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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 24, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, November 24, 2011Popular ReleasesASP.NET Comet Ajax Library (Reverse Ajax - Server Push): ASP.NET Reverse Ajax Samples: Chat, MVC Razor, DesktopClient, Reverse Ajax for VB.NET and C#Windows Azure SDK for PHP: Windows Azure SDK for PHP v4.0.5: INSTALLATION Windows Azure SDK for PHP requires no special installation steps. Simply download the SDK, extract it to the folder you would like to keep it in, and add the library directory to your PHP include_path. INSTALLATION VIA PEAR Maarten Balliauw provides an unofficial PEAR channel via http://www.pearplex.net. Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPAzure Or if you've already installed PHPAzure before: pear upgrade p...Anno 2070 Assistant: Beta v1.0 (STABLE): Anno 2070 Assistant Beta v1.0 Released! Features Included: Complete Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Complete Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Completed Credits Screen Known Issues: Not all production chains and building layouts may be on the lists because they have not yet been discovered. However, data is still 99.9% complete. Currently the Supply & Demand, including Calculator screen are disabled until version 1.1.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.7: Including updated Minecraft Biome Extractor and mcmap to support the new Minecraft 1.0.0 release (new block types, etc).Metro Pandora: Metro Pandora SDK V1: For more information on this release please see Metro Pandora SDK Introduction. Supported platforms: Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight Windows 8 .Net 4.0, WPF, WinformsVisual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775Developer Team Article System Management: DTASM v1.3: ?? ??? ???? 3 ????? ???? ???? ????? ??? : - ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? . - ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? , ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??? . - ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? .VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...SharePoint 2010 Education Demo Project: Release SharePoint SP1 for Education Solutions: This release includes updates to the Content Packs for SharePoint SP1. All Content Packs have been updated to install successfully under SharePoint SP1SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportBugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls Samples and Tutorials: 1.0 samples: Demos and Tutorials for ASP.net Awesome VS2008 are in .NET 3.5 VS2010 are in .NET 4.0 (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)New Projects"My" Search SharePoint 2010 WebParts: Solution consists of two SharePoint 2010 web parts inheriting from core results web part. The "My Core Search Results" webpart and the "Sortable Results" web part.Alerta Mensagens: Projeto de alerta de mensagens.Analyzer GT3000: VU MIF PS1 "Utopine Amnezija" PSI projektasAutoReservation: Miniprojekt an der HSR im Fach MsTechContestMeter: Program for measuring participant scores in programming contests.CountriesWFA: oby ostatniDotNet.Framework.Common: <DotNet.Framework.Common> ASP.NET?????? Esaan Windows Phone 7 Application Compitition: Resource for Esaan Windows Phone 7 Application Excel add-in to enable users View Azure Storage Tables: An Excel 2007 add-in using Azure Storage REST APIs (no Azure libraries required) and Excel custom task pane. Uses of such Office 2007 add-in: 1. Read data from Azure storage, populate that in excel and use it by sorting (not directly available in Azure storage) and so on. 2. Write Sorted data back (in sorted order) back to Azure storage. 3. Have data used frequently (such as dictionary of legal terms, or math formulae, and so on) on Azure storage and let your Office Excel users use th...fastconv: fastconv, a fast charset encoding convertor.gaosu: this is a gaosu projectGems: Gossip-enabled monitoring system.GridIT: GridIT is a Puzzle written in Visual Basic.Habanero Faces: A set of user interface libraries for use with Habanero Core used to build Windows Forms or Visual WebGUI user interfaces for your business objects. HomeSite: HomeSiteHTML to docx Converter: This converts HTML into Word documents (docx format). The code is written in PHP and works with PHPWord.Image Curator: image curation programjLemon: jLemon is an LALR(1) parser generator. Lemon is similar to the much more famous programs "YACC", "BISON" and "LEMON". jLemon is a pure Java program and compatible with "LEMON".jngsoftware: JNG Computer ServicesKinectoid: Kinectoid is a Kinect based pong game based on Neat Game Engine.Linq Accelerator: coming soon!Linq to SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services): Linq to SSRS allows you as developer generate objects and map them to the repots on SQL Server Reporting Services in linq to sql fashion using lambda expressions and linq notation.MicroBitmap - Image Compressor: MicroBitmap is a image compressor which is different from all other compressors This compressor is focussed at compressing the bitmap and making it so small as possible so fast as possible You can find more information in the source codeOMX_AL_test_environment: OMX application layer simulation/testing environmentShuriken Plugins: Shuriken Plugins is a project for developing plugins for Shuriken, the free launcher app on Windows. Simple Command Line Backup Tool: Simple Command Line Backup Tool automates the backup of files from the command line for use in batch files. Includes file type filters/ recursive/non recursive and number days to keep backups for. Right now this is simply a quick app I created for a client of mine that needed a simple backup utility to go with a product I delivered. .NET 2.0 C# Console Application Hopefully this will morph into a useful utility with features not common in other command line backup utilities.SomethingSpacial: Initially designed via Interact Designer Ariel (http://www.facingblend.com/) Something Spacial as a design was used to help give some look and feel for the Silverlight User Group Starter Kit and then finally used as part of the Seattle Silverlight User Group Community Site.SqlServer Packer: SqlServer???????????????????，?????????。TVDBMetaData: Construct TV Series and Episode XML metadata from TheTvDB database.Ukázkové projekty: Obsahuje ukázkové projekty uživatele TenCoKaciStromy.Uzing Inklude: UI = Uzing + Inklude Uzing : Utility classes for .Net written in C# Inklude : Utility classes written in native C++ It supports very low level communications, but in very simple way. Current Capability - TCP, UDP, Thread in C# & C++ - String in C++ - Shared memory in C# - Communication between C# and C++ via shared memory Dependency: - TBB (http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/) - Boost (http://www.boost.org/) Even though it depends on such heavy libs, end developer does...Visual Studio Project Converter: This project is inspired by the original source code provided by Emmet Gray to convert Visual Studio solution and project files from one version to another (both backwards and forwards). This project has been converted to C# and updated to support new features.WarrantyPrint: WarrantyPrintWordPress???? on Windows Azure: WordPress?????Windows Azure Platform????????。 ???????SQL Azure??????。WPFResumeVideo: Play video on any computer, and resume where you left offWyvern's Depot: Personal code repository.

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• Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 11, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 11, 2012Popular ReleasesCasanova Language: Casanova IDE alpha release: This is the first release for the Casanova IDE. It features the major capabilities of the framework: support for rules, scripts, input management, and basic content management. The IDE is still under major development. Planned features include: multiplayer support 3D rendering syntax highlighting basic Intellisense slightly improved syntax for rules and scripts audio in-game menus Also, do not forget to download and install OpenAL: http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Download...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...SVNUG.CodePlex: Cloud Development with Windows Azure: This release contains the slides for the Cloud Development with Windows Azure presentation.WCF Data Service (OData) Regression & Load Testing Tool: Latest: This is latest stable releaseSHA-1 Hash Checker: SHA-1 Hash Checker (for Windows): Fixed major bugs. Removed false negatives.AutoUpdaterdotNET: AutoUpdater.NET 1.0: Everything seems perfect if you find any problem you can report to http://www.rbsoft.org/contact.htmlMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2.zip contains several reports include Sales Reason Comparisons SQL2008R2.rdl which uses Adventure Works DW 2008R2 as a data source reference. For more information, go to Sales Reason Comparisons report.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 7: Fix - Fixed Metro build to pass Windows Application Certification Kit on Windows 8 Release Preview Fix - Fixed Metro build error caused by an anonymous type Fix - Fixed ItemConverter not being used when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed an incorrect object being passed to the Error event when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed decimal properties not being correctly ignored with DefaultValueHandlingLINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.3.0: New to release 1.0.3.0:Combinatronics: Combinations (unique) Combinations (with repetition) Permutations (unique) Permutations (with repetition) Convert jagged arrays to fixed multidimensional arrays Convert fixed multidimensional arrays to jagged arrays ElementAtMax ElementAtMin ElementAtAverage New set of array extension (1.0.2.8):Rotate Flip Resize (maintaing data) Split Fuse Replace Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) Ne...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 1: 6?11????? ??? - ?Entities???????????EntityBase，???ToString()???????json???，??????4.0???????。2.0?3.5???！ ??? - Request????????AccessToken??????source=appkey?????。????，????????，???????public_timeline?????????。 ?? - ???ClinetLogin??????????RefreshToken???????false???。 ?? - ???RepostTimeline????Statuses???null???。 ?? - Utility?BuildPostData?，?WeiboParameter??value?NULL????????。 ??????? ??? - ??.Net 2.0/3.5/4.0????。??????VS2010??????????。VS2008????????，??????????。 ??? - ??.Net 4.0???SDK...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 4.5.0: Added Instruments tab for modules Open folder content feature Some bug fixesPython Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Beta 1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython, IronPython, Jython and PyPy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging •...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 1: New in this release: Automatically flip components when placing Delete components using keyboard delete key Resize document Document properties window Print document Recent files list Confirm when exiting with unsaved changes Thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer for CDDX files Show shortcut keys in toolbox Highlight selected item in toolbox Zoom using mouse scroll wheel while holding down ctrl key Plugin support for: Custom export formats Custom import formats Open...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.2 Beta: The future of Umbracov5 represents the future architecture of Umbraco, so please be aware that while it's technically superior to v4 it's not yet on a par feature or performance-wise. What's new? For full details see our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page showing all items complete for 5.2. In a nutshellPackage Builder Starter Kits Dynamic Extension Methods Querying / IsHelpers Friendly alt template URLs Localization Various bug fixes / performance enhancements Gett...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0.5: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like WebSQL, IndexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. See it in action in this 6 minutes video New features in JayData 1.0.5http://jaydata.org/blog/jaydata-1.0.5-is-here-with-authentication-support-and-more http://jaydata.org/blog/release-notes Sencha Touch 2 module (read-only)This module can be used to bind data retrieved by JayData to Sencha Touch 2 generated user interface. (exam...32feet.NET: 3.5: This version changes the 32feet.NET library (both desktop and NETCF) to use .NET Framework version 3.5. Previously we compiled for .NET v2.0. There are no code changes from our version 3.4. See the 3.4 release for more information. Changes due to compiling for .NET 3.5Applications should be changed to use NET/NETCF v3.5. Removal of class InTheHand.Net.Bluetooth.AsyncCompletedEventArgs, which we provided on NETCF. We now just use the standard .NET System.ComponentModel.AsyncCompletedEvent...Application Architecture Guidelines: Application Architecture Guidelines 3.0.7: 3.0.7Jolt Environment: Jolt v2 Stable: Many new features. Follow development here for more information: http://www.rune-server.org/runescape-development/rs-503-client-server/projects/298763-jolt-environment-v2.html Setup instructions in downloadSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.5): New fetures:Multilingual Support Max users property in Standings Web Part Games time zone change (UTC +1) bug fix - Version 1.4 locking problem http://euro2012.codeplex.com/discussions/358262 bug fix - Field Title not found (v.1.3) German SP http://euro2012.codeplex.com/discussions/358189#post844228 Bug fix - Access is denied.for users with contribute rights Bug fix - Installing on non-English version of SharePoint Bug fix - Title Rules Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint E...New Projects2D map editor for Game Tool Development class: This project contains a basic 2D map editor, which can read a tileset (or chipset) to create a custom map. The user can then load and save maps previously created (file format .map). ArtifexCore: ArtifexCore - a compilation of unique, original, and revamped RunUO/OrbSA projects.ASP.NET MVC 4 - Sports Store using Visual Studio 2011 Beta: This is a the output of "Sports Store" exercise in Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework by Adam Freeman and Steven Sanderson. Instead of MVC 3 as recommended in the book, I have used MVC 4.clabinet: clabinet is a cloud based file cabinetCopy File Location - Explorer Shortcut: This Explorer Extension adds a shortcut menu to all files and folders to copy the full location to the Clipboard.CSSSEVER: ???????????DoodleLabyrinthLogic: A starter '100 rogues' type logic library for rogue-like buildersEasyFlash Cart Builder: EasyFlash Cart Builder is a tool for linking files together into an EasyFlash cartridge. Generic enumeration: Provides string representation of C# enumerations.Hacker Typer for WP7: This is a hackertyper.net Windows Phone based application HTML Batch Logger: This is a simple Log class that can be used in any .NET C# Console Application. You can use it to log into an HTML file, console window, or database. kinect ????????????: ???、??????????????????????、????????????????。???、??????????????????。?????????、????????????????、??????????????????。laskjdfqewr131231: example omes projectnlite web libraray: Lite Web Framework,????Page，??Ndf???WebApiNMemory - an in-memory relational database for .NET: NMemory is a lightweight in-memory relational database engine that can be hosted by .NET applications. It supports traditional database features like indexes, foreign key relations, transaction handling and isolation.NoManaComponets: A attempt at a reusable library for common tasks in XNA like avatar management, text rendering and shading. Currently abandoned.NP: network client appObject Viewer: A UserControl that can display any object.PowerPoint Graph Creator: The main purpose of this PowerPoint add-in is to help people who sometimes need to draw graphs into the PPT and then for example add some animations or want to load to existing graphs into PPT but don't have a lot of time to re-draw every thing.Project Blue Tigris: This Project aims at enabling users to control and interact with Windows without the need to touch the keyboard or the mouse, through a new user interface using gestures and voice commands. This project will utilize webcam and microphones connected to the computer when installed. This is our vision. It would be great if you join us.QTP FT Uninstaller: KnowledgeInbox QTP/FT Uninstaller is a tool designed for uninstalling HP's QuickTest Professional or Functional Testing products in one click. The tool should only be used in cases where QTP was working fine earlier and after some update or installation it stopped working. The tool scans the system registry for all files associated with QTP and deletes them. Note: Using this uninstaller may impact tools like HP Sprinter, Quality Center. You should re-install those tools also after using t...Radius Client for Microsoft® .NET Micro Framework: Client for Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)Regression Suite: RegressionSuite is a software test suite that incorporates measurement of the startup lag, measurement of accurate execution times, generating execution statistics, customized input distributions, and processable regression specific details as part of the regular unit tests. Essentially, RegressionSuite provides the frame-work around which the individual unit regressors are invoked (and details and statistics collected). Unit regressors are grouped into named regressor sets (or modules), a...Sern: Nothing yet.SharePoint List Number to Text Custom Column: Number to text custom column in SharePoint is a project that is useful in any financial SharePoint implementation to automatically generate the corresponding number representation in textual format, this feature is designed to be easy extended to any language and it’s initially in Arabic and English languages.you can find all related source code in download section SharpDND: A attempt to create a open source DLL for the openSRD. Designed with customization in mind if completed the tools included could build out pathfinder and other RPG rulesets.SmartSense: SmartSense is a wearable holographic gesture and voice controlled intelligent system. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a heavily researched area in today’s technology driven world. Most people experience HCI using a mouse and keyboard as input devices. We wanted a more natural way to interact with the computer that also allows instant access to information. We are developing a real-time system that is always on and available to collect data at any moment but also is accessible “on-the-fly...Sumzlib: sumzlib is a set of class library that provides useful algorithms in static method. this project is written in vb.netWCF Data Service (OData) Regression & Load Testing Tool: This is a tool that is especially being developed to regress OData Services. Current release only support few test like ($select, Top, etc ), more test will be added over the time. It is a Multithreaded Regression Test Tool that can generate result in Excel format including diagnostic error data and performance data like turnaround time as well. It can be used for bulk testing of several services at the same time It can be quite useful to for those who are developing several service...X.Web.Microdata: This project is intended to represent an mitcrodata entitie in the .NET Framework. (Particularly in ASP.NET) The X.Web.Microdata represent the http://www.data-vocabulary.org/ (and Google) microdata notation And X.Web.Microdata.SchemaOrg represent http://schema.org/ microdata notatio

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 15, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 15, 2012Popular ReleasesYAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib 2.11: XML entity names now accept W3C standards. * Nullable types are not serialized with a `yaxlib:realtype` attribute any more. * Fixed some namespace related bugs. * Fixed an issue with deserializing date-time values that expose date time kind of UTC during serialization. * Classes can accept YAXDictionary and [YAXCollection] attributes. The value to these attributes can then be overridden by members instantiating them. * Unit tests all migrated to NUnit. ...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. Revitalized IndexedDB providerNow you c...SQL Server Compact Toolbox: Release 3.1.1 Visual Studio add-in: Download the Visual Studio add-in for SQL Server Compact 3.5 and 4.0 from here SQL Server Compact Toolbox 3.1–Visual Guide of new features New features: - Added ability to generate Windows Phone 8 DataContext classes - Improved sqlmetal detection for VS 2012 only installationsVFPX: FoxcodePlus: FoxcodePlus - Visual Studio like extensions to Visual FoxPro IntelliSense.TFS 2012 Server/service Setup for Demo: TfsDemo_1.0.0.1: The console application today sets up Create a new Team Set the team as the default team Configure team settings Set Backlog Iteration path Set Team Iterations and start & finish dates Set Team Area path Add Team Members Add Product Backlog Items & linked Tasks. This has been tested against Tfs Server/Service using Scrum 2.1 Process TemplateZXMAK2: Version 2.6.4.0: - added RZX playback - fix Reset behaviorDroid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.8 Beta: fixed the icon for packages on the desktop fixed the install dialog closing right when it starts removed the link to "set up the sdk for me" as this is no longer supported. fixed bug where the device selection dialog would show, even if there was only one device connected. fixed toolbar from having "gap" between other toolbar removed main menu items that do not have any menus Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.3.0）: Iveely Search Engine?????????????，0.3.0????????，????????：??????。 ????????????"????“？???????,????????????。??0.3.0??????????？0.3.0????????，????。 ?????，????????????????，??????300????，?????????300?????????????????，?????????????????。????，??????????，???????，???????。???????IveelySE.Resource，???????????，???????????????????????，???????????。 ????????Iveely.config，??????IveelySE.Run.Task.exe，?????????http://127.0.0.1:8088/query=yourkeyword，??????。 ????，??? ??http://www.cnblogs.com/liufanping...Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.0: Prva verzija ovog projekta, još je uvijek oznacena kao BETA - ovo znaci da su naša testiranja prošla uspješno :) No, kako mi ne proizvodimo neki software za blagajne, tako sve ovo nije niti isprobano u "realnim" uvjetima - svaka je sugestija, primjedba ili prijava bug-a je dobrodošla. Za sve ovo koristite, molimo, Discussions ili Issue Tracker. U ovom trenutku runtime binary je raspoloživ kao Any CPU za .NET verzije 2.0. Javite ukoliko trebaju i verzije buildane za 32-bit/64-bit kao i za .N...Squiggle - A free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 3.2 (Development): This release is mainly for enabling extensibility and interoperability with other platforms. Support for plugins Support for extensions Communication layer and protocol is platform independent (ZeroMQ, ProtocolBuffers) Bug fixes New /invite command Edit the sent message Disable update check NOTE: This is development release and not recommended for production use.AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.8: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release, and methods that are now deprecated. Note changes to the PDF Writer: tcPDF is no longer bundled with PHPExcel, but should be installed separately if you wish to use that 3rd-Party library with PHPExcel. Alternatively, you can choose to use mPDF or DomPDF as PDF Rendering libraries instead: PHPExcel now provides a configurable wrapper allowing you a choice of PDF renderer. See the documentation, or the PDF s...DirectX Tool Kit: October 12, 2012: October 12, 2012 Added PrimitiveBatch for drawing user primitives Debug object names for all D3D resources (for PIX and debug layer leak reporting)mojoPortal: 2.3.9.3: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2393-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.4: Fixed a bug where the server ip was not logged properly in the stats file.Captcha MVC: Captcha Mvc 2.1.2: v 2.1.2: Fixed problem with serialization. Made all classes from a namespace Jetbrains.Annotaions as the internal. Added autocomplete attribute and autocorrect attribute for captcha input element. Minor changes. Updated: I'm added an example for this question. v 2.1.1: Fixed problem with serialization. Minor changes. v 2.1: Added support for storing captcha in the session or cookie. See the updated example. Updated example. Minor changes. v 2.0.1: Added support for a partial ...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the module printing function was only visible to administrators Fixed issue where pane level skinning was being assigned to a default container for any content pane Fixed issue when using password aging and FB / Google authentication Fixed issue that was causing the DateEditControl to not load the assigned value Fixed issue that stopped additional profile properties to be displayed in the member directory after modifying the template Fixed er...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...VidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...New ProjectsAssertion.NUnit: NUnit test helper class. Traditionally NUnit stops test on the first check failure. But sometimes subsequent rules check may helps with bug location. BlobCache: BlobCache is a graphical way of modify the BlobCache setting in the Web Application web.config.C# Disassembler: Disassembler written in C#. In progress at this momentCakeThatIBaked: Web Scripting and content Creation Project FileCamelot SharePoint SQL Commander Web Part: The Camelot SharePoint SQL Commander Web Part is a simple yet powerful sql-query browser for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and 2013.DB Shell: XAML dialect for describing database operations. Working both with database data and structure. Written for .NET 4.0. DffPlugin: DFF Importer/DFF exporter Description: 3ds max import & export plugins for GTA III era 3d models Supported games: GTA III, GTA VC, GTA SA Author: SeggaemanDirectory2Rss: Directory2Rss scans a list of files under a given set of directories and writes the output to a Rss feed which can be published on the web. When it is run again it checks for new files and writes the addition to the Rss feed. Great for monitoring directories for additions.Dynamics CRM 2011 Type interface for TypeScript: This project provides a type inteface for the CRM object model crm.d.ts. Including this file in your TypeScript project will add Intellisense support for the CREmail Organizer: Outlook 2010 add-in that shows a breakdown of what's taking up space in your inbox. Forismatic. Quotes and expressions. Windows Phone app.: The Windows Phone app for reading the forismatic.comGeekRule Open Source Software: GeekRule provides open source projects for the .NET development communityGestorht: Proyecto para la gestion ht del proyecto completoihashPwd: hashPwd provides hashing algorithms within a classical windows form. Current Version: 1.0bHuber Race: Huber Race is a modern open source race timing and scoring software program designed to time running races on the Windows stack. isanywhere: A command line utility to see if one or more files (given a filemask) are to be found anywhere inside a specific directory, or elsewhere inside one of its subdirectories. A sort of poor man's synchronisation utility, very simple but maybe quite handy.Läx-o-matic: A program for handling submitted answers to tasks, sent in by students.Lixo Eletrônico - Projeto Integrador 2: Não sei o que escrever aqui...só que isso precisa ser feito.Music Note Shuffle - Encouraging Games (SLXNA Game): 0 people following this project (follow) Music Note Shuffle - Encouraging Games VB.Net Silverlight and XNA Game How did this project come about? One of the thmysocket??: ??????，???????myupload: myuploadndalexiswalkingweb2: This is a summary of the codeplex area. To be updated later.OpenMVCRM: This is a free CRM Application which anybody can download and use. Our intention is to make it easy for every small organizations to have a CRM to manage their business. This software is being developed in the wonderful so called ASP.NET MVC and all those wonderful things ASP.NET MVC team is throwing out. We owe to everyonePOV-Ray in Visual Studio: Born out of my own frustrations with the POV-Ray text editor, I decided to embark on this project. Currently it is in the very early stages. QRCode App for SharePoint 2013: The QRCode App is an app part to generate dynamically QRCode in your SharePoint's pages. RazorSourceGenerator: ??????Razor Engine??????，????Razor?????????????????Schema????SQL?????????。RomEditor: Editing CWM-Based Roms made easy !Some Unit-Testing Utilities: Testing for thrown exceptions in the default MS unit-testing framework is not optimal for a variety of reasons. Here are some utility methods that do it betterTMX Map Loader XNA for Windows Phone 7/8: TMXMapLoaderXNA is a full XNA content pipeline library that allows you to import TMX map files.Uzi.Packaging: OPC abstraction library used in Ikosa Framework and Guildsmanship: Battle-Scapes.wtother: wtotherXML File Editor: Egy alkalmazás, amellyel XML fájlokat tudunk kontrolláltan szerkeszteni. A program feladata, hogy egy (konzol) felületen keresztül, menüvezérelten tudjunk szabvYasminuroban: Yasminuroban is an open source "Sokoban" (aka "Warehouse Keeper" or "Boxes") alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard. Includes level editor. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 17, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 17, 2011Popular ReleasesBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.1: - Priority update to resolve a bug that was causing Boss damage to ignore Blood Shields entirelyfluentAOP - A Fluent AOP Library for .NET: fluentAOP.1.0.13.bin: fluentAOP.1.0.13.binXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 02.00.36: New FeaturesAdvanced database caching. XsltDb now supports SqlCacheDependency. This great feature allows minimizing database load for heavily loaded site pages as home page, latest news, etc. mdo:sql and mdo:xml supports JSON output formats $json each recordset is converted to array of JSON records $jsonrow – first record of first recordset is converted to JSON object mdo:header section. You now able to inject anything you need at page header, top of the form or top of the module. mdo...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.16 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of this release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. W...MvcContrib: an Outer Curve Foundation project: MVC 3 - 3.0.51.0: Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.TestHelper.dll MvcContrib.Extras.Release.zip T4MVC. The extra view engines / controller factories and other functionality which is in the project. This file includes the main MvcContrib assembly. Samples are included in the release. You do not need MvcContrib if you download the Extras.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 1.5.0.0 - Jalthi: Updated solution to VS2010. New: Work Item #4450 - Optional MSBuild task parameter :: Do not error if no files were found. Fixed: Work Item #5028 - Output file encoding is the same as the optional MSBuild task encoding argument. Fixed: Work Item #5824 - MSBuilds where slow, after the first build due to the Current Thread being forced to en-gb, on none en-gb systems. Changed: Work Item #6873 - Project license changed from MS-PL to GPLv2. New: Added all the unit tests from the Java YU...N2 CMS: 2.1.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. 2.1.1 Maintenance release List of changes 2.1 Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 8: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 8 ChangesUpgraded library references to address reported regressions Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.6: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comVidCoder: 0.8.1: Adds ability to choose an arbitrary range (in seconds or frames) to encode. Adds ability to override the title number in the output file name when enqueing multiple titles. Updated presets: Added iPhone 4, Apple TV 2, fixed some existing presets that should have had weightp=0 or trellis=0 on them. Added {parent} option to auto-name format. Use {parent:2} to refer to a folder 2 levels above the input file. Added {title:2} option to auto-name format. Adds leading zeroes to reach the sp...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks2008R2 without filestream: This download contains a version of the AdventureWorks2008R2 OLTP database without FILESTREAM properties. You do not need to have filestream enabled to attach this database. No additional schema or data changes have been made. To install the version of AdventureWorks2008R2 that includes filestream, use the SR1 installer available here. Prerequisites: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 must be installed. Full-Text Search must be enabled. Installing the AdventureWorks2008R2 OLTP database: 1. Cl...NuGet: NuGet 1.0 RTM: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog.MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v2.0: This is the 2.0 release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. This tutorial is updated for ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework Code-First, and contains fixes and improvements based on feedback and common questions from previous releases. The main download, MvcMusicStore-v2.0.zip, contains everything you need to build the sample application, including A detailed tutorial document in PDF format Assets you will need to build the project, including images, a stylesheet, and a pre-populated databas...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.7 GA Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.7 GA with the following feature: * Inlines property has been implemented in Title. Also, this release contains fix for the following bugs: * In Column and Bar chart DataPoint’s label properties were not working as expected at real-time if marker enabled was set to true. * 3D Column and Bar chart were not rendered properly if AxisMinimum property was set in x-axis. You can download Visifire v3.6.7 here. Cheers, Team VisifireASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: paging for the lookup lookup with multiselect changes: the css classes used by the framework where renamed to be more standard the lookup controller requries an item.ascx (no more ViewData["structure"]), and LookupList action renamed to Search all the...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-01-12: 2011???????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2011?1??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, AJAX, WinForm, Windows Shell????13?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011/01/13/6135037.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????patterns & practices – Enterprise Library: Enterprise Library 5.0 - Extensibility Labs: This is a preview release of the Hands-on Labs to help you learn and practice different ways the Enterprise Library can be extended. Learning MapCustom exception handler (estimated time to complete: 1 hr 15 mins) Custom logging trace listener (1 hr) Custom configuration source (registry-based) (30 mins) System requirementsEnterprise Library 5.0 / Unity 2.0 installed SQL Express 2008 installed Visual Studio 2010 Pro (or better) installed AuthorsChris Tavares, Microsoft Corporation ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.0: Orchard Release Notes Build: 1.0.20 Published: 1/12/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.0.20.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6.1: The Umbraco 4.6.1 (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains nearly 200 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're ...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14986.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Features: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the ...Facebook C# SDK: 4.2.1: - Authentication bug fixes - Updated Json.Net to version 4.0.0 - BREAKING CHANGE: Removed cookieSupport config setting, now automatic. This download is also availible on NuGet: Facebook FacebookWeb FacebookWebMvcNew ProjectsAddition/Multiplication: It's A simple application developed in <programming language> Use this to perform large but simple Addition and MultiplicationCustom Paging API: This dll contains custom paging method. you can implement this custom paging easily in to your project DanubeSalsaConnection: DanubeSalsaConnectionDNN Menu Provider: You think working with standard DotNetNuke menu providers is a pain? You don't want to study XSLT befor skinning your menu? You are looking for a simple as well as powerful solution? Well, then you are exactly right here! Ejemplos WP7 Silverlight: Los ejemplos en silverlight para WP7 pueden servir de base de las aplicaciones más comunes. Todos los ejemplos son en lenguaje C#.GPS Nerd: Technologies: - ASP.NET MVC, MySQL, NHibernate, Ninject, Google Maps API The GPS Nerd project is a meant to be a platform to learn how to build a website by pulling in various technologies. More Info: See the documentation. Live Site: http://gpsnerd.comNetLirc: .NET LIRC Server with PIC16F628A IR sensornForum For Umbraco: This is the beginning of a forum package for Umbraco, it is built purely using Linq2umbraco so if your an XSLT ninja you are out of luck at the moment. more details to come soon...Orchard Feeds Aggregator Module: Feeds Aggregator Module for Orchard CMSSilverlight for Windows Phone Performance Samples: A collection of Silverlight for Windows Phone code samples highlighting good coding practices.SilvyAcc - Silverlight Accordion Control: This is custom made Silverlight Accordion control.Twesh Ajax: TweshAjax is clientside javascript library for making asynchronous calls to server.WikiPageContentPopulator: This Project allows SharePoint 2010 developers to add wiki page content during the installation of the solution via Feature Receiver WPaolo7: Programmi WPaolo7WPFEdit: WPFEdit is a starter kit for applications that edit files. It contains easy-to-use starter controls and a document management system. WPFEdit is developed with C# / .NET 4.0 / WPF.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 21, 2011Popular ReleasesSQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportdns?????: 1.0: ???????。??????。BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. See http://DeltaEngine.net/Wiki.Roadmap for details.ASP.net Awesome Samples (Web-Forms): 1.0 samples: Full Demo VS2008 Very Simple Demo VS2010 and Tutorials (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblyAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsSilverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.01.01: Major Highlights Fixed problem with the core skin object rendering CSS above the other framework inserted files, which caused problems when using core style skin objects Fixed issue with iFrames getting removed when content is saved Fixed issue with the HTML module removing styling and scripts from the content Fixed issue with inserting the link to jquery after the header of the page Security Fixesnone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesHTML version 6.1.0 ProvidersnoneSCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8 is currently the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added "Wake On LAN" action. WOL.EXE is now included. Added new action "Get all active advertisements" to list all machine based advertisements on remote computers. Added new action "Get all active user advertisements" to list all user based advertisements for logged on users on remote computers. Added config.ini setting "enablePingTest" to control whether ping test is ru...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.3: New featuresAdd magnifier size and scale New file info view in the backstage Add dynamic properties on book and settings Sorting and grouping in the explorer with new design Rework on conversion : Images, PDF, Cbr/rar, Cbz/zip, Xps to the destination formats Images, Cbz and XPS ImprovmentsSuppress MainViewModel and ExplorerViewModel dependencies Add view notifications and Messages from MVVM Light for ViewModel=>View notifications Make thread better on open catalog, no more ihm freeze, less t...New ProjectsAnno 2070 Assistant: Anno 2070 Assistant is a program that is useable with the Ubisoft game Anno 2070. It shows you production chain information, building layouts, population supplies, etc.ASINDO Administration: Administration pages for ASINDO Pediatrics.Birthright Campaign Manager: Birthright Campaign Manager is a tool made with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 designed to help players manage and handle games of Birthright at the domain level, let it be pen and paper, or play by email games.buttons: toolbar buttonsCAML Viewer: CAML Viewer Web Part lets you view CAML Query from Views. This Web Part also helps you find internal names for fields.CapitaList: The Craigslist for current and aspiring entrepreneurs to get all the information to start and establish a local business. This application offers its users access to licensing and permit information, financing option, business proposals and federal grants and awards for the area.CountryProject: Again country gameCSSMMS: ???????????Distributed replay GUI: With release of SQL Server 2012 RC0 I was disaapointed to discover that there was not User Interface for Distributed Replay. This is my contribution. May it help Distributed Replay to get the attention it deserves.DSCop: DSCop is an open source tool that analyzes IBM InfoSphere DataStage jobs and reports information such as violation of some commonly accepted best practices. It's developed in C# and uses MEF from .NET 4 to provide plug-in based architecture.Emailing Files as Attachments in Sharepoint 2010: This solution makes it easy for Sharepoint 2010 users to email files as attachments from the Sharepoint Ribbon Menu. The user can select multiple documents at a time, as well as Folders of files and document sets. The form contains fields for external email addresses as well a Sharepoint People Picker for internal users. If you want to exclude either of them, then simply set the containing panel to invisible. This is described in the documentationExtendable JSON Serialization: Contains an interface (IJSONSerializable) and a collection of JSON objects (conforms to the document set out at http://www.json.org) that enable you to add JSON serialization to your own data access classes. FitLib: A .NET library to parse FIT files used by Garmin GPS receivers.FlyComet: A simple ASP .Net comet implementation enabling ActiveMQ JMS Publisher to push live updates to the client using IHttpAsyncHandler.Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: in this project am pleased to offer these SharePoint 2010 custom templates. These templates are free to all and are provided “as is”. FullByte Tools: This is a test project of mine.GDL: This is the goddamn library. 'Nuff said.kimocsys: KiMoCSys stands for Kinect Motion Capture System. It captures the movement using the kinect hardware and kinect SDK for windows and generates a Collada file with the animation inside. Intended for indie game developers and enthusiasts. Use WPF and C#Leoscorp: This is a test.Nop 23 Multi Store: Nop Commerce Multi Store supportPaper Reader: Silverlight application for read rich text filesPivot Viewer for Office 365: Pivot Viewer Silverlight 5 control in a webpart for Office 365Projeto Teste: Projeto de testesReflective-C#: The Reflective-C# Project. It consists in a pre-preprocessor (yeah, still gotta work on that name xD ), which extends the C# language for more versatility and ease of use. The Project also includes a AOT compiler for IL assemblies, targeting inumerous plataforms.Secure Text Box for Windows Forms: A secure text box control that is implemented using SecureString for secure entering of passwords written in C#SharePoint Mystery: Source code for the SharePoint Mystery sample projectShenJH.Net: ShenJH NetSilverlight in the Enterprise: Project dedicated to Promoting Silverlight usage in the enterprise.Small demo: Call WCF web services using jQuery: Small asp.net web site used to show how to call a WCF service from JavaScript. The main goal is to add a custom BehaviorExtensionElement that will be used to log server errors. It's developed in C# (.net framework 4.0).ThapHaNoiGiaiThuatAKT: Demo d? án môn h?c Các Phuong Pháp L?p TrìnhVolgaTransTelecomClient: VolgaTransTelecomClient makes it easier for clients of "Volga TransTelecom" company to get info about account. It's developed in C#.Your Last Options Dialog: Are you tired of recreating the same option dialog logic for each Windows Phone app every time? "Your Last Options Dialog" is an attempt to create a generic, highly configurable implementation you can easily pull into your own app and set up for your needs quickly. It's extensible in case you need to add more features or want to change existing ones, and allows easy localization of the complete content to all of the languages supported by your app.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 05, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 05, 2011Popular ReleasesSizeOnDisk: 1.0.8.1: Toolbar: Show total of selected folder and hard drive usage of the entire disk Fix: Command binding do not work Execution State Toolbar state by selection Progress task barEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.6 BETA: 2.4.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.1 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the proper...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 10 - June 3, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To install and run the reference implementation, you must perform the fol...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Release Candidate: Highlights of this release This is the release candidate drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All code samples, including all ACS v2: ACS as a Federation Provider - Showing authentication with LiveID, Google, etc. ACS as a FP with Multiple Business Partners. ACS and REST endpoints. Using a WP7 client with REST endpoints. All ACS specific chapters. Two new chapters on SharePoint (SSO and Federation) All revised v1 chapters We are now ...Media Companion: MC 3.404b Weekly: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! *** Due to an issue where the date added & the full genre information was not being read into the Movie cache, it is highly recommended that you perform a Rebuild Movies when first running this latest version. This will read in the information from the nfo's & repopulate the cache used by MC during operation. Fi...Terraria Map Generator: TerrariaMapTool 1.0.0.4 Beta: 1) Fixed the generated map.html file so that the file:/// is included in the base path. 2) Added the ability to use parallelization during generation. This will cause the program to use as many threads as there are physical cores. 3) Fixed some background overdraw.DotRas: DotRas v1.2 (Version 1.2.4168): This release includes compiled (and signed) versions of the binaries, PDBs, CHM help documentation, along with both C# and VB.NET examples. Please don't forget to rate the release! If you find a bug, please open a work item and give as much description as possible. Stack traces, which operating system(s) you're targeting, and build type is also very helpful for bug hunting. If you find something you believe to be a bug but are not sure, create a new discussion on the discussions board. Thank...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight and WP7 made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.1 RTW: Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies Samples Changes.txt License.txt Release Highlights For WP7A new Tombstoning API based on ideas from Fluent NHibernate A new Launcher/Chooser API Strongly typed Navigation SimpleContainer included The full phone lifecycle is made easy to work with ie. we figure out whether your app is actually Resurrecting or just Continuing for you For WPFSupport for the Client Profile Better support for WinForms integration All PlatformsA power...VidCoder: 0.9.1: Added color coding to the Log window. Errors are highlighted in red, HandBrake logs are in black and VidCoder logs are in dark blue. Moved enqueue button to the right with the other control buttons. Added logic to report failures when errors are logged during the encode or when the encode finishes prematurely. Added Copy button to Log window. Adjusted audio track selection box to always show the full track name. Changed encode job progress bar to also be colored yellow when the enco...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.1: - Fixed a small bug in Auto Login - Fixed the updaterEPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server: EPPlus 2.9.0.1: EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server This version has been updated to .Net Framework 3.5 New Features Data Validation. PivotTables (Basic functionalliy...) Support for worksheet data sources. Column, Row, Page and Data fields. Date and Numeric grouping Build in styles. ...and more And some minor new features... Ranges Text-Property|Get the formated value AutofitColumns-method to set the column width from the content of the range LoadFromCollection-metho...jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls: Version 1.4.0.0: Version 1.4.0.0 contains the following additions: Upgraded to MVC 3.0 Upgraded to jQuery 1.6.1 (Though the project supports all jQuery version from 1.4.x onwards) Upgraded to jqGrid 3.8 Better Razor View-Engine support Better Pager support, includes support for custom pagers Added jqGrid toolbar buttons support Search module refactored, with full suport for multiple filters and ordering And Code cleanup, bug-fixes and better controller configuration support.Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v6.0: Version 6.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Authentication using Membership Provider for SQL Server and MySql Spam prevention: Flood Control Moderation: Flag messages Content management: Pages: Create pages (about us/contact/texts) through web administration Allow nearforums to run as an IIS subapp Migrated Facebook Connect to OAuth 2.0 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.8b: Changes: - fix critical issue 15922(AccessViolationException) once and for all ...update is strongly recommended Known Issues: - some addin ribbon examples has a COM Register function with missing codebase entry(win32 registry) ...the problem is only affected to c# examples. fixed in latest source code. NetOffice\ReleaseTags\NetOffice Release 0.8.rar Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:...................Serviio for Windows Home Server: Beta Release 0.5.2.0: Ready for widespread beta. Synchronized build number to Serviio version to avoid confusion.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta4: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta4 2011-5-31?? ???Bilibili.us????? ???? ?? ???"????" ???Bilibili.us??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ???????? ?? ?? ???Bilibili.us?????(??????????????????) ??????(6.cn)?????(????) ?? ?????Acfun?????????? ?????????????? ???QQ???????? ????????????Discussion...CodeCopy Auto Code Converter: Code Copy v0.1: Full add-in, setup project source code and setup fileWordpress Theme 'Windows Metro': v1.00.0017: v1.00.0017 Dies ist eine Vorab-Version aus der Entwickler-Phase. This is a preview version from the development phase.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.4.1: Added Piggy Bank editor and fixed some minor bugs.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.02: Updated the Kooboo_CMS.zip at 2011-06-02 11:44 GMT 1.Fixed: Adding data rule issue on page. 2.Fixed: Caching issue for higher performance. Updated the Kooboo_CMS.zip at 2011-06-01 10:00 GMT 1. Fixed the published package throwed a compile error under WebSite mode. 2. Fixed the ContentHelper.NewMediaFolderObject return TextFolder issue. 3. Shorten the name of ContentHelper API. NewMediaFolderObject=>MediaFolder, NewTextFolderObject=> TextFolder, NewSchemaObject=>Schema. Also update the C...New ProjectsbuddyAgent: buddyAgent is a Classified PortalDataReaderMapping: use linq expression make mapping sqldatareader to DTO model easyForeign eXchange Center: Foreign eXchange CenterGoogleAuthCLONE: Use this like the Google Authenticator you may have on your Android device to interact with Google's Two Factor Authentication scheme. This allows you to log into Google without having to whip out your phone. Stores account information securely!Grammar and Spell Checking Plugin for Windows Live Writer: This project is a spelling and grammar checker plugin for Windows Live Writer. It uses the "After the Deadline" web service to provide advanced grammar checking abilities.GUNDEMAS: Gundemas.comInstantMods: LolLig4 => Análise e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas: Beta teste App_SERVERLight Time Sheet: Silverlight Time SheetMort8088s XmlHelper: XmlHelper makes it easier for developers to create and read data in XML documents by condensing common tasks into a simple static helper class. XmlHelper's developed in c#. Feel free to suggest new methods or better ways to achieve the existing methods.NeuroForecast: This project is designed to study neural network technologies on the example of predicting currency quotes.Orchard Forums: a forums moduleRules Engine: Rules Engine is a C# project that makes it easier for developers to define business rules on domain objects without coupling the domain object to the business rule. The rules engine supports cross-field validation and conditional validation. Rules are interface-based and are easily extensible. Rules can be added using a fluent interface.Super Byte: Super Byte makes it easier for everyone to use your computer .You'll no longer have to strugle. We are always looking for new devlopers. It's developed in C#. Need a fast and reliable "Operating System"? Well SuperByte can give that to you. We have spent many hours of work to bring this project to you. Enjoy! Taygeta - The video shadering library: This library allows rendering YUV and RGB pixel formats using Direct3D 9 runtime. You can also apply shaders and add text, bitmap and line overlays.Test Driver Program: Testing driver programTowerDefense: ????，??ogre??YAPE: Yet Another Pacman Emulator.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 11, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 11, 2013Popular ReleasesToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This samples illustrates the use of ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Microsoft Ente...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message EncodingMapWinGIS ActiveX Map and GIS Component: MapWinGIS v4.8.8 Release Candidate - 32 Bit: This is the first release candidate of MapWinGIS. Please test it thoroughly.MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfVR Player: VR Player 0.3 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.13: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageJumbo.com" links FIXED: Ripping of Threads with multiple pagesASP.NET MVC Forum: MVCForum v1.3.5: This is a bug release version, with a couple of small usability features and UI changes. All the small amount of bugs reported in v1.3 have been fixed, no upgrade needed just overwrite the files and everything should just work.Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 6: New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter Fix - Fixed error deser...QlikView Extension - Animated Scatter Chart: Animated Scatter Chart - v1.0: Version 1.0 including Source Code qar File Example QlikView application Tested With: Browser Firefox 20 (x64) Google Chrome 27 (x64) Internet Explorer 9 QlikView QlikView Desktop 11 - SR2 (x64) QlikView Desktop 11.2 - SR1 (x64) QlikView Ajax Client 11.2 - SR2 (based on x64)BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 7.2: Warning: HTTP Tunnel is not compatible with version 6.x and prior, HTTP packet format has been changed. Check Version History for more information about this release.SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.8: This release includes these changes below: Upgrade SuperSocket to 1.5.3 which is much more stable Added handshake request validating api (WebSocketServer.ValidateHandshake(TWebSocketSession session, string origin)) Fixed a bug that the m_Filters in the SubCommandBase can be null if the command's method LoadSubCommandFilters(IEnumerable<SubCommandFilterAttribute> globalFilters) is not invoked Fixed the compatibility issue on Origin getting in the different version protocols Marked ISub...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.0: 2013.06.04 Ver5.9.0 (1) ?????????????????????????????????($Remote.ini Tmp.ini) (2) ThreadBaseTest?? (3) ????POP3??????SMTP???????????????? (4) Web???????、?????????URL??????????????? (5) Ftp???????、LIST?????????????? (6) ?????????????????????Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.569b: New* Movies - Autoscrape/Batch Rescrape extra fanart and or extra thumbs. * Movies - Alternative editor can add manually actors. * TV - Batch Rescraper, AutoScrape extrafanart, if option enabled. Fixed* Movies - Slow performance switching to movie tab by adding option 'Disable "Not Matching Rename Pattern"' to Movie Preferences - General. * Movies - Fixed only actors with images were scraped and added to nfo * Movies - Fixed filter reset if selected tab was above Home Movies. * Updated Medi...New Projects.Net Framework Detector: This application displays all the .Net framework installed on a PC.Adhayayan: Online learning management system designed for small as having 50 students and large as 1000+ students. This is community version having most needed features.Akad SPPortal: Project portal Reserved for unit with features the basic. Been Development in the Background platform SharePoint foundation 2010. Combined EXT.net FrameworkANGF Autumn's Novel Game Framework: This is a novel game framework project. ANGF was use by a game of "1980 Otaku no Hideo", before Codeplex project started. auto check in: help users to login and check in for certain websites automatically,such as xiami and taobaoBasic Expression Evaluator C#: Mathematical Expression Evaluation with symbols and normal bodmas order of precedence. Supports basic arithmetic operations and access to a symbol dictionaryCaloriesCalculator: CaloriesCalculator, the code refactor exampleCamadanPortal: Just a simple company website...charity organization1: charity organizationControl de Asistencia - Grupo Azar2: Control de asistenciaExpenses Manager: Expenses Manager for Windows Phone 8File Sync (Desktop Application): This is a simple "File Synchronizing" / "File Back Up" software, uses Microsift Sync 2.0Furcadia Heimdall Tester: An application that helps Furcadia technicians test the integrity of the game server. It checks for availability of each heimdall, its connectivity to the rest of the system (horton/tribble) and how often it receives a user compared to the rest of them.Furcadia Installer Browser: A program that can access files within a Furcadia installer and allow the user to open them from within the install package, extract some or all the files inside the package, check data integrity of each file and compare the content of two installers.Furcadia Map Normalizer: Furcadia Map Normalizer is a small tool that helps recover a damaged Furcadia map after a live-edit bug. It restores out-of-range elements within back to zero.MyHistory: .NexusCamera: Nexus Camera is a control for Windows Phone 7 & 8, which can be used as a menu on the Camera. The idea in making this control when we use a camera nexus. ThanksNUnit Test Runner: Allows you to run NUnit tests in a more flexible way.Photo Printer Load Balancing: This was developed as a small utility allowing for multiple printers to be used in a DIY photobooth. It monitors a folder for images and load balances a printerResource Translator: A utility that allows you to quickly translate .NET resource files.SCCM Powershell Module: A powershell module to simplify the administration of a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) environment.ShardMath: A simple cross platform maths library with expression parsing written without any dependencies on existing pre installed .NET libraries.SoftwareEngineering: Software Engineering Project that named SakhtemanPezeshkan Sprint TinCan LRS: Using the TinCan specifications, this C# MVC project attempts to provide endpoints for TinCan compliant clients.threadpool: a high performance threadpool good for tiny / small / medium processor work, which is the base of event_comb procedural programming framework.TouchProxy (for Windows 8): A remote touch injection client for Windows 8 using standard TUIO+OSC protocols, variable input calibration, and integrated hosted Wi-Fi networking for devices.UGSF Design StarterKit: Information for helping users to create SharePoint Design.UNREAL GAME BY FREITAG: Unreal action game!Win8DemoAcceleratore: This project is a demo project for a lab on Windows 8 Store App development Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Education Dark Banner: Education Dark Banner Template help if you want to build an app which has an option for group category display and education detailsWindows 8 App Design Reference Template: Photo Viewer: Photo Viewer template will help if you want a photo gallery app to showcase images from various folders. ????: ????WP7??????

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• EM12c: Using the LIST verb in emcli

  - by SubinDaniVarughese

  Many of us who use EM CLI to write scripts and automate our daily tasks should not miss out on the new list verb released with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.3.0. The combination of list and Jython based scripting support in EM CLI makes it easier to achieve automation for complex tasks with just a few lines of code. Before I jump into a script, let me highlight the key attributes of the list verb and why it’s simply excellent! 1. Multiple resources under a single verb:A resource can be set of users or targets, etc. Using the list verb, you can retrieve information about a resource from the repository database.Here is an example which retrieves the list of administrators within EM.Standard mode$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" Interactive modeemcli>list(resource="Administrators")The output will be the same as standard mode.Standard mode$ emcli @myAdmin.pyEnter password :  ******The output will be the same as standard mode.Contents of myAdmin.py scriptlogin()print list(resource="Administrators",jsonout=False).out()To get a list of all available resources use$ emcli list -helpWith every release of EM, more resources are being added to the list verb. If you have a resource which you feel would be valuable then go ahead and contact Oracle Support to log an enhancement request with product development. Be sure to say how the resource is going to help improve your daily tasks. 2. Consistent Formatting:It is possible to format the output of any resource consistently using these options:  –column  This option is used to specify which columns should be shown in the output. Here is an example which shows the list of administrators and their account status$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" -columns="USER_NAME,REPOS_ACCOUNT_STATUS" To get a list of columns in a resource use:$ emcli list -resource="Administrators" -help You can also specify the width of the each column. For example, here the column width of user_type is set to 20 and department to 30. $ emcli list -resource=Administrators -columns="USER_NAME,USER_TYPE:20,COST_CENTER,CONTACT,DEPARTMENT:30"This is useful if your terminal is too small or you need to fine tune a list of specific columns for your quick use or improved readability.  –colsize  This option is used to resize column widths.Here is the same example as above, but using -colsize to define the width of user_type to 20 and department to 30.$ emcli list -resource=Administrators -columns="USER_NAME,USER_TYPE,COST_CENTER,CONTACT,DEPARTMENT" -colsize="USER_TYPE:20,DEPARTMENT:30" The existing standard EMCLI formatting options are also available in list verb. They are: -format="name:pretty" | -format="name:script” | -format="name:csv" | -noheader | -scriptThere are so many uses depending on your needs. Have a look at the resources and columns in each resource. Refer to the EMCLI book in EM documentation for more information.3. Search:Using the -search option in the list verb makes it is possible to search for a specific row in a specific column within a resource. This is similar to the sqlplus where clause. The following operators are supported:           =           !=           >           <           >=           <=           like           is (Must be followed by null or not null)Here is an example which searches for all EM administrators in the marketing department located in the USA.$emcli list -resource="Administrators" -search="DEPARTMENT ='Marketing'" -search="LOCATION='USA'" Here is another example which shows all the named credentials created since a specific date.  $emcli list -resource=NamedCredentials -search="CredCreatedDate > '11-Nov-2013 12:37:20 PM'"Note that the timestamp has to be in the format DD-MON-YYYY HH:MI:SS AM/PM Some resources need a bind variable to be passed to get output. A bind variable is created in the resource and then referenced in the command. For example, this command will list all the default preferred credentials for target type oracle_database.Here is an example$ emcli list -resource="PreferredCredentialsDefault" -bind="TargetType='oracle_database'" -colsize="SetName:15,TargetType:15" You can provide multiple bind variables. To verify if a column is searchable or requires a bind variable, use the –help option. Here is an example:$ emcli list -resource="PreferredCredentialsDefault" -help 4. Secure accessWhen list verb collects the data, it only displays content for which the administrator currently logged into emcli, has access. For example consider this usecase:AdminA has access only to TargetA. AdminA logs into EM CLIExecuting the list verb to get the list of all targets will only show TargetA.5. User defined SQLUsing the –sql option, user defined sql can be executed. The SQL provided in the -sql option is executed as the EM user MGMT_VIEW, which has read-only access to the EM published MGMT$ database views in the SYSMAN schema. To get the list of EM published MGMT$ database views, go to the Extensibility Programmer's Reference book in EM documentation. There is a chapter about Using Management Repository Views. It’s always recommended to reference the documentation for the supported MGMT$ database views.  Consider you are using the MGMT$ABC view which is not in the chapter. During upgrade, it is possible, since the view was not in the book and not supported, it is likely the view might undergo a change in its structure or the data in it. Using a supported view ensures that your scripts using -sql will continue working after upgrade.Here’s an example  $ emcli list -sql='select * from mgmt$target' 6. JSON output support    JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) enables data to be displayed in a collection of name/value pairs. There is lot of reading material about JSON on line for more information.As an example, we had a requirement where an EM administrator had many 11.2 databases in their test environment and the developers had requested an Administrator to change the lifecycle status from Test to Production which meant the admin had to go to the EM “All targets” page and identify the set of 11.2 databases and then to go into each target database page and manually changes the property to Production. Sounds easy to say, but this Administrator had numerous targets and this task is repeated for every release cycle.We told him there is an easier way to do this with a script and he can reuse the script whenever anyone wanted to change a set of targets to a different Lifecycle status. Here is a jython script which uses list and JSON to change all 11.2 database target’s LifeCycle Property value.If you are new to scripting and Jython, I would suggest visiting the basic chapters in any Jython tutorials. Understanding Jython is important to write the logic depending on your usecase.If you are already writing scripts like perl or shell or know a programming language like java, then you can easily understand the logic.Disclaimer: The scripts in this post are subject to the Oracle Terms of Use located here.  1 from emcli import *  2  search_list = ['PROPERTY_NAME=\'DBVersion\'','TARGET_TYPE= \'oracle_database\'','PROPERTY_VALUE LIKE \'11.2%\'']  3 if len(sys.argv) == 2:  4    print login(username=sys.argv[0])  5    l_prop_val_to_set = sys.argv[1]  6      l_targets = list(resource="TargetProperties", search=search_list,   columns="TARGET_NAME,TARGET_TYPE,PROPERTY_NAME")  7    for target in l_targets.out()['data']:  8       t_pn = 'LifeCycle Status'  9      print "INFO: Setting Property name " + t_pn + " to value " +       l_prop_val_to_set + " for " + target['TARGET_NAME']  10      print  set_target_property_value(property_records=      target['TARGET_NAME']+":"+target['TARGET_TYPE']+":"+      t_pn+":"+l_prop_val_to_set)  11  else:  12   print "\n ERROR: Property value argument is missing"  13   print "\n INFO: Format to run this file is filename.py <username>   <Database Target LifeCycle Status Property Value>" You can download the script from here. I could not upload the file with .py extension so you need to rename the file to myScript.py before executing it using emcli.A line by line explanation for beginners: Line  1 Imports the emcli verbs as functions  2 search_list is a variable to pass to the search option in list verb. I am using escape character for the single quotes. In list verb to pass more than one value for the same option, you should define as above comma separated values, surrounded by square brackets.  3 This is an “if” condition to ensure the user does provide two arguments with the script, else in line #15, it prints an error message.  4 Logging into EM. You can remove this if you have setup emcli with autologin. For more details about setup and autologin, please go the EM CLI book in EM documentation.  5 l_prop_val_to_set is another variable. This is the property value to be set. Remember we are changing the value from Test to Production. The benefit of this variable is you can reuse the script to change the property value from and to any other values.  6 Here the output of the list verb is stored in l_targets. In the list verb I am passing the resource as TargetProperties, search as the search_list variable and I only need these three columns – target_name, target_type and property_name. I don’t need the other columns for my task.  7 This is a for loop. The data in l_targets is available in JSON format. Using the for loop, each pair will now be available in the ‘target’ variable.  8 t_pn is the “LifeCycle Status” variable. If required, I can have this also as an input and then use my script to change any target property. In this example, I just wanted to change the “LifeCycle Status”.  9 This a message informing the user the script is setting the property value for dbxyz.  10 This line shows the set_target_property_value verb which sets the value using the property_records option. Once it is set for a target pair, it moves to the next one. In my example, I am just showing three dbs, but the real use is when you have 20 or 50 targets. The script is executed as:$ emcli @myScript.py subin Production The recommendation is to first test the scripts before running it on a production system. We tested on a small set of targets and optimizing the script for fewer lines of code and better messaging.For your quick reference, the resources available in Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4.0 with list verb are:$ emcli list -helpWatch this space for more blog posts using the list verb and EM CLI Scripting use cases. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and it has helped you gain more information about the list verb. Happy Scripting!!Disclaimer: The scripts in this post are subject to the Oracle Terms of Use located here. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter mt=8">Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked CompareExchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Two posts ago, I discussed the Interlocked Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods (here) for adding and subtracting values in a thread-safe, lightweight manner.  Then, last post I talked about the Interlocked Read() and Exchange() methods (here) for safely and efficiently reading and setting 32 or 64 bit values (or references).  This week, we’ll round out the discussion by talking about the Interlocked CompareExchange() method and how it can be put to use to exchange a value if the current value is what you expected it to be. Dirty reads can lead to bad results Many of the uses of Interlocked that we’ve explored so far have centered around either reading, setting, or adding values.  But what happens if you want to do something more complex such as setting a value based on the previous value in some manner? Perhaps you were creating an application that reads a current balance, applies a deposit, and then saves the new modified balance, where of course you’d want that to happen atomically.  If you read the balance, then go to save the new balance and between that time the previous balance has already changed, you’ll have an issue!  Think about it, if we read the current balance as $400, and we are applying a new deposit of $50.75, but meanwhile someone else deposits $200 and sets the total to $600, but then we write a total of $450.75 we’ve lost $200! Now, certainly for int and long values we can use Interlocked.Add() to handles these cases, and it works well for that.  But what if we want to work with doubles, for example?  Let’s say we wanted to add the numbers from 0 to 99,999 in parallel.  We could do this by spawning several parallel tasks to continuously add to a total: 1: double total = 0; 2:  3: Parallel.For(0, 10000, next => 4: { 5: total += next; 6: }); Were this run on one thread using a standard for loop, we’d expect an answer of 4,999,950,000 (the sum of all numbers from 0 to 99,999).  But when we run this in parallel as written above, we’ll likely get something far off.  The result of one of my runs, for example, was 1,281,880,740.  That is way off!  If this were banking software we’d be in big trouble with our clients.  So what happened?  The += operator is not atomic, it will read in the current value, add the result, then store it back into the total.  At any point in all of this another thread could read a “dirty” current total and accidentally “skip” our add.   So, to clean this up, we could use a lock to guarantee concurrency: 1: double total = 0.0; 2: object locker = new object(); 3:  4: Parallel.For(0, count, next => 5: { 6: lock (locker) 7: { 8: total += next; 9: } 10: }); Which will give us the correct result of 4,999,950,000.  One thing to note is that locking can be heavy, especially if the operation being locked over is trivial, or the life of the lock is a high percentage of the work being performed concurrently.  In the case above, the lock consumes pretty much all of the time of each parallel task – and the task being locked on is relatively trivial. Now, let me put in a disclaimer here before we go further: For most uses, lock is more than sufficient for your needs, and is often the simplest solution!    So, if lock is sufficient for most needs, why would we ever consider another solution?  The problem with locking is that it can suspend execution of your thread while it waits for the signal that the lock is free.  Moreover, if the operation being locked over is trivial, the lock can add a very high level of overhead.  This is why things like Interlocked.Increment() perform so well, instead of locking just to perform an increment, we perform the increment with an atomic, lockless method. As with all things performance related, it’s important to profile before jumping to the conclusion that you should optimize everything in your path.  If your profiling shows that locking is causing a high level of waiting in your application, then it’s time to consider lighter alternatives such as Interlocked. CompareExchange() – Exchange existing value if equal some value So let’s look at how we could use CompareExchange() to solve our problem above.  The general syntax of CompareExchange() is: T CompareExchange<T>(ref T location, T newValue, T expectedValue) If the value in location == expectedValue, then newValue is exchanged.  Either way, the value in location (before exchange) is returned. Actually, CompareExchange() is not one method, but a family of overloaded methods that can take int, long, float, double, pointers, or references.  It cannot take other value types (that is, can’t CompareExchange() two DateTime instances directly).  Also keep in mind that the version that takes any reference type (the generic overload) only checks for reference equality, it does not call any overridden Equals(). So how does this help us?  Well, we can grab the current total, and exchange the new value if total hasn’t changed.  This would look like this: 1: // grab the snapshot 2: double current = total; 3:  4: // if the total hasn’t changed since I grabbed the snapshot, then 5: // set it to the new total 6: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current); So what the code above says is: if the amount in total (1st arg) is the same as the amount in current (3rd arg), then set total to current + next (2nd arg).  This check and exchange pair is atomic (and thus thread-safe). This works if total is the same as our snapshot in current, but the problem, is what happens if they aren’t the same?  Well, we know that in either case we will get the previous value of total (before the exchange), back as a result.  Thus, we can test this against our snapshot to see if it was the value we expected: 1: // if the value returned is != current, then our snapshot must be out of date 2: // which means we didn't (and shouldn't) apply current + next 3: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current) != current) 4: { 5: // ooops, total was not equal to our snapshot in current, what should we do??? 6: } So what do we do if we fail?  That’s up to you and the problem you are trying to solve.  It’s possible you would decide to abort the whole transaction, or perhaps do a lightweight spin and try again.  Let’s try that: 1: double current = total; 2:  3: // make first attempt... 4: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current) 5: { 6: // if we fail, go into a spin wait, spin, and try again until succeed 7: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 8:  9: do 10: { 11: spinner.SpinOnce(); 12: current = total; 13: } 14: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current); 15: } 16:  This is not trivial code, but it illustrates a possible use of CompareExchange().  What we are doing is first checking to see if we succeed on the first try, and if so great!  If not, we create a SpinWait and then repeat the process of SpinOnce(), grab a fresh snapshot, and repeat until CompareExchnage() succeeds.  You may wonder why not a simple do-while here, and the reason it’s more efficient to only create the SpinWait until we absolutely know we need one, for optimal efficiency. Though not as simple (or maintainable) as a simple lock, this will perform better in many situations.  Comparing an unlocked (and wrong) version, a version using lock, and the Interlocked of the code, we get the following average times for multiple iterations of adding the sum of 100,000 numbers: 1: Unlocked money average time: 2.1 ms 2: Locked money average time: 5.1 ms 3: Interlocked money average time: 3 ms So the Interlocked.CompareExchange(), while heavier to code, came in lighter than the lock, offering a good compromise of safety and performance when we need to reduce contention. CompareExchange() - it’s not just for adding stuff… So that was one simple use of CompareExchange() in the context of adding double values -- which meant we couldn’t have used the simpler Interlocked.Add() -- but it has other uses as well. If you think about it, this really works anytime you want to create something new based on a current value without using a full lock.  For example, you could use it to create a simple lazy instantiation implementation.  In this case, we want to set the lazy instance only if the previous value was null: 1: public static class Lazy<T> where T : class, new() 2: { 3: private static T _instance; 4:  5: public static T Instance 6: { 7: get 8: { 9: // if current is null, we need to create new instance 10: if (_instance == null) 11: { 12: // attempt create, it will only set if previous was null 13: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _instance, new T(), (T)null); 14: } 15:  16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } So, if _instance == null, this will create a new T() and attempt to exchange it with _instance.  If _instance is not null, then it does nothing and we discard the new T() we created. This is a way to create lazy instances of a type where we are more concerned about locking overhead than creating an accidental duplicate which is not used.  In fact, the BCL implementation of Lazy<T> offers a similar thread-safety choice for Publication thread safety, where it will not guarantee only one instance was created, but it will guarantee that all readers get the same instance.  Another possible use would be in concurrent collections.  Let’s say, for example, that you are creating your own brand new super stack that uses a linked list paradigm and is “lock free”.  We could use Interlocked.CompareExchange() to be able to do a lockless Push() which could be more efficient in multi-threaded applications where several threads are pushing and popping on the stack concurrently. Yes, there are already concurrent collections in the BCL (in .NET 4.0 as part of the TPL), but it’s a fun exercise!  So let’s assume we have a node like this: 1: public sealed class Node<T> 2: { 3: // the data for this node 4: public T Data { get; set; } 5:  6: // the link to the next instance 7: internal Node<T> Next { get; set; } 8: } Then, perhaps, our stack’s Push() operation might look something like: 1: public sealed class SuperStack<T> 2: { 3: private volatile T _head; 4:  5: public void Push(T value) 6: { 7: var newNode = new Node<int> { Data = value, Next = _head }; 8:  9: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next) 10: { 11: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 12:  13: do 14: { 15: spinner.SpinOnce(); 16: newNode.Next = _head; 17: } 18: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // ... 23: } Notice a similar paradigm here as with adding our doubles before.  What we are doing is creating the new Node with the data to push, and with a Next value being the original node referenced by _head.  This will create our stack behavior (LIFO – Last In, First Out).  Now, we have to set _head to now refer to the newNode, but we must first make sure it hasn’t changed! So we check to see if _head has the same value we saved in our snapshot as newNode.Next, and if so, we set _head to newNode.  This is all done atomically, and the result is _head’s original value, as long as the original value was what we assumed it was with newNode.Next, then we are good and we set it without a lock!  If not, we SpinWait and try again. Once again, this is much lighter than locking in highly parallelized code with lots of contention.  If I compare the method above with a similar class using lock, I get the following results for pushing 100,000 items: 1: Locked SuperStack average time: 6 ms 2: Interlocked SuperStack average time: 4.5 ms So, once again, we can get more efficient than a lock, though there is the cost of added code complexity.  Fortunately for you, most of the concurrent collection you’d ever need are already created for you in the System.Collections.Concurrent (here) namespace – for more information, see my Little Wonders – The Concurent Collections Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here). Summary We’ve seen before how the Interlocked class can be used to safely and efficiently add, increment, decrement, read, and exchange values in a multi-threaded environment.  In addition to these, Interlocked CompareExchange() can be used to perform more complex logic without the need of a lock when lock contention is a concern. The added efficiency, though, comes at the cost of more complex code.  As such, the standard lock is often sufficient for most thread-safety needs.  But if profiling indicates you spend a lot of time waiting for locks, or if you just need a lock for something simple such as an increment, decrement, read, exchange, etc., then consider using the Interlocked class’s methods to reduce wait. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked,CompareExchange,threading,concurrency

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• Using CSS3 media queries in HTML 5 pages

  - by nikolaosk

  This is going to be the seventh post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here , here , here, here , here and here. In this post I will provide a hands-on example on how to use CSS 3 Media Queries in HTML 5 pages. This is a very important feature since nowadays lots of users view websites through their mobile devices. Web designers were able to define media-specific style sheets for quite a while, but have been limited to the type of output. The output could only be Screen, Print .The way we used to do things before CSS 3 was to have separate CSS files and the browser decided which style sheet to use. Please have a look at the snippet below - HTML 4 media queries <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="styles.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print-styles.css"> ?he browser determines which style to use. With CSS 3 we can have all media queries in one stylesheet. Media queries can determine the resolution of the device, the orientation of the device, the width and height of the device and the width and height of the browser window.We can also include CSS 3 media queries in separate stylesheets. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School. Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor. Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr. In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. Before I go on with the actual demo I will use the (http://www.caniuse.com) to see the support for CSS 3 Media Queries from the latest versions of modern browsers. Please have a look at the picture below. We see that all the latest versions of modern browsers support this feature. We can see that even IE 9 supports this feature.   Let's move on with the actual demo.  This is going to be a rather simple demo.I create a simple HTML 5 page. The markup follows and it is very easy to use and understand.This is a page with a 2 column layout. <!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>HTML 5, CSS3 and JQuery</title>    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">       </head>  <body>    <div id="header">      <h1>Learn cutting edge technologies</h1>      <p>HTML 5, JQuery, CSS3</p>    </div>    <div id="main">      <div id="mainnews">        <div>          <h2>HTML 5</h2>        </div>        <div>          <p>            HTML5 is the latest version of HTML and XHTML. The HTML standard defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML. It attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML.          </p>          <div class="quote">            <h4>Do More with Less</h4>            <p>             jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.             </p>            </div>          <p>            The HTML5 test(html5test.com) score is an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications. Even though the specification isn't finalized yet, all major browser manufacturers are making sure their browser is ready for the future. Find out which parts of HTML5 are already supported by your browser today and compare the results with other browsers.                      The HTML5 test does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect. Despite these shortcomings we hope that by quantifying the level of support users and web developers will get an idea of how hard the browser manufacturers work on improving their browsers and the web as a development platform.</p>        </div>      </div>              <div id="CSS">        <div>          <h2>CSS 3 Intro</h2>        </div>        <div>          <p>          Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including plain XML, SVG and XUL.          </p>        </div>      </div>            <div id="CSSmore">        <div>          <h2>CSS 3 Purpose</h2>        </div>        <div>          <p>            CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.[1] This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design).          </p>        </div>      </div>                </div>    <div id="footer">        <p>Feel free to google more about the subject</p>      </div>     </body>  </html>    The CSS code (style.css) follows  body{        line-height: 30px;        width: 1024px;        background-color:#eee;      }            p{        font-size:17px;    font-family:"Comic Sans MS"      }      p,h2,h3,h4{        margin: 0 0 20px 0;      }            #main, #header, #footer{        width: 100%;        margin: 0px auto;        display:block;      }            #header{        text-align: center;         border-bottom: 1px solid #000;         margin-bottom: 30px;      }            #footer{        text-align: center;         border-top: 1px solid #000;         margin-bottom: 30px;      }            .quote{        width: 200px;       margin-left: 10px;       padding: 5px;       float: right;       border: 2px solid #000;       background-color:#F9ACAE;      }            .quote :last-child{        margin-bottom: 0;      }            #main{        column-count:2;        column-gap:20px;        column-rule: 1px solid #000;        -moz-column-count: 2;        -webkit-column-count: 2;        -moz-column-gap: 20px;        -webkit-column-gap: 20px;        -moz-column-rule: 1px solid #000;        -webkit-column-rule: 1px solid #000;      } Now I view the page in the browser.Now I am going to write a media query and add some more rules in the .css file in order to change the layout of the page when the page is viewed by mobile devices. @media only screen and (max-width: 480px) {          body{            width: 480px;          }          #main{            -moz-column-count: 1;            -webkit-column-count: 1;          }        }   I am specifying that this media query applies only to screen and a max width of 480 px. If this condition is true, then I add new rules for the body element. I change the number of columns to one. This rule will not be applied unless the maximum width is 480px or less.  As I decrease the size-width of the browser window I see no change in the column's layout. Have a look at the picture below. When I resize the window and the width of the browser so the width is less than 480px, the media query and its respective rules take effect.We can scroll vertically to view the content which is a more optimised viewing experience for mobile devices. Have a look at the picture below Hope it helps!!!!

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

  - by SGWellens

  At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Portuguese Pointer. She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave.     Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google:  Bing:   To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css">     html     {         height: 100%;     }       body     {         height: 100%;         margin: 0;         padding: 0;     } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script  type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps):     <script type="text/javascript">         var gTheMap;         var gMarker1;         var gMarker2;           $(document).ready(DocLoaded);           function DocLoaded()         {             // golf course coordinates             var StartLat = 44.924254;             var StartLng = -93.366859;               // what element to display the map in             var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0];   Google:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Bing:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new  Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 credentials: 'Asbsa_hzfHl69XF3wxBd_WbW0dLNTRUH3ZHQG9qcV5EFRLuWEaOP1hjWdZ0A0P17',                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial             });             // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new google.maps.Marker(         {             position: location,             map: gTheMap,             draggable: true         });     marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd);     return marker; }   Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location,     {         draggable : true     });     Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd);     gTheMap.entities.push(marker);     return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Event) {     var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position);     var yards = meters * 1.0936133;     $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards');    // draw a line connecting the points     var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position];       if (gLine == null)     {         gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({             path: Endpoints,             strokeColor: "#FFFF00",             strokeOpacity: 1.0,             strokeWeight: 2,             map: gTheMap         });     }     else        gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Args) {    var Distance =  CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location);      $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards');       // draw a line connecting the points    var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location];           if (gLine == null)    {        gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints,            {                strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0),  // aRGB                strokeThickness : 2            });          gTheMap.entities.push(gLine);    }    else        gLine.setLocations(Endpoints);  }   Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens   CodeProject

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• Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

  - by SGWellens

  At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Hungarian Vizlas (or Hungarian pointer). She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave. Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google:  Bing:   To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css">     html     {         height: 100%;     }       body     {         height: 100%;         margin: 0;         padding: 0;     } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script  type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps):     <script type="text/javascript">         var gTheMap;         var gMarker1;         var gMarker2;           $(document).ready(DocLoaded);           function DocLoaded()         {             // golf course coordinates             var StartLat = 44.924254;             var StartLng = -93.366859;               // what element to display the map in             var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0];   Google:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Bing:         // where on earth the map should display         var StartPoint = new  Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng);           // create the map         gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv,             {                 credentials: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',                 center: StartPoint,                 zoom: 18,                 mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial             });           // place two markers         marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001));         marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001));           DragEnd(null);     } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new google.maps.Marker(         {             position: location,             map: gTheMap,             draggable: true         });     marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd);     return marker; } Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------   function PlaceMarker(location) {     var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location,     {         draggable : true     });     Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd);     gTheMap.entities.push(marker);     return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Event) {     var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position);     var yards = meters * 1.0936133;     $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards');    // draw a line connecting the points     var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position];       if (gLine == null)     {         gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({             path: Endpoints,             strokeColor: "#FFFF00",             strokeOpacity: 1.0,             strokeWeight: 2,             map: gTheMap         });     }     else        gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd -------------------------------------------   var gLine = null;   function DragEnd(Args) {    var Distance =  CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location);      $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards');       // draw a line connecting the points    var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location];           if (gLine == null)    {        gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints,            {                strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0),  // aRGB                strokeThickness : 2            });          gTheMap.entities.push(gLine);    }    else        gLine.setLocations(Endpoints);  }  Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens   CodeProject

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• ?Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM?Storage Enhancements

  - by Liu Maclean(???)

  Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM ?????????Storage Enhancements ???????? Lifecycle Management ILM ????????? Automatic Data Placement ??????, ??ADP? ?????? 12c???????Datafile??? Online Move Datafile, ????????????????datafile???????,??????????????? ????(12.1.0.1)Automatic Data Optimization?heat map????????: ????????? (CDB)?????Automatic Data Optimization?heat map Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for Temporal Validity. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the end-time columns. Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for in-database archiving. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the ORA_ARCHIVE_STATE column. Custom policies (user-defined functions) for ADO are not supported if the policies default at the tablespace level. ADO does not perform checks for storage space in a target tablespace when using storage tiering. ADO is not supported on tables with object types or materialized views. ADO concurrency (the number of simultaneous policy jobs for ADO) depends on the concurrency of the Oracle scheduler. If a policy job for ADO fails more than two times, then the job is marked disabled and the job must be manually enabled later. Policies for ADO are only run in the Oracle Scheduler maintenance windows. Outside of the maintenance windows all policies are stopped. The only exceptions are those jobs for rebuilding indexes in ADO offline mode. ADO has restrictions related to moving tables and table partitions. ??????row,segment???????????ADO??,?????create table?alter table?????? ????ADO??,??????????????,???????????????? storage tier , ?????????storage tier?????????, ??????????????ADO??????????? segment?row??group? ?CREATE TABLE?ALERT TABLE???ILM???,??????????????????ADO policy? ??ILM policy???????????????? ??????? ????ADO policy, ?????alter table  ???????,?????????????? CREATE TABLE sales_ado (PROD_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, CUST_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, TIME_ID DATE NOT NULL, CHANNEL_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, PROMO_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, QUANTITY_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL, AMOUNT_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL ) ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SQL> SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled 2 FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLED -------------------- -------------------------- -------------- P41 DATA MOVEMENT YES ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLE ------------------------ ------------- ------ P1 DATA MOVEMENT YES P2 DATA MOVEMENT YES /* You can disable an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE POLICY P1; /* You can delete an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE POLICY P1; /* You can disable all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE_ALL; /* You can delete all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE_ALL; /* You can disable an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DISABLE POLICY P2; /* You can delete an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DELETE POLICY P2; ILM ???????: ?????ILM ADP????,???????: ?????? ???? activity tracking, ????2????????,???????????????????: SEGMENT-LEVEL???????????????????? ROW-LEVEL????????,??????? ????????: 1??????? SEGMENT-LEVEL activity tracking ALTER TABLE interval_sales ILM  ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING SEGMENT ACCESS ???????INTERVAL_SALES??segment level  activity tracking,?????????????????? 2? ??????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING (CREATE TIME , WRITE TIME); 3????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING  (READ TIME); ?12.1.0.1.0?????? ??HEAT_MAP??????????, ?????system??session?????heap_map????????????? ?????????HEAT MAP??,? ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = ON; ?HEAT MAP??????,??????????????????????????  ??SYSTEM?SYSAUX????????????? ???????HEAT MAP??: ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = OFF; ????? HEAT_MAP????, ?HEAT_MAP??? ?????????????????????? ?HEAT_MAP?????????Automatic Data Optimization (ADO)??? ??ADO??,Heat Map ?????????? ????V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT ??????? HEAT MAP?? SQL> select * from V$heat_map_segment; no rows selected SQL> alter session set heat_map=on; Session altered. SQL> select * from scott.emp; EMPNO ENAME JOB MGR HIREDATE SAL COMM DEPTNO ---------- ---------- --------- ---------- --------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 7369 SMITH CLERK 7902 17-DEC-80 800 20 7499 ALLEN SALESMAN 7698 20-FEB-81 1600 300 30 7521 WARD SALESMAN 7698 22-FEB-81 1250 500 30 7566 JONES MANAGER 7839 02-APR-81 2975 20 7654 MARTIN SALESMAN 7698 28-SEP-81 1250 1400 30 7698 BLAKE MANAGER 7839 01-MAY-81 2850 30 7782 CLARK MANAGER 7839 09-JUN-81 2450 10 7788 SCOTT ANALYST 7566 19-APR-87 3000 20 7839 KING PRESIDENT 17-NOV-81 5000 10 7844 TURNER SALESMAN 7698 08-SEP-81 1500 0 30 7876 ADAMS CLERK 7788 23-MAY-87 1100 20 7900 JAMES CLERK 7698 03-DEC-81 950 30 7902 FORD ANALYST 7566 03-DEC-81 3000 20 7934 MILLER CLERK 7782 23-JAN-82 1300 10 14 rows selected. SQL> select * from v$heat_map_segment; OBJECT_NAME SUBOBJECT_NAME OBJ# DATAOBJ# TRACK_TIM SEG SEG FUL LOO CON_ID -------------------- -------------------- ---------- ---------- --------- --- --- --- --- ---------- EMP 92997 92997 23-JUL-13 NO NO YES NO 0 ??v$heat_map_segment???,?v$heat_map_segment??????????????X$HEATMAPSEGMENT V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT displays real-time segment access information. Column Datatype Description OBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the object SUBOBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the subobject OBJ# NUMBER Object number DATAOBJ# NUMBER Data object number TRACK_TIME DATE Timestamp of current activity tracking SEGMENT_WRITE VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has write access: (YES or NO) SEGMENT_READ VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has read access: (YES or NO) FULL_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has full table scan: (YES or NO) LOOKUP_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has lookup scan: (YES or NO) CON_ID NUMBER The ID of the container to which the data pertains. Possible values include:   0: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to the entire CDB. This value is also used for rows in non-CDBs. 1: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to only the root n: Where n is the applicable container ID for the rows containing data The Heat Map feature is not supported in CDBs in Oracle Database 12c, so the value in this column can be ignored. ??HEAP MAP??????????????????,????DBA_HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT???????? ???????HEAT_MAP_STAT$?????? ??Automatic Data Optimization??????: ????1: SQL> alter system set heat_map=on; ?????? ????????????? scott?? http://www.askmaclean.com/archives/scott-schema-script.html SQL> grant all on dbms_lock to scott; ????? SQL> grant dba to scott; ????? @ilm_setup_basic C:\APP\XIANGBLI\ORADATA\MACLEAN\ilm.dbf @tktgilm_demo_env_setup SQL> connect scott/tiger ; ???? SQL> select count(*) from scott.employee; COUNT(*) ---------- 3072 ??? 1 ?? SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT','EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 3072 Adv/basic compressed : 0 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ???????3072?????? ????????? ????policy ???????????? alter table employee ilm add policy row store compress advanced row after 3 days of no modification / SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> execute list_ilm_policies; -------------------------------------------------- Policies defined for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Subobject Name--- : Object Type------ : TABLE Inherited from--- : POLICY NOT INHERITED Policy Name------ : P1 Action Type------ : COMPRESSION Scope------------ : ROW Compression level : ADVANCED Tier Tablespace-- : Condition type--- : LAST MODIFICATION TIME Condition days--- : 3 Enabled---------- : YES -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> select sysdate from dual; SYSDATE -------------- 29-7? -13 SQL> execute set_back_chktime(get_policy_name('EMPLOYEE',null,'COMPRESSION','ROW','ADVANCED',3,null,null),'EMPLOYEE',null,6); Object check time reset ... -------------------------------------- Object Name : EMPLOYEE Object Number : 93123 D.Object Numbr : 93123 Policy Number : 1 Object chktime : 23-7? -13 08.13.42.000000 ?? Distnt chktime : 0 -------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ?policy?chktime???6??, ????set_back_chktime???????????????“????”?,?????????,???????? ?????? alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush shared_pool; alter system flush shared_pool; SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','OPEN'); Set Maint. Window OPEN ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : TRUE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec dbms_lock.sleep(60) ; PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT', 'EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 338 Adv/basic compressed : 2734 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ??????????????? Adv/basic compressed : 2734 ??????? SQL> col object_name for a20 SQL> select object_id,object_name from dba_objects where object_name='EMPLOYEE'; OBJECT_ID OBJECT_NAME ---------- -------------------- 93123 EMPLOYEE SQL> execute list_ilm_policy_executions ; -------------------------------------------------- Policies execution details for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Policy Name------ : P22 Job Name--------- : ILMJOB48 Start time------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.45.061000 ?? End time--------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.48.629000 ?? ----------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Sub_obj Name----- : Obj Type--------- : TABLE ----------------- Exec-state------- : SELECTED FOR EXECUTION Job state-------- : COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY Exec comments---- : Results comments- : --- -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ILMJOB48?????policy?JOB,?12.1.0.1??J00x???? ?MMON_SLAVE???M00x???15????????? select sample_time,program,module,action from v$active_session_history where action ='KDILM background EXEcution' order by sample_time; 29-7? -13 08.16.38.369000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.38.388000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.39.390000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.23.38.681000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M002) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.32.38.968000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.39.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.40.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.36.40.066000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.42.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.43.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.44.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.38.42.386000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M001) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution select distinct action from v$active_session_history where action like 'KDILM%' KDILM background CLeaNup KDILM background EXEcution SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','CLOSE'); Set Maint. Window CLOSE ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : FALSE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> drop table employee purge ; ????? ???? ????? spool ilm_usecase_1_cleanup.lst @ilm_demo_cleanup ; spool off

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• NoSQL with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC - Part 1

  - by shiju

   A while back, I have blogged NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2 on how to use MongoDB with an ASP.NET MVC application. The NoSQL movement is getting big attention and RavenDB is the latest addition to the NoSQL and document database world. RavenDB is an Open Source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform developed  by Ayende Rahien.  Raven stores schema-less JSON documents, allow you to define indexes using Linq queries and focus on low latency and high performance. RavenDB is .NET focused document database which comes with a fully functional .NET client API  and supports LINQ. RavenDB comes with two components, a server and a client API. RavenDB is a REST based system, so you can write your own HTTP cleint API. As a .NET developer, RavenDB is becoming my favorite document database. Unlike other document databases, RavenDB is supports transactions using System.Transactions. Also it's supports both embedded and server mode of database. You can access RavenDB site at http://ravendb.netA demo App with ASP.NET MVCLet's create a simple demo app with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC. To work with RavenDB, do the following steps. Go to http://ravendb.net/download and download the latest build.Unzip the downloaded file.Go to the /Server directory and run the RavenDB.exe. This will start the RavenDB server listening on localhost:8080You can change the port of RavenDB  by modifying the "Raven/Port" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.When running the RavenDB, it will automatically create a database in the /Data directory. You can change the directory name data by modifying "Raven/DataDirt" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.RavenDB provides a browser based admin tool. When the Raven server is running, You can be access the browser based admin tool and view and edit documents and index using your browser admin tool. The web admin tool available at http://localhost:8080The below is the some screen shots of web admin tool     Working with ASP.NET MVC  To working with RavenDB in our demo ASP.NET MVC application, do the following steps Step 1 - Add reference to Raven Cleint API In our ASP.NET MVC application, Add a reference to the Raven.Client.Lightweight.dll from the Client directory. Step 2 - Create DocumentStoreThe document store would be created once per application. Let's create a DocumentStore on application start-up in the Global.asax.cs. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); The above code will create a Raven DB document store and will be listening the server locahost at port 8080    Step 3 - Create DocumentSession on BeginRequest   Let's create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest event in the Global.asax.cs. We are using the document session for every unit of work. In our demo app, every HTTP request would be a single Unit of Work (UoW). BeginRequest += (sender, args) =>   HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); Step 4 - Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest  EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => {     var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable;     if (disposable != null)         disposable.Dispose(); };  At the end of HTTP request, we are destroying the DocumentSession  object.The below  code block shown all the code in the Global.asax.cs  private const string RavenSessionKey = "RavenMVC.Session"; private static DocumentStore documentStore;   protected void Application_Start() { //Create a DocumentStore in Application_Start //DocumentStore should be created once per application and stored as a singleton. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); //DI using Unity 2.0 ConfigureUnity(); }   public MvcApplication() { //Create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest   //create a document session for every unit of work BeginRequest += (sender, args) =>     HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); //Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => { var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable; if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose(); }; }   //Getting the current DocumentSession public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession {   get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } }  We have setup all necessary code in the Global.asax.cs for working with RavenDB. For our demo app, Let’s write a domain class  public class Category {       public string Id { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }   } We have created simple domain entity Category. Let's create repository class for performing CRUD operations against our domain entity Category.  public interface ICategoryRepository {     Category Load(string id);     IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories();     void Save(Category category);     void Delete(string id);       }    public class CategoryRepository : ICategoryRepository {     private IDocumentSession session;     public CategoryRepository()     {             session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession;     }     //Load category based on Id     public Category Load(string id)     {         return session.Load<Category>(id);     }     //Get all categories     public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories()     {         var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>()                 .WaitForNonStaleResults()             .ToArray();         return categories;       }     //Insert/Update category     public void Save(Category category)     {         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id))         {             //insert new record             session.Store(category);         }         else         {             //edit record             var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id);             categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name;             categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description;         }         //save the document session         session.SaveChanges();     }     //delete a category     public void Delete(string id)     {         var category = Load(id);         session.Delete<Category>(category);         session.SaveChanges();     }        } For every CRUD operations, we are taking the current document session object from HttpContext object. session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; We are calling the static method CurrentSession from the Global.asax.cs public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession {     get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } }  Retrieve Entities  The Load method get the single Category object based on the Id. RavenDB is working based on the REST principles and the Id would be like categories/1. The Id would be created by automatically when a new object is inserted to the document store. The REST uri categories/1 represents a single category object with Id representation of 1.   public Category Load(string id) {    return session.Load<Category>(id); } The GetCategories method returns all the categories calling the session.LuceneQuery method. RavenDB is using a lucen query syntax for querying. I will explain more details about querying and indexing in my future posts.   public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories() {     var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>()             .WaitForNonStaleResults()         .ToArray();     return categories;   } Insert/Update entityFor insert/Update a Category entity, we have created Save method in repository class. If  the Id property of Category is null, we call Store method of Documentsession for insert a new record. For editing a existing record, we load the Category object and assign the values to the loaded Category object. The session.SaveChanges() will save the changes to document store.  //Insert/Update category public void Save(Category category) {     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id))     {         //insert new record         session.Store(category);     }     else     {         //edit record         var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id);         categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name;         categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description;     }     //save the document session     session.SaveChanges(); }  Delete Entity  In the Delete method, we call the document session's delete method and call the SaveChanges method to reflect changes in the document store.  public void Delete(string id) {     var category = Load(id);     session.Delete<Category>(category);     session.SaveChanges(); }  Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller and controller actions for handling CRUD operations for the domain class Category  public class CategoryController : Controller { private ICategoryRepository categoyRepository; //DI enabled constructor public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoyRepository) {     this.categoyRepository = categoyRepository; } public ActionResult Index() {         var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories();     if (categories == null)         return RedirectToAction("Create");     return View(categories); }   [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(string id) {     var category = categoyRepository.Load(id);         return View("Save",category); } // GET: /Category/Create [HttpGet] public ActionResult Create() {     var category = new Category();     return View("Save", category); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Save(Category category) {     if (!ModelState.IsValid)     {         return View("Save", category);     }           categoyRepository.Save(category);         return RedirectToAction("Index");     }        [HttpPost] public ActionResult Delete(string id) {     categoyRepository.Delete(id);     var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories();     return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);      }        }  RavenDB is an awesome document database and I hope that it will be the winner in .NET space of document database world.  The source code of demo application available at http://ravenmvc.codeplex.com/

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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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• IIS SSL Certificate Renewal Pain

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’m in the middle of my annual certificate renewal for the West Wind site and I can honestly say that I hate IIS’s certificate system.  When it works it’s fine, but when it doesn’t man can it be a pain. Because I deal with public certificates on my site merely once a year, and you have to perform the certificate dance just the right way, I seem to run into some sort of trouble every year, thinking that Microsoft surely must have addressed the issues I ran into previously – HA! Not so. Don’t ever use the Renew Certificate Feature in IIS! The first rule that I should have never forgotten is that certificate renewals in IIS (7 is what I’m using but I think it’s no different in 7.5 and 8), simply don’t work if you’re submitting to get a public certificate from a certificate authority. I use DNSimple for my DNS domain management and SSL certificates because they provide ridiculously easy domain management and good prices for SSL certs – especially wildcard certificates, which is what I use on west-wind.com. Certificates in IIS can be found pegged to the machine root. If you go into the IIS Manager, go to the machine root the tree and then click on certificates and you then get various certificate options: Both of these options create a new Certificate request (CSR), which is just a text file. But if you’re silly enough like me to click on the Renew button on your old certificate, you’ll find that you end up generating a very long Certificate Request that looks nothing like the original certificate request and the format that’s used for this is not accepted by most certificate authorities. While I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, it simply looks like IIS is respecting none of your original certificate bit size choices and is generating a huge certificate request that is 3 times the size of a ‘normal’ certificate request. The end result is (and I’ve done this at least twice now) is that the certificate processor is likely to fail processing those renewals. Always create a new Certificate While it’s a little more work and you have to remember how to fill out the certificate request properly, this is the safe way to make sure your certificate generates properly. First comes the Distinguished Name Properties dialog: Ah yes you have to love the nomenclature of this stuff. Distinguished name, Common name – WTF is a common name? It doesn’t look common to me! Make sure this form gets filled out correctly. Common NameThis is the domain name of the Web site. In my case I’m creating a wildcard certificate so I’m using the * prefix. If you’re purchasing a certificate for a specific domain use www.west-wind.com or store.west-wind.com for example. Make sure this matches the EXACT domain you’re trying to use secure access on because that’s all the certificate is going to work on unless you get a wildcard certificate. Organization Is the name of your company or organization. Depending on the kind of certificate you purchase this name will show up on your certificate. Most low end SSL certificates (ie. those that cost under $100 for single domains) don’t list the organization, the higher signature certificates that also require extensive validation by the cert authority do. Regardless you should make sure this matches the right company/organization. Organizational Unit This can be anything. Not really sure what this is for, but traditionally I’ve always set this to Web because – well this is a Web thing after all right? I’ve never seen this used anywhere that I can tell other than to internally reference the cert. State and CountryPretty obvious. Should reflect the location of the business/organization/person or site.   Next you have to configure the bit size used for the certificate: The default on this dialog is 1024, but I’ve found that most providers these days request a minimum bit length of 2048, as did my DNSimple provider. Again check with the provider when you submit to make sure. Bit length mismatches can cause problems if you use a size that isn’t supported by the provider. I had that happen last year when I submitted my CSR and it got rejected quite a bit later, when the certs usually are issued within an hour or less. When you’re done here, the certificate is saved to disk as a .txt file and it should look something like this (this is a 2048 bit length CSR):-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIEVGCCAz0CAQAwdjELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxDzANBgNVBAgMBkhhd2FpaTENMAsG A1UEBwwEUGFpYTEfMB0GA1UECgwWV2VzdCBXaW5kIFRlY2hub2xvZ2llczEMMAoG B1UECwwDV2ViMRgwFgYDVQQDDA8qLndlc3Qtd2luZC5jb20wggEiMA0GCSqGSIb3 DQEBAQUAA4IBDwAwggEKAoIBAQDIPWOFMkMVRp2Ftj9w/cCVV4OYYhoZYtl+8lTk oqDwKca0xWHLgioX/9v0rZLS6a82MHqKEBxVXu+cuCmSE4AQtB/1YH9lS4tpc/be OZDvnTotP6l4MCEzzAfROcw4CiIg6X0RMSnl8IATAvv2V5LQM9TDdt9oDdMpX2IY +vVC9RZ7PMHBmR9kwI2i/lrKitzhQKaHgpmKcRlM6iqpALUiX28w5HJaDKK1MDHN 607tyFJLHijuJKx7PdTqZYf50KkC3NupfZ2avVycf18Q13jHWj59tvwEOczoVzRL l4LQivAqbhyiqMpWnrZunIOUZta5aGm+jo7O1knGWJjxuraTAgMBAAGgggGYMBoG CisGAQQBgjcNAgMxDBYKNi4yLjkyMDAuMjA0BgkrBgEEAYI3FRQxJzAlAgEFDAZS QVNYUFMMC1JBU1hQU1xSaWNrDAtJbmV0TWdyLmV4ZTByBgorBgEEAYI3DQICMWQw YgIBAR5aAE0AaQBjAHIAbwBzAG8AZgB0ACAAUgBTAEEAIABTAEMAaABhAG4AbgBl AGwAIABDAHIAeQBwAHQAbwBnAHIAYQBwAGgAaQBjACAAUAByAG8AdgBpAGQAZQBy AwEAMIHPBgkqhkiG9w0BCQ4xgcEwgb4wDgYDVR0PAQH/BAQDAgTwMBMGA1UdJQQM MAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMHgGCSqGSIb3DQEJDwRrMGkwDgYIKoZIhvcNAwICAgCAMA4G CCqGSIb3DQMEAgIAgDALBglghkgBZQMEASowCwYJYIZIAWUDBAEtMAsGCWCGSAFl AwQBAjALBglghkgBZQMEAQUwBwYFKw4DAgcwCgYIKoZIhvcNAwcwHQYDVR0OBBYE FD/yOsTbXE+GVFCFMmldzQvyloz9MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4IBAQCK6LlsCuIM 1AU0niB6QZ9v0FTsGFxP1dYvVUnJyY6VEKNiGFiQjZac7UCs0p58yScdXWEFOE8V OsjAYD3xYNc05+ckyD67UHRGEUAVB9RBvbKW23KeR/8kBmEzc8PemD52YOgExxAJ 57xWmAwEHAvbgYzQvhO8AOzH3TGvvHbg5UKM1pYgNmuwZq5DkL/IDoeIJwfk/wrI wghNTuxxIFgbH4YrgLgv4PRvrS/LaTCRBdboaCgzATMczaOb1nd/DVNR+3fCtMhM W0psTAjzRbmXF3nJyAQa7jF/52gkY0RfFX2lG5tJnG+XDsVNvKNvh9Qa5Tlmkm06 ILKCm9ciWCKk -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- You can take that certificate request and submit that to your certificate provider. Since this is base64 encoded you can typically just paste it into a text box on the submission page, or some providers will ask you to upload the CSR as a file. What does a Renewal look like? Note the length of the CSR will vary somewhat with key strength, but compare this to a renewal request that IIS generated from my existing site:-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIPpwYFKoZIhvcNAQcCoIIPmDCCD5QCAQExCzAJBgUrDgMCGgUAMIIIqAYJKoZI hvcNAQcBoIIImQSCCJUwggiRMIIH+gIBADBdMSEwHwYDVQQLDBhEb21haW4gQ29u dHJvbCBWYWxpFGF0ZWQxHjAcBgNVBAsMFUVzc2VudGlhbFNTTCBXaWxkY2FyZDEY MBYGA1UEAwwPKi53ZXN0LXdpbmQuY29tMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCB iQKBgQCK4OuIOR18Wb8tNMGRZiD1c9X57b332Lj7DhbckFqLs0ys8kVDHrTXSj+T Ye9nmAvfPpZmBtE5p9qRNN79rUYugAdl+qEtE4IJe1bRfxXzcKa1SXa8+TEs3zQa zYSmcR2dDuC8om1eAdeCtt0NnkvANgm1VLwGOor/UHMASaEhCQIDAQABoIIG8jAa BgorBgEEAYI3DQIDMQwWCjYuMi45MjAwLjIwNAYJKwYBBAGCNxUUMScwJQIBBQwG UkFTWFBTDAtSQVNYUFNcUmljawwLSW5ldE1nci5leGUwZgYKKwYBBAGCNw0CAjFY MFYCAQIeTgBNAGkAYwByAG8AcwBvAGYAdAAgAFMAdAByAG8AbgBnACAAQwByAHkA cAB0AG8AZwByAGEAcABoAGkAYwAgAFAAcgBvAHYAaQBkAGUAcgMBADCCAQAGCSqG SIb3DQEJDjGB8jCB7zAOBgNVHQ8BAf8EBAMCBaAwDAYDVR0TAQH/BAIwADA0BgNV 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And it didn’t work. IIS creates a custom CSR that is encoded in a format that no certificate authority I’ve ever used uses. If you want the gory details of what’s in there look at this ServerFault question (thanks to Mika in the comments). In the end it doesn’t matter  though – no certificate authority knows what to do with this CSR. So create a new CSR and skip the renewal. Always! Use the same Server Keep in mind that on IIS at least you should always create your certificate on a single server and then when you receive the final certificate from your provider import it on that server. IIS tracks the CSR it created and requires it in order to import the final certificate properly. So if for some reason you try to install the certificate on another server, it won’t work. I’ve also run into trouble trying to install the same certificate twice – this time around I didn’t give my certificate the proper friendly name and IIS failed to allow me to assign the certificate to any of my Web sites. So I removed the certificate and tried to import again, only to find it failed the second time around. There are other ways to fix this, but in my case I had to have the certificate re-issued to work – not what you want to do. Regardless of what you do though, when you import make sure you do it right the first time by crossing all your t’s and dotting your i's– it’ll save you a lot of grief! You don’t actually have to use the server that the certificate gets installed on to generate the CSR and first install it, but it is generally a good idea to do so just so you can get the certificate installed into the right place right away. If you have access to the server where you need to install the certificate you might as well use it. But you can use another machine to generated the and install the certificate, then export the certificate and move it to another machine as needed. So you can use your Dev machine to create a certificate then export it and install it on a live server. More on installation and back up/export later. Installing the Certificate Once you’ve submitted a CSR request your provider will process the request and eventually issue you a new final certificate that contains another text file with the final key to import into your certificate store. IIS does this by combining the content in your certificate request with the original CSR. If all goes well your new certificate shows up in the certificate list and you’re ready to assign the certificate to your sites. Make sure you use a friendly name that matches domain name of your site. So use *.mysite.com or www.mysite.com or store.mysite.com to ensure IIS recognizes the certificate. I made the mistake of not naming my friendly name this way and found that IIS was unable to link my sites to my wildcard certificate. It needed to have the *. as part of the certificate otherwise the Hostname input field was blanked out. Changing the Friendly Name If you by accidentally used an invalid friendly name you can change it later in the Windows certificate store. Bring up a Run Box Type MMC File | Add/Remove Snap In Add Certificates | Computer Account | Local Computer Drill into Certificates | Personal | Certificates Find your Certificate | Right Click | Properties Edit the Friendly Name | Click OK Backing up your Certificate The first thing you should do once your certificate is successfully installed is to back it up! In case your server crashes or you otherwise lose your configuration this will ensure you have an easy way to recover and reinstall your certificate either on the same server or a different one. If you’re running a server farm or using a wildcard certificate you also need to get the certificate onto other machines and a PFX file import is the easiest way to do this. To back up your certificate select your certificate and choose Export from the context or sidebar menu: The Export Certificate option allows you to export a password protected binary file that you can import in a single step. You can copy the resulting binary PFX file to back up or copy to other machines to install on. Importing the certificate on another machine is as easy as pointing at the PFX file and specifying the password. IIS handles the rest. Assigning a new certificate to your Site Once you have the new certificate installed, all that’s left to do is assign it to your site. In IIS select your Web site and bring up the Site Bindings from the right sidebar. Add a new binding for https, bind it to port 443, specify your hostname and pick the certificate from the pick list. If you’re using a root site make sure to set up your certificate for www.yoursite.com and also for yoursite.com so that both work properly with SSL. Note that you need to explicitly configure each hostname for a certificate if you plan to use SSL. Luckily if you update your SSL certificate in the following year, IIS prompts you and asks whether you like to update all other sites that are using the existing cert to the newer cert. And you’re done. So what’s the Pain? So, all of this is old hat and it doesn’t look all that bad right? So what’s the pain here? Well if you follow the instructions and do everything right, then the process is about as straight forward as you would expect it to be. You create a cert request, you import it and assign it to your sites. That’s the basic steps and to be perfectly fair it works well – if nothing goes wrong. However, renewing tends to be the problem. The first unintuitive issue is that you simply shouldn’t renew but create a new CSR and generate your new certificate from that. Over the years I’ve fallen prey to the belief that Microsoft eventually will fix this so that the renewal creates the same type of CSR as the old cert, but apparently that will just never happen. Booo! The other problem I ran into is that I accidentally misnamed my imported certificate which in turn set off a chain of events that caused my originally issued certificate to become uninstallable. When I received my completed certificate I installed it and it installed just fine, but the friendly name was wrong. As a result IIS refused to assign the certificate to any of my host headered sites. That’s strike number one. Why the heck should the friendly name have any effect on the ability to attach the certificate??? Next I uninstalled the certificate because I figured that would be the easiest way to make sure I get it right. But I found that I could not reinstall my certificate. I kept getting these stop errors: "ASN1 bad tag value met" that would prevent the installation from completion. After searching around for this error and reading countless long messages on forums, I found that this error supposedly does not actually mean the install failed, but the list wouldn’t refresh. Commodo has this to say: Note: There is a known issue in IIS 7 giving the following error: "Cannot find the certificate request associated with this certificate file. A certificate request must be completed on the computer where it was created." You may also receive a message stating "ASN1 bad tag value met". If this is the same server that you generated the CSR on then, in most cases, the certificate is actually installed. Simply cancel the dialog and press "F5" to refresh the list of server certificates. If the new certificate is now in the list, you can continue with the next step. If it is not in the list, you will need to reissue your certificate using a new CSR (see our CSR creation instructions for IIS 7). After creating a new CSR, login to your Comodo account and click the 'replace' button for your certificate. Not sure if this issue is fixed in IIS 8 but that’s an insane bug to have crop up. As it turns out, in my case the refresh didn’t work and the certificate didn’t show up in the IIS list after the reinstall. In fact when looking at the certificate store I could see my certificate was installed in the right place, but the private key is missing which is most likely why IIS is not picking it up. It looks like IIS could not match the final cert to the original CSR generated. But again some sort of message to that affect might be helpful instead of ASN1 bad tag value met. Recovering the Private Key So it turns out my original problem was that I received the published key, but when I imported the private key was missing. There’s a relatively easy way to recover from this. If your certificate doesn’t show up in IIS check in the certificate store for the local machine (see steps above on how to bring this up). If you look at the certificate in Certificates/Personal/Certificates make sure you see the key as shown in the image below: if the key is missing it means that the certificate is missing the private key most likely. To fix a certificate you can do the following: Double click the certificate Go to the Details Tab Copy down the Serial number You can copy the serial number from the area blurred out above. The serial number will be in a format like ?00 a7 9b a1 a4 9d 91 63 57 d6 9f 26 b8 ee 79 b5 cb and you’ll need to strip out the spaces in order to use it in the next step. Next open up an Administrative command prompt and issue the following command: certutil -repairstore my 00a79ba1a49d916357d69f26b8ee79b5cb You should get a confirmation message that the repair worked. If you now go back to the certificate store you should now see the key icon show up on the certificate. Your certificate is fixed. Now go back into IIS Manager and refresh the list of certificates and if all goes well you should see all the certificates that showed in the cert store now: Remember – back up the key first then map to your site… Summary I deal with a lot of customers who run their own IIS servers, and I can’t tell you how often I hear about botched SSL installations. When I posted some of my issues on Twitter yesterday I got a hell storm of “me too” responses. I’m clearly not the only one, who’s run into this especially with renewals. I feel pretty comfortable with IIS configuration and I do a lot of it for support purposes, but the SSL configuration is one that never seems to go seamlessly. This blog post is meant as reminder to myself to read next time I do a renewal. So I can dot my i's and dash my t’s before I get caught in the mess I’m dealing with today. Hopefully some of you find this useful as well.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in IIS7  Security   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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• Node.js Adventure - Host Node.js on Windows Azure Worker Role

  - by Shaun

  In my previous post I demonstrated about how to develop and deploy a Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). WAWS is a new feature in Windows Azure platform. Since it’s low-cost, and it provides IIS and IISNode components so that we can host our Node.js application though Git, FTP and WebMatrix without any configuration and component installation. But sometimes we need to use the Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS) and host our Node.js on worker role. Below are some benefits of using worker role. - WAWS leverages IIS and IISNode to host Node.js application, which runs in x86 WOW mode. It reduces the performance comparing with x64 in some cases. - WACS worker role does not need IIS, hence there’s no restriction of IIS, such as 8000 concurrent requests limitation. - WACS provides more flexibility and controls to the developers. For example, we can RDP to the virtual machines of our worker role instances. - WACS provides the service configuration features which can be changed when the role is running. - WACS provides more scaling capability than WAWS. In WAWS we can have at most 3 reserved instances per web site while in WACS we can have up to 20 instances in a subscription. - Since when using WACS worker role we starts the node by ourselves in a process, we can control the input, output and error stream. We can also control the version of Node.js.   Run Node.js in Worker Role Node.js can be started by just having its execution file. This means in Windows Azure, we can have a worker role with the “node.exe” and the Node.js source files, then start it in Run method of the worker role entry class. Let’s create a new windows azure project in Visual Studio and add a new worker role. Since we need our worker role execute the “node.exe” with our application code we need to add the “node.exe” into our project. Right click on the worker role project and add an existing item. By default the Node.js will be installed in the “Program Files\nodejs” folder so we can navigate there and add the “node.exe”. Then we need to create the entry code of Node.js. In WAWS the entry file must be named “server.js”, which is because it’s hosted by IIS and IISNode and IISNode only accept “server.js”. But here as we control everything we can choose any files as the entry code. For example, I created a new JavaScript file named “index.js” in project root. Since we created a C# Windows Azure project we cannot create a JavaScript file from the context menu “Add new item”. We have to create a text file, and then rename it to JavaScript extension. After we added these two files we should set their “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy Always”, or “Copy if Newer”. Otherwise they will not be involved in the package when deployed. Let’s paste a very simple Node.js code in the “index.js” as below. As you can see I created a web server listening at port 12345. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 12345; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then we need to start “node.exe” with this file when our worker role was started. This can be done in its Run method. I found the Node.js and entry JavaScript file name, and then create a new process to run it. Our worker role will wait for the process to be exited. If everything is OK once our web server was opened the process will be there listening for incoming requests, and should not be terminated. The code in worker role would be like this. 1: public override void Run() 2: { 3: // This is a sample worker implementation. Replace with your logic. 4: Trace.WriteLine("NodejsHost entry point called", "Information"); 5:  6: // retrieve the node.exe and entry node.js source code file name. 7: var node = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot\node.exe"); 8: var js = "index.js"; 9:  10: // prepare the process starting of node.exe 11: var info = new ProcessStartInfo(node, js) 12: { 13: CreateNoWindow = false, 14: ErrorDialog = true, 15: WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal, 16: UseShellExecute = false, 17: WorkingDirectory = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot") 18: }; 19: Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}", node, js), "Information"); 20:  21: // start the node.exe with entry code and wait for exit 22: var process = Process.Start(info); 23: process.WaitForExit(); 24: } Then we can run it locally. In the computer emulator UI the worker role started and it executed the Node.js, then Node.js windows appeared. Open the browser to verify the website hosted by our worker role. Next let’s deploy it to azure. But we need some additional steps. First, we need to create an input endpoint. By default there’s no endpoint defined in a worker role. So we will open the role property window in Visual Studio, create a new input TCP endpoint to the port we want our website to use. In this case I will use 80. Even though we created a web server we should add a TCP endpoint of the worker role, since Node.js always listen on TCP instead of HTTP. And then changed the “index.js”, let our web server listen on 80. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 80; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then publish it to Windows Azure. And then in browser we can see our Node.js website was running on WACS worker role. We may encounter an error if we tried to run our Node.js website on 80 port at local emulator. This is because the compute emulator registered 80 and map the 80 endpoint to 81. But our Node.js cannot detect this operation. So when it tried to listen on 80 it will failed since 80 have been used.   Use NPM Modules When we are using WAWS to host Node.js, we can simply install modules we need, and then just publish or upload all files to WAWS. But if we are using WACS worker role, we have to do some extra steps to make the modules work. Assuming that we plan to use “express” in our application. Firstly of all we should download and install this module through NPM command. But after the install finished, they are just in the disk but not included in the worker role project. If we deploy the worker role right now the module will not be packaged and uploaded to azure. Hence we need to add them to the project. On solution explorer window click the “Show all files” button, select the “node_modules” folder and in the context menu select “Include In Project”. But that not enough. We also need to make all files in this module to “Copy always” or “Copy if newer”, so that they can be uploaded to azure with the “node.exe” and “index.js”. This is painful step since there might be many files in a module. So I created a small tool which can update a C# project file, make its all items as “Copy always”. The code is very simple. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: if (args.Length < 1) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("Usage: copyallalways [project file]"); 6: return; 7: } 8:  9: var proj = args[0]; 10: File.Copy(proj, string.Format("{0}.bak", proj)); 11:  12: var xml = new XmlDocument(); 13: xml.Load(proj); 14: var nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xml.NameTable); 15: nsManager.AddNamespace("pf", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"); 16:  17: // add the output setting to copy always 18: var contentNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:Content", nsManager); 19: UpdateNodes(contentNodes, xml, nsManager); 20: var noneNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:None", nsManager); 21: UpdateNodes(noneNodes, xml, nsManager); 22: xml.Save(proj); 23:  24: // remove the namespace attributes 25: var content = xml.InnerXml.Replace("<CopyToOutputDirectory xmlns=\"\">", "<CopyToOutputDirectory>"); 26: xml.LoadXml(content); 27: xml.Save(proj); 28: } 29:  30: static void UpdateNodes(XmlNodeList nodes, XmlDocument xml, XmlNamespaceManager nsManager) 31: { 32: foreach (XmlNode node in nodes) 33: { 34: var copyToOutputDirectoryNode = node.SelectSingleNode("pf:CopyToOutputDirectory", nsManager); 35: if (copyToOutputDirectoryNode == null) 36: { 37: var n = xml.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "CopyToOutputDirectory", null); 38: n.InnerText = "Always"; 39: node.AppendChild(n); 40: } 41: else 42: { 43: if (string.Compare(copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText, "Always", true) != 0) 44: { 45: copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText = "Always"; 46: } 47: } 48: } 49: } Please be careful when use this tool. I created only for demo so do not use it directly in a production environment. Unload the worker role project, execute this tool with the worker role project file name as the command line argument, it will set all items as “Copy always”. Then reload this worker role project. Now let’s change the “index.js” to use express. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: var port = 80; 5:  6: app.configure(function () { 7: }); 8:  9: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 10: res.send("Hello Node.js!"); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/User/:id", function (req, res) { 14: var id = req.params.id; 15: res.json({ 16: "id": id, 17: "name": "user " + id, 18: "company": "IGT" 19: }); 20: }); 21:  22: app.listen(port); Finally let’s publish it and have a look in browser.   Use Windows Azure SQL Database We can use Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WACD) from Node.js as well on worker role hosting. Since we can control the version of Node.js, here we can use x64 version of “node-sqlserver” now. This is better than if we host Node.js on WAWS since it only support x86. Just install the “node-sqlserver” module from NPM, copy the “sqlserver.node” from “Build\Release” folder to “Lib” folder. Include them in worker role project and run my tool to make them to “Copy always”. Finally update the “index.js” to use WASD. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 3:  4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:{SERVER NAME}.database.windows.net,1433;Database={DATABASE NAME};Uid={LOGIN}@{SERVER NAME};Pwd={PASSWORD};Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 5: var port = 80; 6:  7: var app = express(); 8:  9: app.configure(function () { 10: app.use(express.bodyParser()); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 14: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 15: if (err) { 16: console.log(err); 17: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 18: } 19: else { 20: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 21: if (err) { 22: console.log(err); 23: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 24: } 25: else { 26: res.json(results); 27: } 28: }); 29: } 30: }); 31: }); 32:  33: app.get("/text/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 34: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 35: if (err) { 36: console.log(err); 37: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 38: } 39: else { 40: var key = req.params.key; 41: var culture = req.params.culture; 42: var command = "SELECT * FROM [Resource] WHERE [Key] = '" + key + "' AND [Culture] = '" + culture + "'"; 43: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 44: if (err) { 45: console.log(err); 46: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 47: } 48: else { 49: res.json(results); 50: } 51: }); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55:  56: app.get("/sproc/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 57: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 58: if (err) { 59: console.log(err); 60: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 61: } 62: else { 63: var key = req.params.key; 64: var culture = req.params.culture; 65: var command = "EXEC GetItem '" + key + "', '" + culture + "'"; 66: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 67: if (err) { 68: console.log(err); 69: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 70: } 71: else { 72: res.json(results); 73: } 74: }); 75: } 76: }); 77: }); 78:  79: app.post("/new", function (req, res) { 80: var key = req.body.key; 81: var culture = req.body.culture; 82: var val = req.body.val; 83:  84: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 85: if (err) { 86: console.log(err); 87: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 88: } 89: else { 90: var command = "INSERT INTO [Resource] VALUES ('" + key + "', '" + culture + "', N'" + val + "')"; 91: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 92: if (err) { 93: console.log(err); 94: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 95: } 96: else { 97: res.send(200, "Inserted Successful"); 98: } 99: }); 100: } 101: }); 102: }); 103:  104: app.listen(port); Publish to azure and now we can see our Node.js is working with WASD through x64 version “node-sqlserver”.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to host our Node.js in Windows Azure Cloud Service worker role. By using worker role we can control the version of Node.js, as well as the entry code. And it’s possible to do some pre jobs before the Node.js application started. It also removed the IIS and IISNode limitation. I personally recommended to use worker role as our Node.js hosting. But there are some problem if you use the approach I mentioned here. The first one is, we need to set all JavaScript files and module files as “Copy always” or “Copy if newer” manually. The second one is, in this way we cannot retrieve the cloud service configuration information. For example, we defined the endpoint in worker role property but we also specified the listening port in Node.js hardcoded. It should be changed that our Node.js can retrieve the endpoint. But I can tell you it won’t be working here. In the next post I will describe another way to execute the “node.exe” and Node.js application, so that we can get the cloud service configuration in Node.js. I will also demonstrate how to use Windows Azure Storage from Node.js by using the Windows Azure Node.js SDK.   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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• What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

  - by Alois Kraus

  Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

  - by FransBouma

  Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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• Ancillary Objects: Separate Debug ELF Files For Solaris

  - by Ali Bahrami

  We introduced a new object ELF object type in Solaris 11 Update 1 called the Ancillary Object. This posting describes them, using material originally written during their development, the PSARC arc case, and the Solaris Linker and Libraries Manual. ELF objects contain allocable sections, which are mapped into memory at runtime, and non-allocable sections, which are present in the file for use by debuggers and observability tools, but which are not mapped or used at runtime. Typically, all of these sections exist within a single object file. Ancillary objects allow them to instead go into a separate file. There are different reasons given for wanting such a feature. One can debate whether the added complexity is worth the benefit, and in most cases it is not. However, one important case stands out — customers with very large 32-bit objects who are not ready or able to make the transition to 64-bits. We have customers who build extremely large 32-bit objects. Historically, the debug sections in these objects have used the stabs format, which is limited, but relatively compact. In recent years, the industry has transitioned to the powerful but verbose DWARF standard. In some cases, the size of these debug sections is large enough to push the total object file size past the fundamental 4GB limit for 32-bit ELF object files. The best, and ultimately only, solution to overly large objects is to transition to 64-bits. However, consider environments where: Hundreds of users may be executing the code on large shared systems. (32-bits use less memory and bus bandwidth, and on sparc runs just as fast as 64-bit code otherwise). Complex finely tuned code, where the original authors may no longer be available. Critical production code, that was expensive to qualify and bring online, and which is otherwise serving its intended purpose without issue. Users in these risk adverse and/or high scale categories have good reasons to push 32-bits objects to the limit before moving on. Ancillary objects offer these users a longer runway. Design The design of ancillary objects is intended to be simple, both to help human understanding when examining elfdump output, and to lower the bar for debuggers such as dbx to support them. The primary and ancillary objects have the same set of section headers, with the same names, in the same order (i.e. each section has the same index in both files). A single added section of type SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY is added to both objects, containing information that allows a debugger to identify and validate both files relative to each other. Given one of these files, the ancillary section allows you to identify the other. Allocable sections go in the primary object, and non-allocable ones go into the ancillary object. A small set of non-allocable objects, notably the symbol table, are copied into both objects. As noted above, most sections are only written to one of the two objects, but both objects have the same section header array. The section header in the file that does not contain the section data is tagged with the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag to indicate its placeholder status. Compiler writers and others who produce objects can set the SUNW_SHF_PRIMARY section header flag to mark non-allocable sections that should go to the primary object rather than the ancillary. If you don't request an ancillary object, the Solaris ELF format is unchanged. Users who don't use ancillary objects do not pay for the feature. This is important, because they exist to serve a small subset of our users, and must not complicate the common case. If you do request an ancillary object, the runtime behavior of the primary object will be the same as that of a normal object. There is no added runtime cost. The primary and ancillary object together represent a logical single object. This is facilitated by the use of a single set of section headers. One can easily imagine a tool that can merge a primary and ancillary object into a single file, or the reverse. (Note that although this is an interesting intellectual exercise, we don't actually supply such a tool because there's little practical benefit above and beyond using ld to create the files). Among the benefits of this approach are: There is no need for per-file symbol tables to reflect the contents of each file. The same symbol table that would be produced for a standard object can be used. The section contents are identical in either case — there is no need to alter data to accommodate multiple files. It is very easy for a debugger to adapt to these new files, and the processing involved can be encapsulated in input/output routines. Most of the existing debugger implementation applies without modification. The limit of a 4GB 32-bit output object is now raised to 4GB of code, and 4GB of debug data. There is also the future possibility (not currently supported) to support multiple ancillary objects, each of which could contain up to 4GB of additional debug data. It must be noted however that the 32-bit DWARF debug format is itself inherently 32-bit limited, as it uses 32-bit offsets between debug sections, so the ability to employ multiple ancillary object files may not turn out to be useful. Using Ancillary Objects (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) By default, objects contain both allocable and non-allocable sections. Allocable sections are the sections that contain executable code and the data needed by that code at runtime. Non-allocable sections contain supplemental information that is not required to execute an object at runtime. These sections support the operation of debuggers and other observability tools. The non-allocable sections in an object are not loaded into memory at runtime by the operating system, and so, they have no impact on memory use or other aspects of runtime performance no matter their size. For convenience, both allocable and non-allocable sections are normally maintained in the same file. However, there are situations in which it can be useful to separate these sections. To reduce the size of objects in order to improve the speed at which they can be copied across wide area networks. To support fine grained debugging of highly optimized code requires considerable debug data. In modern systems, the debugging data can easily be larger than the code it describes. The size of a 32-bit object is limited to 4 Gbytes. In very large 32-bit objects, the debug data can cause this limit to be exceeded and prevent the creation of the object. To limit the exposure of internal implementation details. Traditionally, objects have been stripped of non-allocable sections in order to address these issues. Stripping is effective, but destroys data that might be needed later. The Solaris link-editor can instead write non-allocable sections to an ancillary object. This feature is enabled with the -z ancillary command line option. $ ld ... -z ancillary[=outfile] ...By default, the ancillary file is given the same name as the primary output object, with a .anc file extension. However, a different name can be provided by providing an outfile value to the -z ancillary option. When -z ancillary is specified, the link-editor performs the following actions. All allocable sections are written to the primary object. In addition, all non-allocable sections containing one or more input sections that have the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY section header flag set are written to the primary object. All remaining non-allocable sections are written to the ancillary object. The following non-allocable sections are written to both the primary object and ancillary object. .shstrtab The section name string table. .symtab The full non-dynamic symbol table. .symtab_shndx The symbol table extended index section associated with .symtab. .strtab The non-dynamic string table associated with .symtab. .SUNW_ancillary Contains the information required to identify the primary and ancillary objects, and to identify the object being examined. The primary object and all ancillary objects contain the same array of sections headers. Each section has the same section index in every file. Although the primary and ancillary objects all define the same section headers, the data for most sections will be written to a single file as described above. If the data for a section is not present in a given file, the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set, and the sh_size field is 0. This organization makes it possible to acquire a full list of section headers, a complete symbol table, and a complete list of the primary and ancillary objects from either of the primary or ancillary objects. The following example illustrates the underlying implementation of ancillary objects. An ancillary object is created by adding the -z ancillary command line option to an otherwise normal compilation. The file utility shows that the result is an executable named a.out, and an associated ancillary object named a.out.anc. $ cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { (void) printf("hello, world\n"); return (0); } $ cc -g -zancillary hello.c $ file a.out a.out.anc a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped, ancillary object a.out.anc a.out.anc: ELF 32-bit LSB ancillary 80386 Version 1, primary object a.out $ ./a.out hello worldThe resulting primary object is an ordinary executable that can be executed in the usual manner. It is no different at runtime than an executable built without the use of ancillary objects, and then stripped of non-allocable content using the strip or mcs commands. As previously described, the primary object and ancillary objects contain the same section headers. To see how this works, it is helpful to use the elfdump utility to display these section headers and compare them. The following table shows the section header information for a selection of headers from the previous link-edit example. Index Section Name Type Primary Flags Ancillary Flags Primary Size Ancillary Size 13 .text PROGBITS ALLOC EXECINSTR ALLOC EXECINSTR SUNW_ABSENT 0x131 0 20 .data PROGBITS WRITE ALLOC WRITE ALLOC SUNW_ABSENT 0x4c 0 21 .symtab SYMTAB 0 0 0x450 0x450 22 .strtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x1ad 0x1ad 24 .debug_info PROGBITS SUNW_ABSENT 0 0 0x1a7 28 .shstrtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x118 0x118 29 .SUNW_ancillary SUNW_ancillary 0 0 0x30 0x30 The data for most sections is only present in one of the two files, and absent from the other file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set when the data is absent. The data for allocable sections needed at runtime are found in the primary object. The data for non-allocable sections used for debugging but not needed at runtime are placed in the ancillary file. A small set of non-allocable sections are fully present in both files. These are the .SUNW_ancillary section used to relate the primary and ancillary objects together, the section name string table .shstrtab, as well as the symbol table.symtab, and its associated string table .strtab. It is possible to strip the symbol table from the primary object. A debugger that encounters an object without a symbol table can use the .SUNW_ancillary section to locate the ancillary object, and access the symbol contained within. The primary object, and all associated ancillary objects, contain a .SUNW_ancillary section that allows all the objects to be identified and related together. $ elfdump -T SUNW_ancillary a.out a.out.anc a.out: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 a.out.anc: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 The ancillary sections for both objects contain the same number of elements, and are identical except for the first element. Each object, starting with the primary object, is introduced with a MEMBER element that gives the file name, followed by a CHECKSUM that identifies the object. In this example, the primary object is a.out, and has a checksum of 0x8724. The ancillary object is a.out.anc, and has a checksum of 0xfbe2. The first element in a .SUNW_ancillary section, preceding the MEMBER element for the primary object, is always a CHECKSUM element, containing the checksum for the file being examined. The presence of a .SUNW_ancillary section in an object indicates that the object has associated ancillary objects. The names of the primary and all associated ancillary objects can be obtained from the ancillary section from any one of the files. It is possible to determine which file is being examined from the larger set of files by comparing the first checksum value to the checksum of each member that follows. Debugger Access and Use of Ancillary Objects Debuggers and other observability tools must merge the information found in the primary and ancillary object files in order to build a complete view of the object. This is equivalent to processing the information from a single file. This merging is simplified by the primary object and ancillary objects containing the same section headers, and a single symbol table. The following steps can be used by a debugger to assemble the information contained in these files. Starting with the primary object, or any of the ancillary objects, locate the .SUNW_ancillary section. The presence of this section identifies the object as part of an ancillary group, contains information that can be used to obtain a complete list of the files and determine which of those files is the one currently being examined. Create a section header array in memory, using the section header array from the object being examined as an initial template. Open and read each file identified by the .SUNW_ancillary section in turn. For each file, fill in the in-memory section header array with the information for each section that does not have the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag set. The result will be a complete in-memory copy of the section headers with pointers to the data for all sections. Once this information has been acquired, the debugger can proceed as it would in the single file case, to access and control the running program. Note - The ELF definition of ancillary objects provides for a single primary object, and an arbitrary number of ancillary objects. At this time, the Oracle Solaris link-editor only produces a single ancillary object containing all non-allocable sections. This may change in the future. Debuggers and other observability tools should be written to handle the general case of multiple ancillary objects. ELF Implementation Details (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) To implement ancillary objects, it was necessary to extend the ELF format to add a new object type (ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY), a new section type (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY), and 2 new section header flags (SHF_SUNW_ABSENT, SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY). In this section, I will detail these changes, in the form of diffs to the Solaris Linker and Libraries manual. Part IV ELF Application Binary Interface Chapter 13: Object File Format Object File Format Edit Note: This existing section at the beginning of the chapter describes the ELF header. There's a table of object file types, which now includes the new ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY type. e_type Identifies the object file type, as listed in the following table. NameValueMeaning ET_NONE0No file type ET_REL1Relocatable file ET_EXEC2Executable file ET_DYN3Shared object file ET_CORE4Core file ET_LOSUNW0xfefeStart operating system specific range ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY0xfefeAncillary object file ET_HISUNW0xfefdEnd operating system specific range ET_LOPROC0xff00Start processor-specific range ET_HIPROC0xffffEnd processor-specific range Sections Edit Note: This overview section defines the section header structure, and provides a high level description of known sections. It was updated to define the new SHF_SUNW_ABSENT and SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flags and the new SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY section. ... sh_type Categorizes the section's contents and semantics. Section types and their descriptions are listed in Table 13-5. sh_flags Sections support 1-bit flags that describe miscellaneous attributes. Flag definitions are listed in Table 13-8. ... Table 13-5 ELF Section Types, sh_type NameValue . . . SHT_LOSUNW0x6fffffee SHT_SUNW_ancillary0x6fffffee . . . ... SHT_LOSUNW - SHT_HISUNW Values in this inclusive range are reserved for Oracle Solaris OS semantics. SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section. ... Table 13-8 ELF Section Attribute Flags NameValue . . . SHF_MASKOS0x0ff00000 SHF_SUNW_NODISCARD0x00100000 SHF_SUNW_ABSENT0x00200000 SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY0x00400000 SHF_MASKPROC0xf0000000 . . . ... SHF_SUNW_ABSENT Indicates that the data for this section is not present in this file. When ancillary objects are created, the primary object and any ancillary objects, will all have the same section header array, to facilitate merging them to form a complete view of the object, and to allow them to use the same symbol tables. Each file contains a subset of the section data. The data for allocable sections is written to the primary object while the data for non-allocable sections is written to an ancillary file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is used to indicate that the data for the section is not present in the object being examined. When the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is set, the sh_size field of the section header must be 0. An application encountering an SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section can choose to ignore the section, or to search for the section data within one of the related ancillary files. SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY The default behavior when ancillary objects are created is to write all allocable sections to the primary object and all non-allocable sections to the ancillary objects. The SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag overrides this behavior. Any output section containing one more input section with the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag set is written to the primary object without regard for its allocable status. ... Two members in the section header, sh_link, and sh_info, hold special information, depending on section type. Table 13-9 ELF sh_link and sh_info Interpretation sh_typesh_linksh_info . . . SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY The section header index of the associated string table. 0 . . . Special Sections Edit Note: This section describes the sections used in Solaris ELF objects, using the types defined in the previous description of section types. It was updated to define the new .SUNW_ancillary (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY) section. Various sections hold program and control information. Sections in the following table are used by the system and have the indicated types and attributes. Table 13-10 ELF Special Sections NameTypeAttribute . . . .SUNW_ancillarySHT_SUNW_ancillaryNone . . . ... .SUNW_ancillary Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section for details. ... Ancillary Section Edit Note: This new section provides the format reference describing the layout of a .SUNW_ancillary section and the meaning of the various tags. Note that these sections use the same tag/value concept used for dynamic and capabilities sections, and will be familiar to anyone used to working with ELF. In addition to the primary output object, the Solaris link-editor can produce one or more ancillary objects. Ancillary objects contain non-allocable sections that would normally be written to the primary object. When ancillary objects are produced, the primary object and all of the associated ancillary objects contain a SHT_SUNW_ancillary section, containing information that identifies these related objects. Given any one object from such a group, the ancillary section provides the information needed to identify and interpret the others. This section contains an array of the following structures. See sys/elf.h. typedef struct { Elf32_Word a_tag; union { Elf32_Word a_val; Elf32_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf32_Ancillary; typedef struct { Elf64_Xword a_tag; union { Elf64_Xword a_val; Elf64_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf64_Ancillary; For each object with this type, a_tag controls the interpretation of a_un. a_val These objects represent integer values with various interpretations. a_ptr These objects represent file offsets or addresses. The following ancillary tags exist. Table 13-NEW1 ELF Ancillary Array Tags NameValuea_un ANC_SUNW_NULL0Ignored ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM1a_val ANC_SUNW_MEMBER2a_ptr ANC_SUNW_NULL Marks the end of the ancillary section. ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM Provides the checksum for a file in the c_val element. When ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM precedes the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, it provides the checksum for the object from which the ancillary section is being read. When it follows an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER tag, it provides the checksum for that member. ANC_SUNW_MEMBER Specifies an object name. The a_ptr element contains the string table offset of a null-terminated string, that provides the file name. An ancillary section must always contain an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM before the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, identifying the current object. Following that, there should be an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER for each object that makes up the complete set of objects. Each ANC_SUNW_MEMBER should be followed by an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM for that object. A typical ancillary section will therefore be structured as: TagMeaning ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum of this object ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object #1 ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object #1 . . . ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object N ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object N ANC_SUNW_NULL An object can therefore identify itself by comparing the initial ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM to each of the ones that follow, until it finds a match. Related Other Work The GNU developers have also encountered the need/desire to support separate debug information files, and use the solution detailed at http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html. At the current time, the separate debug file is constructed by building the standard object first, and then copying the debug data out of it in a separate post processing step, Hence, it is limited to a total of 4GB of code and debug data, just as a single object file would be. They are aware of this, and I have seen online comments indicating that they may add direct support for generating these separate files to their link-editor. It is worth noting that the GNU objcopy utility is available on Solaris, and that the Studio dbx debugger is able to use these GNU style separate debug files even on Solaris. Although this is interesting in terms giving Linux users a familiar environment on Solaris, the 4GB limit means it is not an answer to the problem of very large 32-bit objects. We have also encountered issues with objcopy not understanding Solaris-specific ELF sections, when using this approach. The GNU community also has a current effort to adapt their DWARF debug sections in order to move them to separate files before passing the relocatable objects to the linker. The details of Project Fission can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission. The goal of this project appears to be to reduce the amount of data seen by the link-editor. The primary effort revolves around moving DWARF data to separate .dwo files so that the link-editor never encounters them. The details of modifying the DWARF data to be usable in this form are involved — please see the above URL for details.

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• An Honest look at SharePoint Web Services

  - by juanlarios

  INTRODUCTION If you are a SharePoint developer you know that there are two basic ways to develop against SharePoint. 1) The object Model 2) Web services. SharePoint object model has the advantage of being quite rich. Anything you can do through the SharePoint UI as an administrator or end user, you can do through the object model. In fact everything that is done through the UI is done through the object model behind the scenes. The major disadvantage to getting at SharePoint this way is that the code needs to run on the server. This means that all web parts, event receivers, features, etc… all of this is code that is deployed to the server. The second way to get to SharePoint is through the built in web services. There are many articles on how to manipulate web services, how to authenticate to them and interact with them. The basic idea is that a remote application or process can contact SharePoint through a web service. Lots has been written about how great these web services are. This article is written to document the limitations, some of the issues and frustrations with working with SharePoint built in web services. Ultimately, for the tasks I was given to , SharePoint built in web services did not suffice. My evaluation of SharePoint built in services was compared against creating my own WCF Services to do what I needed. The current project I'm working on right now involved several "integration points". A remote application, installed on a separate server was to contact SharePoint and perform an task or operation. So I decided to start up Visual Studio and built a DLL and basically have 2 layers of logic. An integration layer and a data layer. A good friend of mine pointed me to SOLID principles and referred me to some videos and tutorials about it. I decided to implement the methodology (although a lot of the principles are common sense and I already incorporated in my coding practices). I was to deliver this dll to the application team and they would simply call the methods exposed by this dll and voila! it would do some task or operation in SharePoint. SOLUTION My integration layer implemented an interface that defined some of the basic integration tasks that I was to put together. My data layer was about the same, it implemented an interface with some of the tasks that I was going to develop. This gave me the opportunity to develop different data layers, ultimately different ways to get at SharePoint if I needed to. This is a classic SOLID principle. In this case it proved to be quite helpful because I wrote one data layer completely implementing SharePoint built in Web Services and another implementing my own WCF Service that I wrote. I should mention there is another layer underneath the data layer. In referencing SharePoint or WCF services in my visual studio project I created a class for every web service call. So for example, if I used List.asx. I created a class called "DocumentRetreival" this class would do the grunt work to connect to the correct URL, It would perform the basic operation of contacting the service and so on. If I used a view.asmx, I implemented a class called "ViewRetrieval" with the same idea as the last class but it would now interact with all he operations in view.asmx. This gave my data layer the ability to perform multiple calls without really worrying about some of the grunt work each class performs. This again, is a classic SOLID principle. So, in order to compare them side by side we can look at both data layers and with is involved in each. Lets take a look at the "Create Project" task or operation. The integration point is described as , "dll is to provide a way to create a project in SharePoint". Projects , in this case are basically document libraries. I am to implement a way in which a remote application can create a document library in SharePoint. Easy enough right? Use the list.asmx Web service in SharePoint. So here we go! Lets take a look at the code. I added the List.asmx web service reference to my project and this is the class that contacts it:  class DocumentRetrieval     {         private ListsSoapClient _service;      d   private bool _impersonation;         public DocumentRetrieval(bool impersonation, string endpt)         {             _service = new ListsSoapClient();             this.SetEndPoint(string.Format("{0}/{1}", endpt, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["List"]));             _impersonation = impersonation;             if (_impersonation)             {                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["password"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["username"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel =                     System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;             }     private void SetEndPoint(string p)          {             _service.Endpoint.Address = new EndpointAddress(p);          }          /// <summary>         /// Creates a document library with specific name and templateID         /// </summary>         /// <param name="listName">New list name</param>         /// <param name="templateID">Template ID</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public XmlElement CreateLibrary(string listName, int templateID, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             XmlDocument sample = new XmlDocument();             XmlElement viewCol = sample.CreateElement("Empty");             try             {                 _service.Open();                 viewCol = _service.AddList(listName, "", templateID);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/CreateLibrary", ex.GetType(), "Connection Error", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);                             }finally             {                 _service.Close();             }                                      return viewCol;         } } There was a lot more in this class (that I am not including) because i was reusing the grunt work and making other operations with LIst.asmx, For example, updating content types, changing or configuring lists or document libraries. One of the first things I noticed about working with the built in services is that you are really at the mercy of what is available to you. Before creating a document library (Project) I wanted to expose a IsProjectExisting method. This way the integration or data layer could recognize if a library already exists. Well there is no service call or method available to do that check. So this is what I wrote:   public bool DocLibExists(string listName, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             try             {                 var allLists = _service.GetListCollection();                                return allLists.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>().ToList().Exists(x => x.Attributes["Title"].Value ==listName);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/GetList/GetListWSCall", ex.GetType(), "Unable to Retrieve List Collection", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);             }             return false;         } This really just gets an XMLElement with all the lists. It was then up to me to sift through the clutter and noise and see if Document library already existed. This took a little bit of getting used to. Now instead of working with code, you are working with XMLElement response format from web service. I wrote a LINQ query to go through and find if the attribute "Title" existed and had a value of the listname then it would return True, if not False. I didn't particularly like working this way. Dealing with XMLElement responses and then having to manipulate it to get at the exact data I was looking for. Once the check for the DocLibExists, was done, I would either create the document library or send back an error indicating the document library already existed. Now lets examine the code that actually creates the document library. It does what you are really after, it creates a document library. Notice how the template ID is really an integer. Every document library template in SharePoint has an ID associated with it. Document libraries, Image Library, Custom List, Project Tasks, etc… they all he a unique integer associated with it. Well, that's great but the client came back to me and gave me some specifics that each "project" or document library, should have. They specified they had 3 types of projects. Each project would have unique views, about 10 views for each project. Each Project specified unique configurations (auditing, versioning, content types, etc…) So what turned out to be a simple implementation of creating a document library as a repository for a project, turned out to be quite involved.  The first thing I thought of was to create a template for document library. There are other ways you can do this too. Using the web Service call, you could configure views, versioning, even content types, etc… the only catch is, you have to be working quite extensively with CAML. I am not fond of CAML. I can do it and work with it, I just don't like doing it. It is quite touchy and at times it is quite tough to understand where errors were made with CAML statements. Working with Web Services and CAML proved to be quite annoying. The service call would return a generic error message that did not particularly point me to a CAML statement syntax error, or even a CAML error. I was not sure if it was a security , performance or code based issue. It was quite tough to work with. At times it was difficult to work with because of the way SharePoint handles metadata. There are "Names", "Display Name", and "StaticName" fields. It was quite tough to understand at times, which one to use. So it took a lot of trial and error. There are tools that can help with CAML generation. There is also now intellisense for CAML statements in Visual Studio that might help but ultimately I'm not fond of CAML with Web Services.   So I decided on the template. So my plan was to create create a document library, configure it accordingly and then use The Template Builder that comes with the SharePoint SDK. This tool allows you to create site templates, list template etc… It is quite interesting because it does not generate an STP file, it actually generates an xml definition and a feature you can activate and make that template available on a site or site collection. The first issue I experienced with this is that one of the specifications to this template was that the "All Documents" view was to have 2 web parts on it. Well, it turns out that using the template builder , it did not include the web parts as part of the list template definition it generated. It backed up the settings, the views, the content types but not the custom web parts. I still decided to try this even without the web parts on the page. This new template defined a new Document library definition with a unique ID. The problem was that the service call accepts an int but it only has access to the built in library int definitions. Any new ones added or created will not be available to create. So this made it impossible for me to approach the problem this way.     I should also mention that one of the nice features about SharePoint is the ability to create list templates, back them up and then create lists based on that template. It can all be done by end user administrators. These templates are quite unique because they are saved as an STP file and not an xml definition. I also went this route and tried to see if there was another service call where I could create a document library based no given template name. Nope! none.      After some thinking I decide to implement a WCF service to do this creation for me. I was quite certain that the object model would allow me to create document libraries base on a template in which an ID was required and also templates saved as STP files. Now I don't want to bother with posting the code to contact WCF service because it's self explanatory, but I will post the code that I used to create a list with custom template. public ServiceResult CreateProject(string name, string templateName, string projectId)         {             string siteurl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url;             Guid webguid = SPContext.Current.Web.ID;                        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteurl))             {                 using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb)                 {                     SPListTemplateCollection temps = site.GetCustomListTemplates(rootweb);                     ProcessWeb(siteurl, webguid, web => Act_CreateProject(web, name, templateName, projectId, temps));                 }//SpWeb             }//SPSite              return _globalResult;                   }         private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                             try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                                       }        private void ProcessWeb(string siteurl, Guid webguid, Action<SPWeb> action) {                        using (SPSite sitecollection = new SPSite(siteurl)) {                 using (SPWeb web = sitecollection.AllWebs[webguid]) {                     action(web);                 }                     }                  } This code is actually some of the code I implemented for the service. there was a lot more I did on Project Creation which I will cover in my next blog post. I implemented an ACTION method to process the web. This allowed me to properly dispose the SPWEb and SPSite objects and not rewrite this code over and over again. So I implemented a WCF service to create projects for me, this allowed me to do a lot more than just create a document library with a template, it now gave me the flexibility to do just about anything the client wanted at project creation. Once this was implemented , the client came back to me and said, "we reference all our projects with ID's in our application. we want SharePoint to do the same". This has been something I have been doing for a little while now but I do hope that SharePoint 2010 can have more of an answer to this and address it properly. I have been adding metadata to SPWebs through property bag. I believe I have blogged about it before. This time it required metadata added to a document library. No problem!!! I also mentioned these web parts that were to go on the "All Documents" View. I took the opportunity to configure them to the appropriate settings. There were two settings that needed to be set on these web parts. One of them was a Project ID configured in the webpart properties. The following code enhances and replaces the "Act_CreateProject " method above:  private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                 SPLimitedWebPartManager wpmgr = null;                               try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     SPFolder rootFolder = newList.RootFolder;                     rootFolder.Properties.Add(KEY, projectId);                     rootFolder.Update();                     if (rootFolder.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         rootFolder.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     if (!templateName.Contains("Natural"))                     {                         SPView alldocumentsview = newList.Views.Cast<SPView>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Title.Equals(ALLDOCUMENTS));                         SPFile alldocfile = targetsite.GetFile(alldocumentsview.ServerRelativeUrl);                         wpmgr = alldocfile.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared);                         ConfigureWebPart(wpmgr, projectId, CUSTOMWPNAME);                                              alldocfile.Update();                     }                                        if (newList.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         newList.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                 finally                 {                     if (wpmgr != null)                     {                         wpmgr.Web.Dispose();                         wpmgr.Dispose();                     }                 }             }                         }       private void ConfigureWebPart(SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr, string prjId, string webpartname)         {             var wp = mgr.WebParts.Cast<System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.DisplayTitle.Equals(webpartname));             if (wp != null)             {                           (wp as ListRelationshipWebPart.ListRelationshipWebPart).ProjectID = prjId;                 mgr.SaveChanges(wp);             }         }   This Shows you how I was able to set metadata on the document library. It has to be added to the RootFolder of the document library, Unfortunately, the SPList does not have a Property bag that I can add a key\value pair to. It has to be done on the root folder. Now everything in the integration will reference projects by ID's and will not care about names. My, "DocLibExists" will now need to be changed because a web service is not set up to look at property bags.  I had to write another method on the Service to do the equivalent but with ID's instead of names.  The second thing you will notice about the code is the use of the Webpartmanager. I have seen several examples online, and also read a lot about memory leaks, The above code does not produce memory leaks. The web part manager creates an SPWeb, so just dispose it like I did. CONCLUSION This is a long long post so I will stop here for now, I will continue with more comparisons and limitations in my next post. My conclusion for this example is that Web Services will do the trick if you can suffer through CAML and if you are doing some simple operations. For Everything else, there's WCF! **** fireI apologize for the disorganization of this post, I was on a bus on a 12 hour trip to IOWA while I wrote it, I was half asleep and half awake, hopefully it makes enough sense to someone.

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• Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

  - by Shaun

  Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   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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• Security Issues with Single Page Apps

  - by Stephen.Walther

  Last week, I was asked to do a code review of a Single Page App built using the ASP.NET Web API, Durandal, and Knockout (good stuff!). In particular, I was asked to investigate whether there any special security issues associated with building a Single Page App which are not present in the case of a traditional server-side ASP.NET application. In this blog entry, I discuss two areas in which you need to exercise extra caution when building a Single Page App. I discuss how Single Page Apps are extra vulnerable to both Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. This goal of this blog post is NOT to persuade you to avoid writing Single Page Apps. I’m a big fan of Single Page Apps. Instead, the goal is to ensure that you are fully aware of some of the security issues related to Single Page Apps and ensure that you know how to guard against them. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks According to WhiteHat Security, over 65% of public websites are open to XSS attacks. That’s bad. By taking advantage of XSS holes in a website, a hacker can steal your credit cards, passwords, or bank account information. Any website that redisplays untrusted information is open to XSS attacks. Let me give you a simple example. Imagine that you want to display the name of the current user on a page. To do this, you create the following server-side ASP.NET page located at http://MajorBank.com/SomePage.aspx: <%@Page Language="C#" %> <html> <head> <title>Some Page</title> </head> <body> Welcome <%= Request["username"] %> </body> </html> Nothing fancy here. Notice that the page displays the current username by using Request[“username”]. Using Request[“username”] displays the username regardless of whether the username is present in a cookie, a form field, or a query string variable. Unfortunately, by using Request[“username”] to redisplay untrusted information, you have now opened your website to XSS attacks. Here’s how. Imagine that an evil hacker creates the following link on another website (hackers.com): <a href="/SomePage.aspx?username=<script src=Evil.js></script>">Visit MajorBank</a> Notice that the link includes a query string variable named username and the value of the username variable is an HTML <SCRIPT> tag which points to a JavaScript file named Evil.js. When anyone clicks on the link, the <SCRIPT> tag will be injected into SomePage.aspx and the Evil.js script will be loaded and executed. What can a hacker do in the Evil.js script? Anything the hacker wants. For example, the hacker could display a popup dialog on the MajorBank.com site which asks the user to enter their password. The script could then post the password back to hackers.com and now the evil hacker has your secret password. ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC have two automatic safeguards against this type of attack: Request Validation and Automatic HTML Encoding. Protecting Coming In (Request Validation) In a server-side ASP.NET app, you are protected against the XSS attack described above by a feature named Request Validation. If you attempt to submit “potentially dangerous” content — such as a JavaScript <SCRIPT> tag — in a form field or query string variable then you get an exception. Unfortunately, Request Validation only applies to server-side apps. Request Validation does not help in the case of a Single Page App. In particular, the ASP.NET Web API does not pay attention to Request Validation. You can post any content you want – including <SCRIPT> tags – to an ASP.NET Web API action. For example, the following HTML page contains a form. When you submit the form, the form data is submitted to an ASP.NET Web API controller on the server using an Ajax request: <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> <form data-bind="submit:submit"> <div> <label> User Name: <input data-bind="value:user.userName" /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Email: <input data-bind="value:user.email" /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> </div> </form> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.js"></script> <script src="Scripts/knockout-2.1.0.js"></script> <script> var viewModel = { user: { userName: ko.observable(), email: ko.observable() }, submit: function () { $.post("/api/users", ko.toJS(this.user)); } }; ko.applyBindings(viewModel); </script> </body> </html> The form above is using Knockout to bind the form fields to a view model. When you submit the form, the view model is submitted to an ASP.NET Web API action on the server. Here’s the server-side ASP.NET Web API controller and model class: public class UsersController : ApiController { public HttpResponseMessage Post(UserViewModel user) { var userName = user.UserName; return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK); } } public class UserViewModel { public string UserName { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } } If you submit the HTML form, you don’t get an error. The “potentially dangerous” content is passed to the server without any exception being thrown. In the screenshot below, you can see that I was able to post a username form field with the value “<script>alert(‘boo’)</script”. So what this means is that you do not get automatic Request Validation in the case of a Single Page App. You need to be extra careful in a Single Page App about ensuring that you do not display untrusted content because you don’t have the Request Validation safety net which you have in a traditional server-side ASP.NET app. Protecting Going Out (Automatic HTML Encoding) Server-side ASP.NET also protects you from XSS attacks when you render content. By default, all content rendered by the razor view engine is HTML encoded. For example, the following razor view displays the text “<b>Hello!</b>” instead of the text “Hello!” in bold: @{ var message = "<b>Hello!</b>"; } @message   If you don’t want to render content as HTML encoded in razor then you need to take the extra step of using the @Html.Raw() helper. In a Web Form page, if you use <%: %> instead of <%= %> then you get automatic HTML Encoding: <%@ Page Language="C#" %> <% var message = "<b>Hello!</b>"; %> <%: message %> This automatic HTML Encoding will prevent many types of XSS attacks. It prevents <script> tags from being rendered and only allows &lt;script&gt; tags to be rendered which are useless for executing JavaScript. (This automatic HTML encoding does not protect you from all forms of XSS attacks. For example, you can assign the value “javascript:alert(‘evil’)” to the Hyperlink control’s NavigateUrl property and execute the JavaScript). The situation with Knockout is more complicated. If you use the Knockout TEXT binding then you get HTML encoded content. On the other hand, if you use the HTML binding then you do not: <!-- This JavaScript DOES NOT execute --> <div data-bind="text:someProp"></div> <!-- This Javacript DOES execute --> <div data-bind="html:someProp"></div> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.js"></script> <script src="Scripts/knockout-2.1.0.js"></script> <script> var viewModel = { someProp : "<script>alert('Evil!')<" + "/script>" }; ko.applyBindings(viewModel); </script>   So, in the page above, the DIV element which uses the TEXT binding is safe from XSS attacks. According to the Knockout documentation: “Since this binding sets your text value using a text node, it’s safe to set any string value without risking HTML or script injection.” Just like server-side HTML encoding, Knockout does not protect you from all types of XSS attacks. For example, there is nothing in Knockout which prevents you from binding JavaScript to a hyperlink like this: <a data-bind="attr:{href:homePageUrl}">Go</a> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script> <script src="Scripts/knockout-2.1.0.js"></script> <script> var viewModel = { homePageUrl: "javascript:alert('evil!')" }; ko.applyBindings(viewModel); </script> In the page above, the value “javascript:alert(‘evil’)” is bound to the HREF attribute using Knockout. When you click the link, the JavaScript executes. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Attacks Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks rely on the fact that a session cookie does not expire until you close your browser. In particular, if you visit and login to MajorBank.com and then you navigate to Hackers.com then you will still be authenticated against MajorBank.com even after you navigate to Hackers.com. Because MajorBank.com cannot tell whether a request is coming from MajorBank.com or Hackers.com, Hackers.com can submit requests to MajorBank.com pretending to be you. For example, Hackers.com can post an HTML form from Hackers.com to MajorBank.com and change your email address at MajorBank.com. Hackers.com can post a form to MajorBank.com using your authentication cookie. After your email address has been changed, by using a password reset page at MajorBank.com, a hacker can access your bank account. To prevent CSRF attacks, you need some mechanism for detecting whether a request is coming from a page loaded from your website or whether the request is coming from some other website. The recommended way of preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks is to use the “Synchronizer Token Pattern” as described here: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_%28CSRF%29_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet When using the Synchronizer Token Pattern, you include a hidden input field which contains a random token whenever you display an HTML form. When the user opens the form, you add a cookie to the user’s browser with the same random token. When the user posts the form, you verify that the hidden form token and the cookie token match. Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks with ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET gives you a helper and an action filter which you can use to thwart Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. For example, the following razor form for creating a product shows how you use the @Html.AntiForgeryToken() helper: @model MvcApplication2.Models.Product <h2>Create Product</h2> @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.AntiForgeryToken(); <div> @Html.LabelFor( p => p.Name, "Product Name:") @Html.TextBoxFor( p => p.Name) </div> <div> @Html.LabelFor( p => p.Price, "Product Price:") @Html.TextBoxFor( p => p.Price) </div> <input type="submit" /> } The @Html.AntiForgeryToken() helper generates a random token and assigns a serialized version of the same random token to both a cookie and a hidden form field. (Actually, if you dive into the source code, the AntiForgeryToken() does something a little more complex because it takes advantage of a user’s identity when generating the token). Here’s what the hidden form field looks like: <input name=”__RequestVerificationToken” type=”hidden” value=”NqqZGAmlDHh6fPTNR_mti3nYGUDgpIkCiJHnEEL59S7FNToyyeSo7v4AfzF2i67Cv0qTB1TgmZcqiVtgdkW2NnXgEcBc-iBts0x6WAIShtM1″ /> And here’s what the cookie looks like using the Google Chrome developer toolbar: You use the [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] action filter on the controller action which is the recipient of the form post to validate that the token in the hidden form field matches the token in the cookie. If the tokens don’t match then validation fails and you can’t post the form: public ActionResult Create() { return View(); } [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(Product productToCreate) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { // save product to db return RedirectToAction("Index"); } return View(); } How does this all work? Let’s imagine that a hacker has copied the Create Product page from MajorBank.com to Hackers.com – the hacker grabs the HTML source and places it at Hackers.com. Now, imagine that the hacker trick you into submitting the Create Product form from Hackers.com to MajorBank.com. You’ll get the following exception: The Cross-Site Request Forgery attack is blocked because the anti-forgery token included in the Create Product form at Hackers.com won’t match the anti-forgery token stored in the cookie in your browser. The tokens were generated at different times for different users so the attack fails. Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks with a Single Page App In a Single Page App, you can’t prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks using the same method as a server-side ASP.NET MVC app. In a Single Page App, HTML forms are not generated on the server. Instead, in a Single Page App, forms are loaded dynamically in the browser. Phil Haack has a blog post on this topic where he discusses passing the anti-forgery token in an Ajax header instead of a hidden form field. He also describes how you can create a custom anti-forgery token attribute to compare the token in the Ajax header and the token in the cookie. See: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/10/10/preventing-csrf-with-ajax.aspx Also, take a look at Johan’s update to Phil Haack’s original post: http://johan.driessen.se/posts/Updated-Anti-XSRF-Validation-for-ASP.NET-MVC-4-RC (Other server frameworks such as Rails and Django do something similar. For example, Rails uses an X-CSRF-Token to prevent CSRF attacks which you generate on the server – see http://excid3.com/blog/rails-tip-2-include-csrf-token-with-every-ajax-request/#.UTFtgDDkvL8 ). For example, if you are creating a Durandal app, then you can use the following razor view for your one and only server-side page: @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Index</title> </head> <body> @Html.AntiForgeryToken() <div id="applicationHost"> Loading app.... </div> @Scripts.Render("~/scripts/vendor") <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> </body> </html> Notice that this page includes a call to @Html.AntiForgeryToken() to generate the anti-forgery token. Then, whenever you make an Ajax request in the Durandal app, you can retrieve the anti-forgery token from the razor view and pass the token as a header: var csrfToken = $("input[name='__RequestVerificationToken']").val(); $.ajax({ headers: { __RequestVerificationToken: csrfToken }, type: "POST", dataType: "json", contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8', url: "/api/products", data: JSON.stringify({ name: "Milk", price: 2.33 }), statusCode: { 200: function () { alert("Success!"); } } }); Use the following code to create an action filter which you can use to match the header and cookie tokens: using System.Linq; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Helpers; using System.Web.Http.Controllers; namespace MvcApplication2.Infrastructure { public class ValidateAjaxAntiForgeryToken : System.Web.Http.AuthorizeAttribute { protected override bool IsAuthorized(HttpActionContext actionContext) { var headerToken = actionContext .Request .Headers .GetValues("__RequestVerificationToken") .FirstOrDefault(); ; var cookieToken = actionContext .Request .Headers .GetCookies() .Select(c => c[AntiForgeryConfig.CookieName]) .FirstOrDefault(); // check for missing cookie or header if (cookieToken == null || headerToken == null) { return false; } // ensure that the cookie matches the header try { AntiForgery.Validate(cookieToken.Value, headerToken); } catch { return false; } return base.IsAuthorized(actionContext); } } } Notice that the action filter derives from the base AuthorizeAttribute. The ValidateAjaxAntiForgeryToken only works when the user is authenticated and it will not work for anonymous requests. Add the action filter to your ASP.NET Web API controller actions like this: [ValidateAjaxAntiForgeryToken] public HttpResponseMessage PostProduct(Product productToCreate) { // add product to db return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK); } After you complete these steps, it won’t be possible for a hacker to pretend to be you at Hackers.com and submit a form to MajorBank.com. The header token used in the Ajax request won’t travel to Hackers.com. This approach works, but I am not entirely happy with it. The one thing that I don’t like about this approach is that it creates a hard dependency on using razor. Your single page in your Single Page App must be generated from a server-side razor view. A better solution would be to generate the anti-forgery token in JavaScript. Unfortunately, until all browsers support a way to generate cryptographically strong random numbers – for example, by supporting the window.crypto.getRandomValues() method — there is no good way to generate anti-forgery tokens in JavaScript. So, at least right now, the best solution for generating the tokens is the server-side solution with the (regrettable) dependency on razor. Conclusion The goal of this blog entry was to explore some ways in which you need to handle security differently in the case of a Single Page App than in the case of a traditional server app. In particular, I focused on how to prevent Cross-Site Scripting and Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks in the case of a Single Page App. I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that Single Page Apps are inherently less secure than server-side apps. Whatever type of web application you build – regardless of whether it is a Single Page App, an ASP.NET MVC app, an ASP.NET Web Forms app, or a Rails app – you must constantly guard against security vulnerabilities.

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