Key;         }     } } There are some things to note here.  The bulk of managing the relationship between an object instance and the related string key is handled by the Items property being an ResourceDictionary.  Also there is a catch all “__default__” key value which allows for only a subset of the possible input values to mapped to an object with the rest falling through to the default. We can then set one of these up in Xaml:-             <local:StringToObjectConverter x:Key="StatusToBrush">                 <ResourceDictionary>                     <SolidColorBrush Color="Red" x:Key="Overdue" />                     <SolidColorBrush Color="Orange" x:Key="Urgent" />                     <SolidColorBrush Color="Silver" x:Key="__default__" />                 </ResourceDictionary>             </local:StringToObjectConverter> You could well imagine that in the model being bound these key names would actually be members of an enum.  This still works due to the use of ToString in the Convert method.  Hence the only requirement for the incoming object is that it has a ToString implementation which generates a sensible string instead of simply the type name. I can’t imagine right now a scenario where this converter would be used in a TwoWay binding but there is no reason why it can’t.  I prefer to avoid leaving the ConvertBack throwing an exception if that can be be avoided.  Hence it just enumerates the KeyValuePair entries to find a value that matches and returns the key its mapped to. Ah but now my sense of balance is assaulted again.  Whilst StringToObjectConverter is quite happy to accept an enum type via the Convert method it returns a string from the ConvertBack method not the original input enum type that arrived in the Convert.  Now I could address this by complicating the ConvertBack method and examining the targetType parameter etc.  However I prefer to a different approach, deriving a new EnumToObjectConverter class instead. EnumToObjectConverter using System; namespace SilverlightApplication1 {     public class EnumToObjectConverter : StringToObjectConverter     {         public override object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             string key = Enum.GetName(value.GetType(), value);             return base.Convert(key, targetType, parameter, culture);         }         public override object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)         {             string key = (string)base.ConvertBack(value, typeof(String), parameter, culture);             return Enum.Parse(targetType, key, false);         }     } }   This is a more belts and braces solution with specific use of Enum.GetName and Enum.Parse.  Whilst its more explicit in that the a developer has to  choose to use it, it is only really necessary when using TwoWay binding, in OneWay binding the base StringToObjectConverter would serve just as well. The observant might note that there is actually no “Generic” aspect to this solution in the end.  The use of a ResourceDictionary eliminates the need for that.

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  • HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database

    - by Jane Story
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When working with a Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Standard Costing application, there can often be a requirement to check data or allocated results using reporting tools e.g Smartview. To do this, you are retrieving data directly from the Essbase databases related to your HPCM model. For information, running reports is covered in Chapter 9 of the HPCM User documentation. The aim of this blog is to provide a quick guide to finding this data for reporting in the HPCM generated Essbase database in v11.1.2.2.x of HPCM. In order to retrieve data from an HPCM generated Essbase database, it is important to understand each of the following dimensions in the Essbase database and where data is located within them: Measures dimension – identifies Measures AllocationType dimension – identifies Direct Allocation Data or Genealogy Allocation data Point Of View (POV) dimensions – there must be at least one, maximum of four. Business dimensions: Stage Business dimensions – these will be identified by the Stage prefix. Intra-Stage dimension – these will be identified by the _Intra suffix. Essbase outlines and reporting is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s02.html For additional details on reporting measures, please review this section of the documentation:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/apas03.html Reporting requirements in HPCM quite often start with identifying non balanced items in the Stage Balancing report. The following documentation link provides help with identifying some of the items within the Stage Balancing report:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/generatestagebalancing.html The following are some types of data upon which you may want to report: Stage Data: Direct Input Assigned Input Data Assigned Output Data Idle Cost/Revenue Unassigned Cost/Revenue Over Driven Cost/Revenue Direct Allocation Data Genealogy Allocation Data Stage Data Stage Data consists of: Direct Input i.e. input data, the starting point of your allocation e.g. in Stage 1 Assigned Input Data i.e. the cost/revenue received from a prior stage (i.e. stage 2 and higher). Assigned Output Data i.e. for each stage, the data that will be assigned forward is assigned post stage data. Reporting on this data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s03.html Dimension Selection Measures Direct Input: CostInput RevenueInput Assigned Input (from previous stages): CostReceivedPriorStage RevenueReceivedPriorStage Assigned Output (to subsequent stages): CostAssignedPostStage RevenueAssignedPostStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the stage business dimensions for the stage you wish to see the Stage data for. All other Dimensions NoMember Idle/Unassigned/OverDriven To view Idle, Unassigned or Overdriven Costs/Revenue, first select which stage for which you want to view this data. If multiple Stages have unassigned/idle, resolve the earliest first and re-run the calculation as differences in early stages will create unassigned/idle in later stages. Dimension Selection Measures Idle: IdleCost IdleRevenue Unassigned: UnAssignedCost UnAssignedRevenue Overdriven: OverDrivenCost OverDrivenRevenue AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/ Idle/OverDriven Cost All the Stage Business dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/Idle/Overdriven. Zoom in on each dimension to find the individual members to find which members have Unassigned/Idle/OverDriven data. All other Dimensions NoMember Direct Allocation Data Direct allocation data shows the data received by a destination intersection from a source intersection where a direct assignment(s) exists. Reporting on direct allocation data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s04.html You would select the following to report direct allocation data Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the SOURCE stage business dimensions and the DESTINATION stage business dimensions for the direct allocations for the stage you wish to report on. All other Dimensions NoMember Genealogy Allocation Data Genealogy allocation data shows the indirect data relationships between stages. Genealogy calculations run in the HPCM Reporting database only. Reporting on genealogy data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s05.html Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType GenealogyAllocation (IndirectAllocation in 11.1.2.1 and prior versions) POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any stage business dimension members from the STARTING stage in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the INTERMEDIATE stage(s) in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the ENDING stage in Genealogy All other Dimensions NoMember Notes If you still don’t see data after checking the above, please check the following Check the calculation has been run. Here are couple of indicators that might help them with that. Note the size of essbase cube before and after calculations ensure that a calculation was run against the database you are examing. Export the essbase data to a text file to confirm that some data exists. Examine the date and time on task area to see when, if any, calculations were run and what choices were used (e.g. Genealogy choices) If data does not exist in places where they are expecting, it could be that No calculations/genealogy were run No calculations were successfully run The model/data at feeder location were either absent or incompatible, resulting in no allocation e.g no driver data. Smartview Invocation from HPCM From version 11.1.2.2.350 of HPCM (this version will be GA shortly), it is possible to directly invoke Smartview from HPCM. There is guided navigation before the Smartview invocation and it is then possible to see the selected value(s) in SmartView. Click to Download HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database (Right click or option-click the link and choose "Save As..." to download this pdf file)

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  • SQLCMD Mode: give it one more chance

    - by Maria Zakourdaev
      - Click on me. Choose me. - asked one forgotten feature when some bored DBA was purposelessly wondering through the Management Studio menu at the end of her long and busy working day. - Why would I use you? I have heard of no one who does. What are you for? - perplexedly wondered aged and wise DBA. At least that DBA thought she was aged and wise though each day tried to prove to her that she wasn't. - I know you. You are quite lazy. Why would you do additional clicks to move from window to window? From Tool to tool ? This is irritating, isn't it? I can run windows system commands, sql statements and much more from the same script, from the same query window! - I have all my tools that I‘m used to, I have Management Studio, Cmd, Powershell. They can do anything for me. I don’t need additional tools. - I promise you, you will like me. – the thing continued to whine . - All right, show me. – she gave up. It’s always this way, she thought sadly, - easier to agree than to explain why you don’t want. - Enable me and then think about anything that you always couldn’t do through the management studio and had to use other tools. - Ok. Google for me the list of greatest features of SQL SERVER 2012. - Well... I’m not sure... Think about something else. - Ok, here is something easy for you. I want to check if file folder exists or if file is there. Though, I can easily do this using xp_cmdshell … - This is easy for me. – rejoiced the feature. By the way, having the items of the menu talking to you usually means you should stop working and go home. Or drink coffee. Or both. Well, aged and wise dba wasn’t thinking about the weirdness of the situation at that moment. - After enabling me, – said unfairly forgotten feature (it was thinking of itself in such manner) – after enabling me you can use all command line commands in the same management studio query window by adding two exclamation marks !! at the beginning of the script line to denote that you want to use cmd command: -Just keep in mind that when using this feature, you are actually running the commands ON YOUR computer and not on SQL server that query window is connected to. This is main difference from using xp_cmdshell which is executing commands on sql server itself. Bottomline, use UNC path instead of local path. - Look, there are much more than that. - The SQLCMD feature was getting exited.- You can get IP of your servers, create, rename and drop folders. You can see the contents of any file anywhere and even start different tools from the same query window: Not so aged and wise DBA was getting interested: - I also want to run different scripts on different servers without changing connection of the query window. - Sure, sure! Another great feature that CMDmode is providing us with and giving more power to querying. Use “:” to use additional features, like :connect that allows you to change connection: - Now imagine, you have one script where you have all your changes, like creating staging table on the DWH staging server, adding fact table to DWH itself and updating stored procedures in the server where reporting database is located. - Now, give me more challenges! - Script out a list of stored procedures into the text files. - You can do it easily by using command :out which will write the query results into the specified text file. The output can be the code of the stored procedure or any data. Actually this is the same as changing the query output into the file instead of the grid. - Now, take all of the scripts and run all of them, one by one, on the different server.  - Easily - Come on... I’m sure that you can not... -Why not? Naturally, I can do it using :r commant which is opening a script and executing it. Look, I can also use :setvar command to define an environment variable in SQLCMD mode. Just note that you have to leave the empty string between :r commands, otherwise it’s not working although I have no idea why. - Wow.- She was really impressed. - Ok, I’ll go to try all those… -Wait, wait! I know how to google the SQL SERVER features for you! This example will open chrome explorer with search results for the “SQL server 2012 top features” ( change the path to suit your PC): “Well, this can be probably useful stuff, maybe this feature is really unfairly forgotten”, thought the DBA while going through the dark empty parking lot to her lonely car. “As someone really wise once said: “It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning. Learn, unlearn and relearn”.

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