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  • How to account for speed of the vehicle when shooting shells from it?

    - by John Murdoch
    I'm developing a simple 3D ship game using libgdx and bullet. When a user taps the mouse I create a new shell object and send it in the direction of the mouse click. However, if the user has tapped the mouse in the direction where the ship is currently moving, the ship catches up to the shells very quickly and can sometimes even get hit by them - simply because the speed of shells and the ship are quite comparable. I think I need to account for ship speed when generating the initial impulse for the shells, and I tried doing that (see "new line added"), but I cannot figure out if what I'm doing is the proper way and if yes, how to calculate the correct coefficient. public void createShell(Vector3 origin, Vector3 direction, Vector3 platformVelocity, float velocity) { long shellId = System.currentTimeMillis(); // hack ShellState state = getState().createShellState(shellId, origin.x, origin.y, origin.z); ShellEntity entity = EntityFactory.getInstance().createShellEntity(shellId, state); add(entity); entity.getBody().applyCentralImpulse(platformVelocity.mul(velocity * 0.02f)); // new line added, to compensate for the moving platform, no idea how to calculate proper coefficient entity.getBody().applyCentralImpulse(direction.nor().mul(velocity)); } private final Vector3 v3 = new Vector3(); public void shootGun(Vector3 direction) { Vector3 shipVelocity = world.getShipEntities().get(id).getBody().getLinearVelocity(); world.getState().getShipStates().get(id).transform.getTranslation(v3); // current location of our ship v3.add(direction.nor().mul(10.0f)); // hack; this is to avoid shell immediately impacting the ship that it got shot out from world.createShell(v3, direction, shipVelocity, 500); }

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  • a little code to allow word substitution depending on user

    - by Fred Quimby
    Can anyone help? I'm creating a demo web app in html in order for people to physically see and comment on the app prior to committing to a proper build. So whilst the proper app will be database driven, my demo is just standard html with some javascript effects. What I do want to demonstrate is that different user group will see different words. For example, imagine I have an html sentence that says 'This will cost £100 to begin'. What I need to some way of identifying that if the user has deemed themselves to be from the US, the sentence says 'This will cost $100 to begin'. This requirement is peppered throughtout the pages but I'm happy to add each one manually. So I envisage some code along the lines of 'first, remove the [boot US] trunk' where the UK version is 'first remove the boot' but the code is saying that the visitor needs the US version. It then looks up boot (in an Access database perhaps) and sees that the table says for boot for US, display 'trunk'. I'm not a programmer but I can normally cobble together scripts so I'm hoping someone may have a relatively easy solution in javascrip, CSS or asp. To recap; I have a number of words or short sentences that need to appear differently and I'm happy to manually insert each one if necessary (but would be even better if the words were automatically changed). And I need a device which allows me to tell the pages to choose the US version, or for example, the New Zealand version. Thanks in advance. Fred

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  • Language redirect affecting pagerank and search listing?

    - by Janoszen
    Preface We have a number of sites that use the same redirect mechanism across the board. We recently transitioned one site from non-localised to localised and detected that the Google+ integration doesn't show up on the search results any more AND the PageRank is gone from 2 to 0. How the redirect works If the UA sends a cookie (e.g. lang=en), redirect the user to /language (e.g. /en) If the UA is a bot (.*bot.*), redirect to /en If the Accept-Language header contains a usable, non-English language, redirect to /language (English is the default on many browsers in non-English regions) If there is a valid GeoIP lookup and the detected region is linked to a supported language, redirect to /language Redirect to /en We do of course on all pages have the proper markup to indicate the alternate language: <link hreflang="de" href="/de" rel="alternate" /> As far as we can tell, we follow all publicly available guidelines from Google, so we are a bit at odds if this is a bug in Google or we have done something wrong. Question Does not having content on the root URL of a domain adversely affect search engine rankings and if yes, how does one implement a proper language redirection?

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  • Technology Choice for a Client Application [on hold]

    - by AK_
    Not sure this is the right place to ask... I'm involved in the development of a new system, and now we are passing the demos stage. We need to build a proper client application. The platform we care most about is Windows, for now at least, but we would love to support other platforms, as long as it's free :-). Or at least very cheap. We anticipate two kinds of users: Occasional, coming mostly from the web. Professional, who would probably require more features, and better performance, and probably would prefer to see a native client. Our server exposes two APIs: A SOAP API, WCF behind the scenes, that supports 100% of the functionality. A small and very fast UDP + Binary API, that duplicates some of the functionality and is intended for the sake of performance for certain real-time scenarios. Our team is mostly proficient in .Net, C#, C++ development, and rather familiar with Web development (HTML, JavaScript). We are probably intending to develop two clients (for both user profiles), a web app, and a native app. Architecturally, we would like to have as many common components as possible. We would like to have several layers: Communication, Client Model, Client Logic, shared by both of the clients. We would also like to be able to add features to both clients when only the actual UI is a dual cost, and the rest is shared. We are looking at several technologies: WPF + Silverlight, Pure HTML, Flash / Flex (AIR?), Java (JavaFx?), and we are considering poking at WinRT(or whatever the proper name is). The question is which technology would you recommend and why? And which advantages or disadvantages will it have regarding our requirements?

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  • CodeStock 2012 Review: Eric Landes( @ericlandes ) - Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.

    Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.Speaker: Eric LandesTwitter: @ericlandesBlog: http://ericlandes.com/ This was one of the first sessions I attended during CodeStock 2012. Eric’s talk focused mostly on unit testing, and that the lack of proper unit testing can be compared to stealing from an employer. His point was that if you’re not doing proper unit testing then all of the time wasted on fixing issues that could have been detected with unit tests is like stealing money from employer. He makes the assumption that that time spent on fixing these issues could have been better spent developing new features that drive the business. To a point I can agree with Eric’s argument regarding unit testing and stealing from a company’s perspective. I can see how he relates resources being shifted from new development to bug fixes as stealing based on the fact that the resources used to fix bugs are directly taken from other projects. He also states that Boring/Redundant and Build/Test tasks should be automated because it reduces the changes of errors and frees up developer to do what they do best, DEVELOP! When he refers to testing, he breaks testing down in to four distinct types. Unit Test Acceptance Test (This also includes Integration Tests) Performance Test UI Test With this he also recommends that developers should not go buck wild striving for 100% code coverage because some test my not provide a great return on investment. In his experience he recommends that 70% test coverage was a very acceptable rate.

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  • How to manage and estimate unstructured requirements received from customers

    - by user20358
    A lot of the times I receive a software system's requirements from our customers in a very unstructured format. It is usually a bunch of "product development" guys from the customer's who come up with these "proposed solutions" to the business problems they have. While they are the experts at the business domain, a lot of the times they don't have the solutions right. This results in multiple versions of the same requirement mixing up of two requirements into one a few versions of the requirement later down the line, the requirements which were combined together get separated out again, each taking with it some of the new additions How do you work with such requirements coming in and sort them out into proper use cases and before development begins? What tools can we use to track a particular requirement's history, from the first time it was conceived till the time it gets crystallized into a proper use case? Estimating work against requirements received in such a fashion is a nightmare which ends up in making mistakes in understanding the requirement correctly and estimating the effort against it correctly. Any tips, tools, tricks to make this activity more manageable? I'm just trying to get some insights from someone more experienced than I am in requirements management and effort estimation.

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  • Calculating up-vector to avoid gimbal lock using euler angles

    - by jessejuicer
    I wish to orbit a camera around a sphere, yet the problem is that when the camera rotates so that it is at the north pole (and pointing down) or the south pole (and pointing up) of the sphere the camera doesn't handle itself very well. It spins rapidly until arriving 180 degrees in the opposite direction. I believe this is known as gimbal lock. I understand you can avoid this problem using quaternions. But I also read in another forum that it's possible to avoid this easily using euler angles as well. Which I would prefer to do. It was said that all you need to do is "calculate a proper up-vector every frame, and that avoids the problem entirely." Well, I tried aligning the up-vector with the vertical axis of the camera whenever the camera changed orientation, but this didn't seem to work. Meaning that the up-vector followed exactly the orientation of the camera's y-axis (or it's up vector), instead of using a constant up-vector aligned to the up-vector of the world (0, 1, 0). How exactly do I go about calculating a proper up-vector as my camera orientation changes to avoid the gimbal lock problem mentioned above?

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  • Finding Buried Controls

    - by Bunch
    This post is pretty specific to an issue I had but still has some ideas that could be applied in other scenarios. The problem I had was updating a few buttons so their Text values could be set in the code behind which had a method to grab the proper value from an external source. This was so that if the application needed to be installed by a customer using a language other than English or needed a different notation for the button's Text they could simply update the database. Most of the time this was no big deal. However I had one instance where the button was part of a control, the button had no set ID and that control was only found in a dll. So there was no markup to edit for the Button. Also updating the dll was not an option so I had to make the best of what I had to work with. In the cs file for the aspx file with the control on it I added the Page_LoadComplete. The problem button was within a GridView so I added a foreach to go through each GridViewRow and find the button I needed. Since I did not have an ID to work with besides a random ctl00$main$DllControl$gvStuff$ctl03$ctl05 using the GridView's FindControl was out. I ended up looping through each GridViewRow, then if a RowState equaled Edit loop through the Cells, each control in the Cell and check each control to see if it held a Panel that contained the button. If the control was a Panel I could then loop through the controls in the Panel, find the Button that had text of "Update" (that was the hard coded part) and change it using the method to return the proper value from the database. if (rowState.Contains("Edit")){  foreach (DataControlFieldCell rowCell in gvr.Cells)  {   foreach (Control ctrl in rowCell.Controls)   {    if (ctrl.GetType() == typeof(Panel))     {     foreach (Control childCtrl in ctrl.Controls)     {      if (childCtrl.GetType() == typeof(Button))      {       Button update = (Button)childCtrl;       if (update.Text == "Update")       {        update.Text = method to return the external value for the button's text;       }      }     }    }   }  }} Tags: ASP.Net, CSharp

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  • How to Assure an Effective Data Model

    As a general rule in my opinion the effectiveness of a data model can be directly related to the accuracy and complexity of a project’s requirements. For example there is no need to work on very detailed data models when the details surrounding a specific data model have not been defined or even clarified. Developing data models when the clarity of project requirements is limited tends to introduce designed issues because the proper details to create an effective data model are not even known. One way to avoid this issue is to create data models that correspond to the complexity of the existing project requirements so that when requirements are updated then new data models can be created based any new discoveries regarding requirements on a fine grain level.  This allows for data models to be composed of general entities to be created initially when a project’s requirements are very vague and then the entities are refined as new and more substantial requirements are defined or redefined. This promotes communication amongst all stakeholders within a project as they go through the process of defining and finalizing project requirements.In addition, here are some general tips that can be applied to projects in regards to data modeling.Initially model all data generally and slowly reactor the data model as new requirements and business constraints are applied to a project.Ensure that data modelers have the proper tools and training they need to design a data model accurately.Create a common location for all project documents so that everyone will be able to review a project’s data models along with any other project documentation.All data models should follow a clear naming schema that tells readers the intended purpose for the data and how it is going to be applied within a project.

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  • Open Source Project all dressed up but nowhere to go...

    - by Calanus
    Over the past 2 years myself and a colleague have built an online statistical analysis application using a mixture of silverlight, wcf and R. I (a c# programmer) wrote all the silverlight and wcf stuff whilst my colleague (a statistician) came up with the stats algorithms and wrote the R code. Now we think that this app is fairly unique - a rich gui online statistics application that is much more intuitive than all the other online stat apps that I've seen. But despite this we don't really know where to go with the project, mainly for the following reasons: 1) Its fairly complicated stuff - without the mix of programing and stats skills it would be difficult for anyone to "get into" the project and contribute. 2) We are stalled by a lack of a proper place to host the site. Currently it sits on the family windows 7 media centre, not exactly the best place to host it as it could interfere with the missus trying to watch Corrie/Friends/Oprah etc. Soo, anyone got any ideas on how to move forward with this? I guess that my strength is programing not marketing so despite working hard at this for the past couple of years I feel that I've reached a dead end! Also, does anyone know of any free windows hosting for open source projects? If I could find a proper place to put the app I might feel re-energised about the whole thing. The source code is on codeplex at: http://silverstats.codeplex.com, whilst the app is currently hosted at http://silverstats.co.uk

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  • Business Forces: SOA Adoption

    The only constant in today’s business environment is change. Businesses that continuously foresee change and adapt quickly will gain market share and increased growth. In our ever growing global business environment change is driven by data in regards to collecting, maintaining, verifying and distributing data.  Companies today are made and broken over data. Would anyone still use Google if they did not have one of the most accurate search indexes on the internet? No, because their value is in their data and the quality of their data. Due to the increasing focus on data, companies have been adopting new methodologies for gaining more control over their data while attempting to reduce the costs of maintaining it. In addition, companies are also trying to reduce the time it takes to analyze data in regards to various market forces to foresee changes prior to them actually occurring.   Benefits of Adopting SOA Services can be maintained separately from other services and applications so that a change in one service will only affect itself and client services or applications. The advent of services allows for system functionality to be distributed across a network or multiple networks. The costs associated with maintain business functionality is much higher in standard application development over SOA due to the fact that one Services can be maintained and shared to other applications instead of multiple instances of business functionality being duplicated via hard coding in to several applications. When multiple applications use a single service for a specific business function then the all of the data being processed will be consistent in terms of quality and accuracy through the applications. Disadvantages of Adopting SOA Increased initial costs and timelines are associated with SOA due to the fact that services need to be created as well as applications need to be modified to call the services In order for an SOA project to be successful the project must obtain company and management support in order to gain the proper exposure, funding, and attention. If SOA is new to a company they must also support the proper training in order for the project to be designed, and implemented correctly. References: Tews, R. (2007). Beyond IT: Exploring the Business Value of SOA. SOA Magazine Issue XI.

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  • CodeStock 2012 Review: Eric Landes( @ericlandes ) - Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.

    Automated Tests in to automated Builds! How to put the right type of automated tests in to the right automated builds.Speaker: Eric LandesTwitter: @ericlandesBlog: http://ericlandes.com/ This was one of the first sessions I attended during CodeStock 2012. Eric’s talk focused mostly on unit testing, and that the lack of proper unit testing can be compared to stealing from an employer. His point was that if you’re not doing proper unit testing then all of the time wasted on fixing issues that could have been detected with unit tests is like stealing money from employer. He makes the assumption that that time spent on fixing these issues could have been better spent developing new features that drive the business. To a point I can agree with Eric’s argument regarding unit testing and stealing from a company’s perspective. I can see how he relates resources being shifted from new development to bug fixes as stealing based on the fact that the resources used to fix bugs are directly taken from other projects. He also states that Boring/Redundant and Build/Test tasks should be automated because it reduces the changes of errors and frees up developer to do what they do best, DEVELOP! When he refers to testing, he breaks testing down in to four distinct types. Unit Test Acceptance Test (This also includes Integration Tests) Performance Test UI Test With this he also recommends that developers should not go buck wild striving for 100% code coverage because some test my not provide a great return on investment. In his experience he recommends that 70% test coverage was a very acceptable rate.

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  • Google Analytics Social Tracking implementation. Is Google's example correct?

    - by s_a
    The current Google Analytics help page on Social tracking (developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSocial?hl=es-419) links to this page with an example of the implementation: http://analytics-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/tracking/javascript/v5/social/facebook_js_async.html I've followed the example carefully yet social interactions are not registered. This is the webpage with the non-working setup: http://bit.ly/1dA00dY (obscured domain as per Google's Webmaster Central recommendations for their product forums) This is the structure of the page: In the : ga async code copied from the analytics' page a script tag linking to stored in the same domain. the twitter js loading tag In the the fb-root div the facebook async loading js including the _ga.trackFacebook(); call the social buttons afterwards, like so: (with the proper URL) Tweet (with the proper handle) That's it. As far as I can tell, I have implemented it exactly like in the example, but likes and twitts aren't registered. I have also altered the ga_social_tracking.js to register the social interactions as events, adding the code below. It doesn't work either. What could be wrong? Thanks! Code added to ga_social_tracking.js var url = document.URL; var category = 'Social Media'; /* Facebook */ FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(href, widget) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, 'Facebook', url]); }); /* Twitter */ twttr.events.bind('tweet', function(event) { _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, 'Twitter', url]); });

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  • MVC and delegation

    - by timjver
    I am a beginning iOS programmer and use the Model-View-Controller model as a design pattern: my model doesn't know anything about my view (in order to make it compatible with any view), my view doesn't know anything about my model so they interact via my controller. A very usual way for a view to interact with the controller is through delegation: when the user interacts with the app, my view will notify my controller, which can call some methods of my model and update my view, if necessary. However, would it make sense to also make my controller the delegate of my model? I'm not convinced this is the way to go. It could be handy for my model to notify my controller of some process being finished, for example, or to ask for extra input of the user if it doesn't have enough information to complete the task. The downside of this, though, is that my controller would be the delegate for both my controller and my model, so there wouldn't be really a proper way to notify my model of changes in my view, and vice versa. (correct me if I'm wrong.) Conclusion: I don't really think it's a good idea to to have my controller to be the delegate of my model, but just being the delegate of my view would be fine. Is this the way most MVC models handle? Or is there a way to have the controller be the delegate of both the controller and the model, with proper communication between them? Like I said, I'm a beginner, so I want to do such stuff the right way immediately, rather than spending loads of hours on models that won't work anyway. :)

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  • Service Discovery in WCF 4.0 &ndash; Part 1

    - by Shaun
    When designing a service oriented architecture (SOA) system, there will be a lot of services with many service contracts, endpoints and behaviors. Besides the client calling the service, in a large distributed system a service may invoke other services. In this case, one service might need to know the endpoints it invokes. This might not be a problem in a small system. But when you have more than 10 services this might be a problem. For example in my current product, there are around 10 services, such as the user authentication service, UI integration service, location service, license service, device monitor service, event monitor service, schedule job service, accounting service, player management service, etc..   Benefit of Discovery Service Since almost all my services need to invoke at least one other service. This would be a difficult task to make sure all services endpoints are configured correctly in every service. And furthermore, it would be a nightmare when a service changed its endpoint at runtime. Hence, we need a discovery service to remove the dependency (configuration dependency). A discovery service plays as a service dictionary which stores the relationship between the contracts and the endpoints for every service. By using the discovery service, when service X wants to invoke service Y, it just need to ask the discovery service where is service Y, then the discovery service will return all proper endpoints of service Y, then service X can use the endpoint to send the request to service Y. And when some services changed their endpoint address, all need to do is to update its records in the discovery service then all others will know its new endpoint. In WCF 4.0 Discovery it supports both managed proxy discovery mode and ad-hoc discovery mode. In ad-hoc mode there is no standalone discovery service. When a client wanted to invoke a service, it will broadcast an message (normally in UDP protocol) to the entire network with the service match criteria. All services which enabled the discovery behavior will receive this message and only those matched services will send their endpoint back to the client. The managed proxy discovery service works as I described above. In this post I will only cover the managed proxy mode, where there’s a discovery service. For more information about the ad-hoc mode please refer to the MSDN.   Service Announcement and Probe The main functionality of discovery service should be return the proper endpoint addresses back to the service who is looking for. In most cases the consume service (as a client) will send the contract which it wanted to request to the discovery service. And then the discovery service will find the endpoint and respond. Sometimes the contract and endpoint are not enough. It also contains versioning, extensions attributes. This post I will only cover the case includes contract and endpoint. When a client (or sometimes a service who need to invoke another service) need to connect to a target service, it will firstly request the discovery service through the “Probe” method with the criteria. Basically the criteria contains the contract type name of the target service. Then the discovery service will search its endpoint repository by the criteria. The repository might be a database, a distributed cache or a flat XML file. If it matches, the discovery service will grab the endpoint information (it’s called discovery endpoint metadata in WCF) and send back. And this is called “Probe”. Finally the client received the discovery endpoint metadata and will use the endpoint to connect to the target service. Besides the probe, discovery service should take the responsible to know there is a new service available when it goes online, as well as stopped when it goes offline. This feature is named “Announcement”. When a service started and stopped, it will announce to the discovery service. So the basic functionality of a discovery service should includes: 1, An endpoint which receive the service online message, and add the service endpoint information in the discovery repository. 2, An endpoint which receive the service offline message, and remove the service endpoint information from the discovery repository. 3, An endpoint which receive the client probe message, and return the matches service endpoints, and return the discovery endpoint metadata. WCF 4.0 discovery service just covers all these features in it's infrastructure classes.   Discovery Service in WCF 4.0 WCF 4.0 introduced a new assembly named System.ServiceModel.Discovery which has all necessary classes and interfaces to build a WS-Discovery compliant discovery service. It supports ad-hoc and managed proxy modes. For the case mentioned in this post, what we need to build is a standalone discovery service, which is the managed proxy discovery service mode. To build a managed discovery service in WCF 4.0 just create a new class inherits from the abstract class System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. This class implemented and abstracted the procedures of service announcement and probe. And it exposes 8 abstract methods where we can implement our own endpoint register, unregister and find logic. These 8 methods are asynchronized, which means all invokes to the discovery service are asynchronously, for better service capability and performance. 1, OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement, OnEndOnlineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the online announcement message. We need to add the endpoint information to the repository in this method. 2, OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement, OnEndOfflineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the offline announcement message. We need to remove the endpoint information from the repository in this method. 3, OnBeginFind, OnEndFind: Invoked when a client sent the probe message that want to find the service endpoint information. We need to look for the proper endpoints by matching the client’s criteria through the repository in this method. 4, OnBeginResolve, OnEndResolve: Invoked then a client sent the resolve message. Different from the find method, when using resolve method the discovery service will return the exactly one service endpoint metadata to the client. In our example we will NOT implement this method.   Let’s create our own discovery service, inherit the base System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. We also need to specify the service behavior in this class. Since the build-in discovery service host class only support the singleton mode, we must set its instance context mode to single. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using System.ServiceModel; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 11: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 12: { 13: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 14: { 15: throw new NotImplementedException(); 16: } 17:  18: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 19: { 20: throw new NotImplementedException(); 21: } 22:  23: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 24: { 25: throw new NotImplementedException(); 26: } 27:  28: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginResolve(ResolveCriteria resolveCriteria, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 29: { 30: throw new NotImplementedException(); 31: } 32:  33: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: throw new NotImplementedException(); 36: } 37:  38: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:  43: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 44: { 45: throw new NotImplementedException(); 46: } 47:  48: protected override EndpointDiscoveryMetadata OnEndResolve(IAsyncResult result) 49: { 50: throw new NotImplementedException(); 51: } 52: } 53: } Then let’s implement the online, offline and find methods one by one. WCF discovery service gives us full flexibility to implement the endpoint add, remove and find logic. For the demo purpose we will use an internal dictionary to store the services’ endpoint metadata. In the next post we will see how to serialize and store these information in database. Define a concurrent dictionary inside the service class since our it will be used in the multiple threads scenario. 1: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 2: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 3: { 4: private ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata> _services; 5:  6: public ManagedProxyDiscoveryService() 7: { 8: _services = new ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata>(); 9: } 10: } Then we can simply implement the logic of service online and offline. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.AddOrUpdate(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, endpointDiscoveryMetadata, (key, value) => endpointDiscoveryMetadata); 4: return new OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 5: } 6:  7: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 8: { 9: OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 10: } 11:  12: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: { 14: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpoint = null; 15: _services.TryRemove(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, out endpoint); 16: return new OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 17: } 18:  19: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 20: { 21: OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 22: } Regards the find method, the parameter FindRequestContext.Criteria has a method named IsMatch, which can be use for us to evaluate which service metadata is satisfied with the criteria. So the implementation of find method would be like this. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.Where(s => findRequestContext.Criteria.IsMatch(s.Value)) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .All(meta => 6: { 7: findRequestContext.AddMatchingEndpoint(meta); 8: return true; 9: }); 10: return new OnFindAsyncResult(callback, state); 11: } 12:  13: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 14: { 15: OnFindAsyncResult.End(result); 16: } As you can see, we checked all endpoints metadata in repository by invoking the IsMatch method. Then add all proper endpoints metadata into the parameter. Finally since all these methods are asynchronized we need some AsyncResult classes as well. Below are the base class and the inherited classes used in previous methods. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.Threading; 6:  7: namespace Phare.Service 8: { 9: abstract internal class AsyncResult : IAsyncResult 10: { 11: AsyncCallback callback; 12: bool completedSynchronously; 13: bool endCalled; 14: Exception exception; 15: bool isCompleted; 16: ManualResetEvent manualResetEvent; 17: object state; 18: object thisLock; 19:  20: protected AsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 21: { 22: this.callback = callback; 23: this.state = state; 24: this.thisLock = new object(); 25: } 26:  27: public object AsyncState 28: { 29: get 30: { 31: return state; 32: } 33: } 34:  35: public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle 36: { 37: get 38: { 39: if (manualResetEvent != null) 40: { 41: return manualResetEvent; 42: } 43: lock (ThisLock) 44: { 45: if (manualResetEvent == null) 46: { 47: manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(isCompleted); 48: } 49: } 50: return manualResetEvent; 51: } 52: } 53:  54: public bool CompletedSynchronously 55: { 56: get 57: { 58: return completedSynchronously; 59: } 60: } 61:  62: public bool IsCompleted 63: { 64: get 65: { 66: return isCompleted; 67: } 68: } 69:  70: object ThisLock 71: { 72: get 73: { 74: return this.thisLock; 75: } 76: } 77:  78: protected static TAsyncResult End<TAsyncResult>(IAsyncResult result) 79: where TAsyncResult : AsyncResult 80: { 81: if (result == null) 82: { 83: throw new ArgumentNullException("result"); 84: } 85:  86: TAsyncResult asyncResult = result as TAsyncResult; 87:  88: if (asyncResult == null) 89: { 90: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid async result.", "result"); 91: } 92:  93: if (asyncResult.endCalled) 94: { 95: throw new InvalidOperationException("Async object already ended."); 96: } 97:  98: asyncResult.endCalled = true; 99:  100: if (!asyncResult.isCompleted) 101: { 102: asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); 103: } 104:  105: if (asyncResult.manualResetEvent != null) 106: { 107: asyncResult.manualResetEvent.Close(); 108: } 109:  110: if (asyncResult.exception != null) 111: { 112: throw asyncResult.exception; 113: } 114:  115: return asyncResult; 116: } 117:  118: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously) 119: { 120: if (isCompleted) 121: { 122: throw new InvalidOperationException("This async result is already completed."); 123: } 124:  125: this.completedSynchronously = completedSynchronously; 126:  127: if (completedSynchronously) 128: { 129: this.isCompleted = true; 130: } 131: else 132: { 133: lock (ThisLock) 134: { 135: this.isCompleted = true; 136: if (this.manualResetEvent != null) 137: { 138: this.manualResetEvent.Set(); 139: } 140: } 141: } 142:  143: if (callback != null) 144: { 145: callback(this); 146: } 147: } 148:  149: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously, Exception exception) 150: { 151: this.exception = exception; 152: Complete(completedSynchronously); 153: } 154: } 155: } 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using Phare.Service; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: internal sealed class OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 11: { 12: public OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: : base(callback, state) 14: { 15: this.Complete(true); 16: } 17:  18: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 19: { 20: AsyncResult.End<OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 21: } 22:  23: } 24:  25: sealed class OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 26: { 27: public OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 28: : base(callback, state) 29: { 30: this.Complete(true); 31: } 32:  33: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: AsyncResult.End<OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 36: } 37: } 38:  39: sealed class OnFindAsyncResult : AsyncResult 40: { 41: public OnFindAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 42: : base(callback, state) 43: { 44: this.Complete(true); 45: } 46:  47: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 48: { 49: AsyncResult.End<OnFindAsyncResult>(result); 50: } 51: } 52:  53: sealed class OnResolveAsyncResult : AsyncResult 54: { 55: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint; 56:  57: public OnResolveAsyncResult(EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 58: : base(callback, state) 59: { 60: this.matchingEndpoint = matchingEndpoint; 61: this.Complete(true); 62: } 63:  64: public static EndpointDiscoveryMetadata End(IAsyncResult result) 65: { 66: OnResolveAsyncResult thisPtr = AsyncResult.End<OnResolveAsyncResult>(result); 67: return thisPtr.matchingEndpoint; 68: } 69: } 70: } Now we have finished the discovery service. The next step is to host it. The discovery service is a standard WCF service. So we can use ServiceHost on a console application, windows service, or in IIS as usual. The following code is how to host the discovery service we had just created in a console application. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: using (var host = new ServiceHost(new ManagedProxyDiscoveryService())) 4: { 5: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 6: { 7: host.Description.Endpoints.All((ep) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine(ep.ListenUri); 10: return true; 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: // retrieve the announcement, probe endpoint and binding from configuration 17: var announcementEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 18: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 19: var binding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 20: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(binding, announcementEndpointAddress); 21: var probeEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(binding, probeEndpointAddress); 22: probeEndpoint.IsSystemEndpoint = false; 23: // append the service endpoint for announcement and probe 24: host.AddServiceEndpoint(announcementEndpoint); 25: host.AddServiceEndpoint(probeEndpoint); 26:  27: host.Open(); 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 30: Console.ReadKey(); 31: } 32: catch (Exception ex) 33: { 34: Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()); 35: } 36: } 37:  38: Console.WriteLine("Done."); 39: Console.ReadKey(); 40: } What we need to notice is that, the discovery service needs two endpoints for announcement and probe. In this example I just retrieve them from the configuration file. I also specified the binding of these two endpoints in configuration file as well. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> And this is the console screen when I ran my discovery service. As you can see there are two endpoints listening for announcement message and probe message.   Discoverable Service and Client Next, let’s create a WCF service that is discoverable, which means it can be found by the discovery service. To do so, we need to let the service send the online announcement message to the discovery service, as well as offline message before it shutdown. Just create a simple service which can make the incoming string to upper. The service contract and implementation would be like this. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IStringService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: string ToUpper(string content); 6: } 1: public class StringService : IStringService 2: { 3: public string ToUpper(string content) 4: { 5: return content.ToUpper(); 6: } 7: } Then host this service in the console application. In order to make the discovery service easy to be tested the service address will be changed each time it’s started. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var baseAddress = new Uri(string.Format("net.tcp://localhost:11001/stringservice/{0}/", Guid.NewGuid().ToString())); 4:  5: using (var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(StringService), baseAddress)) 6: { 7: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Service opened at {0}", host.Description.Endpoints.First().ListenUri); 10: }; 11:  12: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IStringService), new NetTcpBinding(), string.Empty); 13:  14: host.Open(); 15:  16: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 17: Console.ReadKey(); 18: } 19: } Currently this service is NOT discoverable. We need to add a special service behavior so that it could send the online and offline message to the discovery service announcement endpoint when the host is opened and closed. WCF 4.0 introduced a service behavior named ServiceDiscoveryBehavior. When we specified the announcement endpoint address and appended it to the service behaviors this service will be discoverable. 1: var announcementAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 2: var announcementBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 3: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(announcementBinding, announcementAddress); 4: var discoveryBehavior = new ServiceDiscoveryBehavior(); 5: discoveryBehavior.AnnouncementEndpoints.Add(announcementEndpoint); 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(discoveryBehavior); The ServiceDiscoveryBehavior utilizes the service extension and channel dispatcher to implement the online and offline announcement logic. In short, it injected the channel open and close procedure and send the online and offline message to the announcement endpoint.   On client side, when we have the discovery service, a client can invoke a service without knowing its endpoint. WCF discovery assembly provides a class named DiscoveryClient, which can be used to find the proper service endpoint by passing the criteria. In the code below I initialized the DiscoveryClient, specified the discovery service probe endpoint address. Then I created the find criteria by specifying the service contract I wanted to use and invoke the Find method. This will send the probe message to the discovery service and it will find the endpoints back to me. The discovery service will return all endpoints that matches the find criteria, which means in the result of the find method there might be more than one endpoints. In this example I just returned the first matched one back. In the next post I will show how to extend our discovery service to make it work like a service load balancer. 1: static EndpointAddress FindServiceEndpoint() 2: { 3: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 4: var probeBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 5: var discoveryEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(probeBinding, probeEndpointAddress); 6:  7: EndpointAddress address = null; 8: FindResponse result = null; 9: using (var discoveryClient = new DiscoveryClient(discoveryEndpoint)) 10: { 11: result = discoveryClient.Find(new FindCriteria(typeof(IStringService))); 12: } 13:  14: if (result != null && result.Endpoints.Any()) 15: { 16: var endpointMetadata = result.Endpoints.First(); 17: address = endpointMetadata.Address; 18: } 19: return address; 20: } Once we probed the discovery service we will receive the endpoint. So in the client code we can created the channel factory from the endpoint and binding, and invoke to the service. When creating the client side channel factory we need to make sure that the client side binding should be the same as the service side. WCF discovery service can be used to find the endpoint for a service contract, but the binding is NOT included. This is because the binding was not in the WS-Discovery specification. In the next post I will demonstrate how to add the binding information into the discovery service. At that moment the client don’t need to create the binding by itself. Instead it will use the binding received from the discovery service. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 4: var content = Console.ReadLine(); 5: while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content)) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Finding the service endpoint..."); 8: var address = FindServiceEndpoint(); 9: if (address == null) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("There is no endpoint matches the criteria."); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Found the endpoint {0}", address.Uri); 16:  17: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IStringService>(new NetTcpBinding(), address); 18: factory.Opened += (sender, e) => 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("Connecting to {0}.", factory.Endpoint.ListenUri); 21: }; 22: var proxy = factory.CreateChannel(); 23: using (proxy as IDisposable) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("ToUpper: {0} => {1}", content, proxy.ToUpper(content)); 26: } 27: } 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 30: content = Console.ReadLine(); 31: } 32: } Similarly, the discovery service probe endpoint and binding were defined in the configuration file. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> OK, now let’s have a test. Firstly start the discovery service, and then start our discoverable service. When it started it will announced to the discovery service and registered its endpoint into the repository, which is the local dictionary. And then start the client and type something. As you can see the client asked the discovery service for the endpoint and then establish the connection to the discoverable service. And more interesting, do NOT close the client console but terminate the discoverable service but press the enter key. This will make the service send the offline message to the discovery service. Then start the discoverable service again. Since we made it use a different address each time it started, currently it should be hosted on another address. If we enter something in the client we could see that it asked the discovery service and retrieve the new endpoint, and connect the the service.   Summary In this post I discussed the benefit of using the discovery service and the procedures of service announcement and probe. I also demonstrated how to leverage the WCF Discovery feature in WCF 4.0 to build a simple managed discovery service. For test purpose, in this example I used the in memory dictionary as the discovery endpoint metadata repository. And when finding I also just return the first matched endpoint back. I also hard coded the bindings between the discoverable service and the client. In next post I will show you how to solve the problem mentioned above, as well as some additional feature for production usage. You can download the code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Parallelism in .NET – Part 1, Decomposition

    - by Reed
    The first step in designing any parallelized system is Decomposition.  Decomposition is nothing more than taking a problem space and breaking it into discrete parts.  When we want to work in parallel, we need to have at least two separate things that we are trying to run.  We do this by taking our problem and decomposing it into parts. There are two common abstractions that are useful when discussing parallel decomposition: Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition.  These two abstractions allow us to think about our problem in a way that helps leads us to correct decision making in terms of the algorithms we’ll use to parallelize our routine. To start, I will make a couple of minor points. I’d like to stress that Decomposition has nothing to do with specific algorithms or techniques.  It’s about how you approach and think about the problem, not how you solve the problem using a specific tool, technique, or library.  Decomposing the problem is about constructing the appropriate mental model: once this is done, you can choose the appropriate design and tools, which is a subject for future posts. Decomposition, being unrelated to tools or specific techniques, is not specific to .NET in any way.  This should be the first step to parallelizing a problem, and is valid using any framework, language, or toolset.  However, this gives us a starting point – without a proper understanding of decomposition, it is difficult to understand the proper usage of specific classes and tools within the .NET framework. Data Decomposition is often the simpler abstraction to use when trying to parallelize a routine.  In order to decompose our problem domain by data, we take our entire set of data and break it into smaller, discrete portions, or chunks.  We then work on each chunk in the data set in parallel. This is particularly useful if we can process each element of data independently of the rest of the data.  In a situation like this, there are some wonderfully simple techniques we can use to take advantage of our data.  By decomposing our domain by data, we can very simply parallelize our routines.  In general, we, as developers, should be always searching for data that can be decomposed. Finding data to decompose if fairly simple, in many instances.  Data decomposition is typically used with collections of data.  Any time you have a collection of items, and you’re going to perform work on or with each of the items, you potentially have a situation where parallelism can be exploited.  This is fairly easy to do in practice: look for iteration statements in your code, such as for and foreach. Granted, every for loop is not a candidate to be parallelized.  If the collection is being modified as it’s iterated, or the processing of elements depends on other elements, the iteration block may need to be processed in serial.  However, if this is not the case, data decomposition may be possible. Let’s look at one example of how we might use data decomposition.  Suppose we were working with an image, and we were applying a simple contrast stretching filter.  When we go to apply the filter, once we know the minimum and maximum values, we can apply this to each pixel independently of the other pixels.  This means that we can easily decompose this problem based off data – we will do the same operation, in parallel, on individual chunks of data (each pixel). Task Decomposition, on the other hand, is focused on the individual tasks that need to be performed instead of focusing on the data.  In order to decompose our problem domain by tasks, we need to think about our algorithm in terms of discrete operations, or tasks, which can then later be parallelized. Task decomposition, in practice, can be a bit more tricky than data decomposition.  Here, we need to look at what our algorithm actually does, and how it performs its actions.  Once we have all of the basic steps taken into account, we can try to analyze them and determine whether there are any constraints in terms of shared data or ordering.  There are no simple things to look for in terms of finding tasks we can decompose for parallelism; every algorithm is unique in terms of its tasks, so every algorithm will have unique opportunities for task decomposition. For example, say we want our software to perform some customized actions on startup, prior to showing our main screen.  Perhaps we want to check for proper licensing, notify the user if the license is not valid, and also check for updates to the program.  Once we verify the license, and that there are no updates, we’ll start normally.  In this case, we can decompose this problem into tasks – we have a few tasks, but there are at least two discrete, independent tasks (check licensing, check for updates) which we can perform in parallel.  Once those are completed, we will continue on with our other tasks. One final note – Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition are not mutually exclusive.  Often, you’ll mix the two approaches while trying to parallelize a single routine.  It’s possible to decompose your problem based off data, then further decompose the processing of each element of data based on tasks.  This just provides a framework for thinking about our algorithms, and for discussing the problem.

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  • Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

    - by Rick Strahl
    ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Text Wrapping in SSRS

    - by anna
    Hi, How do I accomplish text wrapping of table fields in SSRS Report, and proper landscaping when rendering the report to PDF format Thanks in advance Anna

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  • How to update an XBAP’s config file after deployment

    - by maharaj
    Hi All, Here is my scenario and would love any feedback. We have a WPF XBAP application which gets hosted on our customer's IIS server on which we as a vendor do not have any control over. So as a part of configuration, clients first need to configure the WCF service to point to the proper endpoints. Default location for the service is say "http://localhost/XYZ.svc" which needs to change to proper adderess such as "http://USC.intl.edu/XYZ.svc" (offcourse our service is not called XYZ, just using that name as an example). Problem in our test scenario is as soon as we change these values in the config file (Appname.exe.config) the manifest file becomes invalid and we start getting errors. The solutions that I have looked at talk about mageui.exe. Our clinets may not have this utility. So how can we achieve this without using this utility and have the app be configurable. Any input will be appreciated. Thanks, Salil

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  • ajax upload cannot process JSON response or gives download popup

    - by Jorre
    I'm using the AJAX plugin from Andris Valums: AJAX Upload ( http://valums.com/ajax-upload/ ) Copyright (c) Andris Valums It works great, except for the fact that I cannot send proper JSON as a response. I'm setting the headers to 'Content-Type', 'application/json' before sending the JSON-encoded response, and in the plugin I'm saying that I'm expecting JSON: responseType: "json", This gives me a download popup asking to download the JSON/REPONSE file. The strange thing is, when I don't ass the correct "Content-Type" to my response, it works. Of course I want to pass the correct response type, because all my jQuery 1.4 calls are depending on correct JSON. Does anyone else have had this same problem or is there anyone out there willing to try this out ? I'd love to use this plugin but only when I can return proper JSON with the correct content-type Thanks for all your help!

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  • how to setup the sphinx with netbeans

    - by Pradeep
    i have successfully configured sphinx4 with eclipse. for that these steps i have used. copy my java and config files to SRC folder all the necessary jar files (in the lib). the lib folder added to the root of the project build those jar files (jsapi files too) change the configuration file and give the proper path test the java file but in Netbeans i really dont understand how to do the proper steps. can someone help me. the jar files should be added to "Libraries" rite. then after adding them how to build them. in the netbeans it dont show a SRC folder. so all the java files and configuration files should go to Source Packages folder rite. can someone help me with this. please

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  • Emacs: annoying Flymake dialog box.

    - by baol
    Hello I have the following lines in my ~/.emacs.d/init.el (custom-set-variables '(flymake-allowed-file-name-masks (quote ( ("\\.cc\\'" flymake-simple-make-init) ("\\.cpp\\'" flymake-simple-make-init))))) (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-find-file-hook) When I open a cc/cpp file that has a Makefile with the following content in the same folder I get proper on-the-fly compilation and error reporting (Flymake will check the syntax and report errors and warnings during code editing) .PHONY: check-syntax check-syntax: $(CXX) -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -fsyntax-only $(CHK_SOURCES) The problem is that when I open a .cc file that has no corresponding Makefile i get an annoying dialog box that warns me about flymake being disabled for every file opened. Is there some hook I can use to disable that warning? Can you provide sample elisp code and explanation on how you found the proper hook?

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  • Problem with sharepoint search.

    - by Lalit
    Hi, I have created the Contact list. I feed proper data where required in my personal sharepoint site. Bu when I look for the specific name or any key word that present in contact list it shows message : No results matching your search were found. Check your spelling. Are the words in your query spelled correctly? Try using synonyms. Maybe what you're looking for uses slightly different words. Make your search more general. Try more general terms in place of specific ones. Try your search in a different scope. Different scopes can have different results. Where is, I am giving proper inputs by following these instructions. What should be problem. Is i nees to make any setting for make my data searchable ?

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