Search Results

Search found 6791 results on 272 pages for 'touch typing'.

Page 260/272 | < Previous Page | 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267  | Next Page >

• How to Manage Your Movies in Boxee

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Boxee is a free cross platform HTPC application that plays media locally and via the Internet. Today we’ll take a look at how to manage your local movie collection in Boxee. Note: We are using the most recent version of Boxee running on Windows 7. Your experience on an earlier version or a Mac or Linux build may vary slightly. If you are using an earlier version of Boxee, we recommend you update to the current version (0.9.21.11487). The latest update features significant improvements in file and media identification. Naming your Movie Files Proper file naming is important for Boxee to correctly identify your movie files. Before you get started you may want to take some time to name your files properly. Boxee supports the following naming conventions: Lawrence of Arabia.avi Lawrence.of.Arabia.avi Lawrence of Arabia (1962).avi Lawrence.of.Arabia(1962).avi For multi-part movies, you can use .part or .cd to identify first and second parts of the movie. Gettysburg.part1.avi Gettysburg.part2.avi If you are unsure of the correct title of the movie, check with IMDB.com. Supported File Types Boxee supports the following video file types and codecs: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support) CDs, DVDs, VCD/SVCD MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak Adding Movie Files to Boxee Boxee will automatically scan your default media folders and add any movie files to My Movies. Boxee will attempt to identify the media and check sources on the web to get data like cover art and other metadata. You can add as many sources to Boxee as you like from your local hard drive, external hard drives or from your network. You will need to make sure you have access to shared folders on the networked computer hosting the media you want to share. You can browse for other folders to scan by selecting Scan Media Folders.   You can also add media files by selecting Settings from the Home screen… Then select Media… and then selecting Add Sources. Browse for your directory and select Add source. Next, you’ll need to select the media type and the type of scanning. You can also change the share name if you’d like. When finished, select Add. You should see a quick notification at the top of the screen that the source was added.   Select Scan source to have Boxee to begin scanning your media files and attempt to properly identify them. Your movies may not show up instantly in My Movies. It will take Boxee some time to fully scan your sources, especially if you have a large collection. Eventually you should see My Movies begin to populate with cover art and metadata.   You can see the progress and find unidentified files by clicking on the yellow arrow to the left, or navigating to the left with your keyboard or remote and selecting Manage Sources.   Here you can see how many files (if any) Boxee failed to identify. To see which titles are unresolved, select Unidentified Files.   Here you’ll find your unresolved files. Select one of the unidentified files to search for the proper movie information. Next, select the Indentify Video icon. Boxee will fill in the title of the file or you edit the title yourself in the text box. Click Search. The results of your search will be displayed. Scroll through and select the title that fits your movie. Check the details of the film to make sure you have the correct title and select Done.   Fixing Incorrectly Indentified Files If you find a movie has been incorrectly identified you can correct it manually. Select the movie. Then search for the correct movie title from the list and select it. When you’re sure you found the correct movie, click Done. Filtering your Movies You can filter your movie collection by genre, or by whether it has been marked as watched or unwatched. When you’ve finished watching a movie, Boxee will mark it as watched.   You can also manually mark a title as watched.   Boxee also features a wide variety of genres by which you can filter the titles in your library. Playing your Movie When you’re ready to start watching a movie, simply select your title.   From here, you can select the “i” icon to read more information about the movie, add it to your queue, or add a shortcut. Click Local File to begin playing.   Now you’re ready to enjoy your movie. If you don’t have a large movie collection or just need more selection, you may want to check out the Netflix App for Boxee. Looking for a Boxee remote? Check out the iPhone App for Boxee. Links Download Boxee IMDB.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Watch Netflix Instant Movies in BoxeeIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Customize the Background in BoxeeUse your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee RemoteGetting Started with Boxee TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free

  Read the article

• Change or Reset Windows Password from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you can’t log in even after trying your twelve passwords, or you’ve inherited a computer complete with password-protected profiles, worry not – you don’t have to do a fresh install of Windows. We’ll show you how to change or reset your Windows password from a Ubuntu Live CD. This method works for all of the NT-based version of Windows – anything from Windows 2000 and later, basically. And yes, that includes Windows 7. You’ll need a Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD, or a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive. If you don’t have one, or have forgotten how to boot from the flash drive, check out our article on creating a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 flash drive. The program that lets us manipulate Windows passwords is called chntpw. The steps to install it are different in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. Installation: 32-bit Open up Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System at the top of the screen, expanding the Administration section, and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager. chntpw is found in the universe repository. Repositories are a way for Ubuntu to group software together so that users are able to choose if they want to use only completely open source software maintained by Ubuntu developers, or branch out and use software with different licenses and maintainers. To enable software from the universe repository, click on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic window. Add a checkmark beside the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)” and then click close. When you change the repositories you are selecting software from, you have to reload the list of available software. In the main Synaptic window, click on the Reload button. The software lists will be downloaded. Once downloaded, Synaptic must rebuild its search index. The label over the text field by the Search button will read “Rebuilding search index.” When it reads “Quick search,” type chntpw in the text field. The package will show up in the list. Click on the checkbox near the chntpw name. Click on Mark for Installation. chntpw won’t actually be installed until you apply the changes you’ve made, so click on the Apply button in the Synaptic window now. You will be prompted to accept the changes. Click Apply. The changes should be applied quickly. When they’re done, click Close. chntpw is now installed! You can close Synaptic Package Manager. Skip to the section titled Using chntpw to reset your password. Installation: 64-bit The version of chntpw available in Ubuntu’s universe repository will not work properly on a 64-bit machine. Fortunately, a patched version exists in Debian’s Unstable branch, so let’s download it from there and install it manually. Open Firefox. Whether it’s your preferred browser or not, it’s very readily accessible in the Ubuntu Live CD environment, so it will be the easiest to use. There’s a shortcut to Firefox in the top panel. Navigate to http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/chntpw/download and download the latest version of chntpw for 64-bit machines. Note: In most cases it would be best to add the Debian Unstable branch to a package manager, but since the Live CD environment will revert to its original state once you reboot, it’ll be faster to just download the .deb file. Save the .deb file to the default location. You can close Firefox if desired. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, expanding the Accessories folder, and clicking on Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the following text, hitting enter after each line: cd Downloadssudo dpkg –i chntpw* chntpw will now be installed. Using chntpw to reset your password Before running chntpw, you will have to mount the hard drive that contains your Windows installation. In most cases, Ubuntu 9.10 makes this simple. Click on Places at the top-left of the screen. If your Windows drive is easily identifiable – usually by its size – then left click on it. If it is not obvious, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the correct one. The correct hard drive will have the WINDOWS folder in it. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label that appears in the menu bar of the file browser. If you don’t already have one open, start a terminal window by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the commands cd /medials pressing enter after each line. You should see one or more strings of text appear; one of those strings should correspond with the string that appeared in the title bar of the file browser earlier. Change to that directory by entering the command cd <hard drive label> Since the hard drive label will be very annoying to type in, you can use a shortcut by typing in the first few letters or numbers of the drive label (capitalization matters) and pressing the Tab key. It will automatically complete the rest of the string (if those first few letters or numbers are unique). We want to switch to a certain Windows directory. Enter the command: cd WINDOWS/system32/config/ Again, you can use tab-completion to speed up entering this command. To change or reset the administrator password, enter: sudo chntpw SAM SAM is the file that contains your Windows registry. You will see some text appear, including a list of all of the users on your system. At the bottom of the terminal window, you should see a prompt that begins with “User Edit Menu:” and offers four choices. We recommend that you clear the password to blank (you can always set a new password in Windows once you log in). To do this, enter “1” and then “y” to confirm. If you would like to change the password instead, enter “2”, then your desired password, and finally “y” to confirm. If you would like to reset or change the password of a user other than the administrator, enter: sudo chntpw –u <username> SAM From here, you can follow the same steps as before: enter “1” to reset the password to blank, or “2” to change it to a value you provide. And that’s it! Conclusion chntpw is a very useful utility provided for free by the open source community. It may make you think twice about how secure the Windows login system is, but knowing how to use chntpw can save your tail if your memory fails you two or eight times! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDChange Your Forgotten Windows Password with the Linux System Rescue CDHow to Create and Use a Password Reset Disk in Windows Vista & Windows 7Reset Your Forgotten Password the Easy Way Using the Ultimate Boot CD for WindowsHow to install Spotify in Ubuntu 9.10 using Wine TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic NoSquint Remembers Site Specific Zoom Levels (Firefox) New Firefox release 3.6.3 fixes 1 Critical bug Dark Side of the Moon (8-bit)

  Read the article

• ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF

  - by oazabir

  ParallelWork is an open source free helper class that lets you run multiple work in parallel threads, get success, failure and progress update on the WPF UI thread, wait for work to complete, abort all work (in case of shutdown), queue work to run after certain time, chain parallel work one after another. It’s more convenient than using .NET’s BackgroundWorker because you don’t have to declare one component per work, nor do you need to declare event handlers to receive notification and carry additional data through private variables. You can safely pass objects produced from different thread to the success callback. Moreover, you can wait for work to complete before you do certain operation and you can abort all parallel work while they are in-flight. If you are building highly responsive WPF UI where you have to carry out multiple job in parallel yet want full control over those parallel jobs completion and cancellation, then the ParallelWork library is the right solution for you. I am using the ParallelWork library in my PlantUmlEditor project, which is a free open source UML editor built on WPF. You can see some realistic use of the ParallelWork library there. Moreover, the test project comes with 400 lines of Behavior Driven Development flavored tests, that confirms it really does what it says it does. The source code of the library is part of the “Utilities” project in PlantUmlEditor source code hosted at Google Code. The library comes in two flavors, one is the ParallelWork static class, which has a collection of static methods that you can call. Another is the Start class, which is a fluent wrapper over the ParallelWork class to make it more readable and aesthetically pleasing code. ParallelWork allows you to start work immediately on separate thread or you can queue a work to start after some duration. You can start an immediate work in a new thread using the following methods: void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete) void StartNow(Action doWork, Action onComplete, Action<Exception> failed) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workEndedAt = DateTime.Now; }); Or you can use the fluent way Start.Work: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .Run(); Besides simple execution of work on a parallel thread, you can have the parallel thread produce some object and then pass it to the success callback by using these overloads: void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete) void StartNow<T>(Func<T> doWork, Action<T> onComplete, Action<Exception> fail) For example, ParallelWork.StartNow<Dictionary<string, string>>( () => { test = new Dictionary<string,string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }, (result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }); Or, the fluent way: Start<Dictionary<string, string>>.Work(() => { test = new Dictionary<string, string>(); test.Add("test", "test"); return test; }) .OnComplete((result) => { Assert.True(result.ContainsKey("test")); }) .Run(); You can also start a work to happen after some time using these methods: DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action onComplete, TimeSpan duration) DispatcherTimer StartAfter(Action doWork,Action onComplete,TimeSpan duration) You can use this to perform some timed operation on the UI thread, as well as perform some operation in separate thread after some time. ParallelWork.StartAfter( () => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }, () => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }, waitDuration); Or, the fluent way: Start.Work(() => { workStartedAt = DateTime.Now; Thread.Sleep(howLongWorkTakes); }) .OnComplete(() => { workCompletedAt = DateTime.Now; }) .RunAfter(waitDuration);   There are several overloads of these functions to have a exception callback for handling exceptions or get progress update from background thread while work is in progress. For example, I use it in my PlantUmlEditor to perform background update of the application. // Check if there's a newer version of the app Start<bool>.Work(() => { return UpdateChecker.HasUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl); }) .OnComplete((hasUpdate) => { if (hasUpdate) { if (MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "There's a newer version available. Do you want to download and install?", "New version available", MessageBoxButton.YesNo, MessageBoxImage.Information) == MessageBoxResult.Yes) { ParallelWork.StartNow(() => { var tempPath = System.IO.Path.Combine( Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), Settings.Default.SetupExeName); UpdateChecker.DownloadLatestUpdate(Settings.Default.DownloadUrl, tempPath); }, () => { }, (x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), "Download failed. When you run next time, it will try downloading again.", "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Warning); }); } } }) .OnException((x) => { MessageBox.Show(Window.GetWindow(me), x.Message, "Download failed", MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Exclamation); }); The above code shows you how to get exception callbacks on the UI thread so that you can take necessary actions on the UI. Moreover, it shows how you can chain two parallel works to happen one after another. Sometimes you want to do some parallel work when user does some activity on the UI. For example, you might want to save file in an editor while user is typing every 10 second. In such case, you need to make sure you don’t start another parallel work every 10 seconds while a work is already queued. You need to make sure you start a new work only when there’s no other background work going on. Here’s how you can do it: private void ContentEditor_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!ParallelWork.IsAnyWorkRunning()) { ParallelWork.StartAfter(SaveAndRefreshDiagram, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10)); } } If you want to shutdown your application and want to make sure no parallel work is going on, then you can call the StopAll() method. ParallelWork.StopAll(); If you want to wait for parallel works to complete without a timeout, then you can call the WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan timeout). It will block the current thread until the all parallel work completes or the timeout period elapses. result = ParallelWork.WaitForAllWork(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); The result is true, if all parallel work completed. If it’s false, then the timeout period elapsed and all parallel work did not complete. For details how this library is built and how it works, please read the following codeproject article: ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/parallelwork.aspx If you like the article, please vote for me.

  Read the article

• Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad

  - by Maiko Rocha

  One of my WebCenter Portal customers was asking about adaptive design with ADF/WebCenter Portal and how they could go about creating an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application. They were looking not only for the out-of-the-box support for mobile Safari which is certified against PS5+ (11.1.1.6) for ADF/WebCenter - but also to create a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad. Seems like they wanted something in the lines of Yahoo! Mail provides for the iPad - so the example I will use is shamelessly inspired by Y! Mail's iPad UI.  But first, let's quickly understand how can we bake in some adaptive goodness into ADF Faces. First thing we need to understand is, yes, there are a couple of constraints that we will need to work around, namely, the use or layout managers and skins. Please also keep in mind that I'm not and I don't pretend to be a web designer, much less an UX specialist, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section. Now, back to the limitations. Layout Managers ADF Faces layout managers create an abstraction on top of the generated HTML code for a page so a developer doesn't need to be worried about how to size and dimension the UI layout (eg, af:panelStretchLayout). Although layout managers are very helpful, in this specific situation we will need to know a little bit more of how the final HTML is being rendered so we can apply the CSS class accordingly and create transition containers where the media queries will be applied - now, if you're using 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.3) there's the new component af:panelGridLayout (here and here) that will greatly improve creating responsive templates and pages because it is based on the grid/fluid systems and will generate straight out to DIVs on your final page. For now, I'm limited to PS5 and the af:panelStretchLayout component as a starting point because that's the release my customer is on. Skins You won't be able to use media queries, or use anything with "@" notation on the skin CSS file - the skin pre-processor will remove all extraneous "@" from the CSS file. The solution is to split your CSS in two separate files: a skin CSS file and plain CSS where you will add the media queries. The issue here is that you won't be able to use media queries for any faces components. We can, though, still apply the media queries for the components like af:panelGroupLayout and af:panelBorderLayout through their styleClass property to enable these components to be responsive to to the iPad orientation, by changing its dimensions, font sizes, hide/show areas, etc. Difference between responsive and adaptive design The best definition of adaptive vs responsive web design I could find is this: “Responsive web design,” as coined by Ethan Marcotte, means “fluid grids, fluid images/media & media queries.” “Adaptive web design,” as I use it, is about creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function). To me, “adaptive web design” is just another term for “progressive enhancement” of which responsive web design can (an often should) be an integral part, but is a more holistic approach to web design in that it also takes into account varying levels of markup, CSS, JavaScript and assistive technology support. Responsive/adapative web design is much more than slapping an HTML template with CSS around your content or application. The content and application themselves are part of your web design - in other words, a responsive template is just an afterthought if it is not originating from a responsive design the involves the whole web application/s. Tips on responsive / adapative design with ADF/WebCenter Some of the tips listed below were already mentioned in multiple blog posts about ADF layout and skinning, but it is still worth remembering: a simple guideline for ADF/WebCenter apps would be to first create a high-level group of devices, for example: smartphones, tablets,  and desktop. For each of these large groups, create the basic structure to provide responsiveness: a page template, a skin, and an external CSS: pagetemplate_smartphone.jspx, smartphone_skin.css, smartphone-responsive.css pagetemplate_tablet.jspx, tablet_skin.css, tablet-responsive.css pagetemplate_desktop.jspx, desktop_skin.css, desktop-responsive.css These three assets can be changed on the fly through an user-agent check on the server side, delivering the right UI to the right device. Within each of the assets, you can make fine adjustments for each subgroup of devices with media queries - for example, smart phones with different screen dimensions and pixel density. Having these three groups and the corresponding assets per group seem to be a good compromise between trying to put everything on a single set of assets - specially considering the constraints above - and going to the other side of the spectrum to create assets per discrete device (iPhone4, iPhone5, Nexus, S3, etc.). Keep in mind that these are my rules and are not in any shape or form a best practice - this is how it fits best for the scenarios I've been working with. If you need to use HTML tags on your page, surround them with af:group to protect the DOM structure For stretchable/fluid layouts: Use non-stretching containers: panelGroupLayout, panelBorderLayout, … panelBorderLayout can be used to approximate HTML table component To avoid multiple scroll bars, do not nest scrolling PanelGroupLayout components. Consider layout="vertical" For stretchable/fluid layouts: Most stretchable ADF components also work in flowing context with dimensionsFrom="auto" To stretch a component horizontally, use styleClass="AFStretchWidth" instead of  "width:100%" Skinning Don't use CSS3 @media, @import, animations, etc. on skin css files. They will be removed. CSS3 properties within a class (box-shadow, transition, etc.) work just fine. Consider resetting some skin classes to better control their rendering: body {color: inherit;font: inherit;} af|document {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|commandLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|goLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|inputText::content {font: inherit;} Specific meta tags and CSS properties: Use  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"/> to avoid zooming (if you want) Use -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to enable native momentum scrolling within overflown areas (here) Use text-rendering: optmizeLegibility to improve readability. (here) User text-overflow: ellipsis to gracefully crop overflown text. (here) The meta-tags are included in each and every page in the metaContainer facet of af:document tag. You can also use a javascript to inject the meta-tags from the template. For the purpose of the example, I wanted to use as few workarounds as possible.   The iPad template and sample application This sample application has been built as a WebCenter Portal application, but you will also be able to reuse the template and techniques on your vanilla ADF application. Keep in mind that I'm neither a designer nor a CSS specialist, so please don't bash me too much on the messy CSS file you'll find on the application.  I've extended the provided PreferencesBean class that comes with WebCenter Portal and added code to dinamically change the template and skin on the fly.   This is the sample application in landscape orientation: This is the sample application in portrait orientation - the left side menu hides automatically based on a CSS media query: Another screenshot with a skinned popup opened: This is a sample application for you to play with - ideally you shouldn't use it as a starting point. On the left side bar you will find links rendered from a WebCenter Portal navigation model - the link triggers a full request through an af:goLink, while the light blue PPR button triggers a PPR navigation. The dark blue toolbar buttons at the top don't have any function,while the Approve and Reject buttons show a skinned popup. The search box of course doesn't have any behavior attahed to it either. There's a known issue right now with some PPR calls that are randomly generating a 403 error redirecting to the login page - I didn't have time to investigate if this is iOS6 specific or not - if you have any insights please let me know your findings. You can download the sample here.

  Read the article

• Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Accidentally deleting a file is a terrible feeling. Not being able to boot into Windows and undelete that file makes that even worse. Fortunately, you can recover deleted files on NTFS hard drives from an Ubuntu Live CD. To show this process, we created four files on the desktop of a Windows XP machine, and then deleted them. We then booted up the same machine with the bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive that we created last week. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open a terminal by clicking Applications in the top left of the screen, and then selecting Accessories > Terminal. To undelete our files, we first need to identify the hard drive that we want to undelete from. In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk –l and press enter. What you’re looking for is a line that ends with HPSF/NTFS (under the heading System). In our case, the device is “/dev/sda1”. This may be slightly different for you, but it will still begin with /dev/. Note this device name. If you have more than one hard drive partition formatted as NTFS, then you may be able to identify the correct partition by the size. If you look at the second line of text in the screenshot above, it reads “Disk /dev/sda: 136.4 GB, …” This means that the hard drive that Ubuntu has named /dev/sda is 136.4 GB large. If your hard drives are of different size, then this information can help you track down the right device name to use. Alternatively, you can just try them all, though this can be time consuming for large hard drives. Now that you know the name Ubuntu has assigned to your hard drive, we’ll scan it to see what files we can uncover. In the terminal window, type: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> and hit enter. In our case, the command is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 The names of files that can recovered show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column tells us how much of that file can be recovered. Three of the four files that we originally deleted are showing up in this list, even though we shut down the computer right after deleting the four files – so even in ideal cases, your files may not be recoverable. Nevertheless, we have three files that we can recover – two JPGs and an MPG. Note: ntfsundelete is immediately available in the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. If you are in a different version of Ubuntu, or for some other reason get an error when trying to use ntfsundelete, you can install it by entering “sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs” in a terminal window. To quickly recover the two JPGs, we will use the * wildcard to recover all of the files that end with .jpg. In the terminal window, enter sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –m *.jpg which is, in our case, sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –m *.jpg The two files are recovered from the NTFS hard drive and saved in the current working directory of the terminal. By default, this is the home directory of the current user, though we are working in the Desktop folder. Note that the ntfsundelete program does not make any changes to the original NTFS hard drive. If you want to take those files and put them back in the NTFS hard drive, you will have to move them there after they are undeleted with ntfsundelete. Of course, you can also put them on your flash drive or open Firefox and email them to yourself – the sky’s the limit! We have one more file to undelete – our MPG. Note the first column on the far left. It contains a number, its Inode. Think of this as the file’s unique identifier. Note this number. To undelete a file by its Inode, enter the following in the terminal: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –i <Inode> In our case, this is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –i 14159 This recovers the file, along with an identifier that we don’t really care about. All three of our recoverable files are now recovered. However, Ubuntu lets us know visually that we can’t use these files yet. That’s because the ntfsundelete program saves the files as the “root” user, not the “ubuntu” user. We can verify this by typing the following in our terminal window: ls –l We want these three files to be owned by ubuntu, not root. To do this, enter the following in the terminal window: sudo chown ubuntu <Files> If the current folder has other files in it, you may not want to change their owner to ubuntu. However, in our case, we only have these three files in this folder, so we will use the * wildcard to change the owner of all three files. sudo chown ubuntu * The files now look normal, and we can do whatever we want with them. Hopefully you won’t need to use this tip, but if you do, ntfsundelete is a nice command-line utility. It doesn’t have a fancy GUI like many of the similar Windows programs, but it is a powerful tool that can recover your files quickly. See ntfsundelete’s manual page for more detailed usage information Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDUse Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows ComputerCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayGuide to Using Check Disk in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

  Read the article

• Automating Form Login

  - by Greg_Gutkin

  Introduction A common task in configuring a web application for proxying in Pagelet Producer is setting up form autologin. PP provides a wizard-like tool for detecting the login form fields, but this is usually only the first step in configuring this feature. If the generated configuration doesn't seem to work, some additional manual modifications will be needed to complete the setup. This article will try to guide you through this process while steering you away from common pitfalls. For the purposes of this article, let's assume the following characteristics about your environment: Web Application Base URL: http://host/app (configured as Resource Source URL in PP) Pagelet Producer Base URL: http://pp/pagelets Form Field Auto-Detection Form Autologin is configured in the PP Admin UI under resource_name/Autologin/Form Login. First, you'll enter the URL to the login form under "Login Form Identification". This will enable the admin wizard to connect to and display the login page. Caution: RedirectsMake sure the entered URL matches what you see in the browser's address bar, when the application login page is displayed. For example, even though you may be able to reach the login page by simply typing http://host/app, the URL you end up on may change to http://host/app/login via browser redirect(s).The second URL is the one you will want to use. Caution: External Login ServersThe login page may actually come from a different server than the application you are trying to proxy. For example, you may notice that the login page URL changes to http://hostB/appB. This is common when external SSO products are involved. There are two ways of dealing with this situation. One is to configure Pagelet Producer to participate in SSO. This approach is out of scope of this article and is discussed in a separate whitepaper (TODO add link). The second approach is to use the autologin feature to provide stored credentials to the SSO login form. Since the login form URL is not an extension of the application base URL (PP resource URL), you will need to add a new PP resource for the SSO server and configure the login form on that resource instead of the original application resource. One side benefit of this additional resource is that it can reused for other applications relying on the same SSO server for login. After entering the login page URL (make sure dropdown says "URL"), click "Automatically Detect Form Fields". This will bring up the web app's login page in a new browser window. Fill it out and submit it as you would normally. If everything goes right, Pagelet Producer will intercept the submitted values and fill out all the needed configuration data in the Admin UI. If the login form window doesn't close or configuration data doesn't get filled in, you may have not entered the login page URL correctly. Review the two cautionary notes above and make any necessary changes. If the form fields got filled automatically, it's time to save the configuration and test it out. If you can access a protected area of the backend application via a proxied PP URL without filling out its login form, then you are pretty much done with login form configuration. The only other step you will need to complete before declaring this aspect of configuration production ready is configuring form field source. You may skip to that section below. Manual Login Form Identification Let's take a closer look at Login Form Identification. This determines how Pagelet Producer recognizes login forms as such. URL The most efficient way of detecting login forms is by looking at the page URL. This method can only be used under the following conditions: Login page URL must be different from the post login application URLs. Login page URL must stay constant regardless of the path it takes to reach the page. For example, reaching the login page by going to the application base URL or to a specific protected URL must result in a redirect to the same login page URL (query string excluded). If only the query string parameters change, just leave out the query string from the configured login page URL. If either of these conditions is not fullfilled, you must switch to the RegEx approach below. RegEx If the login page URL is not uniform enough across all scenarios or is indistinguishable from other page locations, PP can be configured to recognize it by looking at the page markup itself. This is accomplished by changing the dropdown to "RegEx". If regular expressions scare you, take comfort from the fact that in most cases you won't need to enter any special regex characters. Let's look at an example: Say you have a login form that looks like <form id='loginForm' action='login?from=pageA' > <input id='user'> <input id='pass'> </form> Since this form has an id attribute, you can be reasonably sure that this login form can be uniquely identified across the web application by this snippet: "id='loginForm'". (Unless, of course your backend web application contains login forms to other apps). Since no wildcards are needed to find this snippet, you can just enter it as is into the RegEx field - no special regular expression characters needed! If the web developer who created the form wasn't kind enough to provide a unique id, you will need to look for other snippets of the page to uniquely identify it. It could be the action URL, an input field id, or some other markup fragment. You should abstain from using UI text as an identifier it may change in translated versions of the page and prevent the login page logic from working for international users. You may need to turn to regular expression wildcard syntax if no simple matches work. For more information on regular expression, refer to the Resources section. Form Submit Location Now we'll look at the form submit location. If the captured URL contains query string parameters that will likely change from one form submission to the next, you will need to change its type to RegEx. This type will tell Pagelet Producer to parse the login page for the action URL and submit to the value found. The regular expression needs to point at the actual action URL with its first grouping expression. Taking the example form definition above, the form submit location regex would be: action='(.*?)' The parentheses are used to identify the actual action URL, while the rest of the expression provides the context for finding it. Expression .*? is a so-called reluctant wildcard that matches any character excluding the single quote that follows. See Resources section below for further information on regular expressions. Manual Form Field Detection If the Admin UI form field detection wizard fails to populate login form configuration page, you will have to enter the fields by hand. Use a built-in browser developer tool or addon (e.g. Firebug) to inspect the form element and its children input elements. For each input element (including hidden elements), create an entry under Form Fields. Change its Source according to the next section. Form Field Source Change the source of any of the fields not exposed to the users of the login form (i.e. hidden fields) to "Generated". This means Pagelet Producer will just use the values returned by the web app rather than supplying values it stored. For fields that contain sensitive data or vary from user to user (e.g. username & password), change the source to User (Credential) Vault. Logging Support To help you troubleshoot you autologin configuration, PP provides some useful logging support. To turn on detailed logging for the autologin feature, navigate to Settings in Admin UI. Under Logging, change the log level for AutoLogin to Finest. Known Limitations Autologin feature may not work as expected if login form fields (not just the values, but the DOM elements themselves) are generated dynamically by client side JavaScript. Resources RegEx RegEx Reference from Java RegEx Test Tool

  Read the article

• FAQ: GridView Calculation with JavaScript

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  In my previous post I wrote a simple demo on how to Calculate Totals in GridView and Display it in the Footer. Basically what it does is it calculates the total amount by typing into the TextBox and display the grand total in the footer of the GridView and basically it was a server side implemenation.  Many users in the forums are asking how to do the same thing without postbacks and how to calculate both amount and total amount together. In this post I will demonstrate how to do this using JavaScript. To get started let's go ahead and set up the form. Just for the simplicity of this demo I just set up the form like this:   <asp:gridview ID="GridView1" runat="server" ShowFooter="true" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Description" HeaderText="Item Description" /> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Item Price"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLPrice" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Price") %>'></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Quantity"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="TXTQty" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> <b>Total Amount:</b> </FooterTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Sub-Total"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLSubTotal" runat="server"></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLTotal" runat="server" ForeColor="Green"></asp:Label> </FooterTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:gridview>   As you can see there's no fancy about the mark up above. It just a standard GridView with BoundFields and TemplateFields on it. Now just for the purpose of this demo I just use a dummy data for populating the GridView. Here's the code below:   public partial class GridCalculation : System.Web.UI.Page { private void BindDummyDataToGrid() { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); DataRow dr = null; dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Description", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Price", typeof(string))); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 1; dr["Description"] = "Nike"; dr["Price"] = "1000"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 2; dr["Description"] = "Converse"; dr["Price"] = "800"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 3; dr["Description"] = "Adidas"; dr["Price"] = "500"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 4; dr["Description"] = "Reebok"; dr["Price"] = "750"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 5; dr["Description"] = "Vans"; dr["Price"] = "1100"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 6; dr["Description"] = "Fila"; dr["Price"] = "200"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); //Bind the Gridview GridView1.DataSource = dt; GridView1.DataBind(); } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { BindDummyDataToGrid(); } } }   Now try to run the page. The output should look something like below: The Client-Side Calculation Here's the code for the GridView calculation:   <script type="text/javascript"> function CalculateTotals() { var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var tb = gv.getElementsByTagName("input"); var lb = gv.getElementsByTagName("span"); var sub = 0; var total = 0; var indexQ = 1; var indexP = 0; for (var i = 0; i < tb.length; i++) { if (tb[i].type == "text") { sub = parseFloat(lb[indexP].innerHTML) * parseFloat(tb[i].value); if (isNaN(sub)) { lb[i + indexQ].innerHTML = ""; sub = 0; } else { lb[i + indexQ].innerHTML = sub; } indexQ++; indexP = indexP + 2; total += parseFloat(sub); } } lb[lb.length -1].innerHTML = total; } </script>   The code above calculates the sub-total by multiplying the price and the quantity and at the same time calculates the total amount  by adding the sub-total values. Now you can simply call the JavaScript function above like this:   <ItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="TXTQty" runat="server" onkeyup="CalculateTotals();"></asp:TextBox> </ItemTemplate>   Running the code above will display something like below: That's it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JavaScript,GridView,TipsTricks

  Read the article

• 202 blog articles

  - by mprove

  All my blog articles under blogs.oracle.com since August 2005: 202 blog articles Apr 2012 blogs.oracle.com design patch Mar 2012 Interaction 12 - Critique Mar 2012 Typing. Clicking. Dancing. Feb 2012 Desktop Mobility in Hospitals with Oracle VDI /video Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 3 Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 2 Feb 2012 Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 1 Feb 2012 Shit Interaction Designers Say Feb 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #3: How to display custom page titles in Spaces Jan 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #2: How to create an Admin menu in Spaces and save a lot of time Jan 2012 Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #1: How to apply custom resources in Spaces Jan 2012 Merry XMas and a Happy 2012! Dec 2011 One Year Oracle SocialChat - The Movie Nov 2011 Frank Ludolph's Last Working Day Nov 2011 Hans Rosling at TED Oct 2011 200 Countries x 200 Years Oct 2011 Blog Aggregation for Desktop Virtualization Oct 2011 Oracle VDI at OOW 2011 Sep 2011 Design for Conversations & Conversations for Design Sep 2011 All Oracle UX Blogs Aug 2011 Farewell Loriot Aug 2011 Oracle VDI 3.3 Overview Aug 2011 Sutherland's Closing Remarks at HyperKult Aug 2011 Surface and Subface Aug 2011 Back to Childhood in UI Design Jul 2011 The Art of Engineering and The Engineering of Art Jul 2011 Oracle VDI Seminar - June-30 Jun 2011 SGD White Paper May 2011 TEDxHamburg Live Feed May 2011 Oracle VDI in 3 Minutes May 2011 Space Ship Earth 2011 May 2011 blog moving times Apr 2011 Frozen tag cloud Apr 2011 Oracle: Hardware Software Complete in 1953 Apr 2011 Interaction Design with Wireframes Apr 2011 A guide to closing down a project Feb 2011 Oracle VDI 3.2.2 Jan 2011 free VDI charts Jan 2011 Sun Founders Panel 2006 Dec 2010 Sutherland on Leadership Dec 2010 SocialChat: Efficiency of E20 Dec 2010 ALWAYS ON Desktop Virtualization Nov 2010 12,000 Desktops at JavaOne Nov 2010 SocialChat on Sharing Best Practices Oct 2010 Globe of Visitors Oct 2010 SocialChat about the Next Big Thing Oct 2010 Oracle VDI UX Story - Wireframes Oct 2010 What's a PC anyway? Oct 2010 SocialChat on Getting Things Done Oct 2010 SocialChat on Infoglut Oct 2010 IT Twenty Twenty Oct 2010 Desktop Virtualization Webcasts from OOW Oct 2010 Oracle VDI 3.2 Overview Sep 2010 Blog Usability Top 7 Sep 2010 100 and counting Aug 2010 Oracle'izing the VDI Blogs Aug 2010 SocialChat on Apple Aug 2010 SocialChat on Video Conferencing Aug 2010 Oracle VDI 3.2 - Features and Screenshots Aug 2010 SocialChat: Don't stop making waves Aug 2010 SocialChat: Giving Back to the Community Aug 2010 SocialChat on Learning in Meetings Aug 2010 iPAD's Natural User Interface Jul 2010 Last day for Sun Microsystems GmbH Jun 2010 SirValUse Celebration Snippets Jun 2010 10 years SirValUse - Happy Birthday! Jun 2010 Wim on Virtualization May 2010 New Home for Oracle VDI Apr 2010 Renaissance Slide Sorter Comments Apr 2010 Unboxing Sun Ray 3 Plus Apr 2010 Desktop Virtualisierung mit Sun VDI 3.1 Apr 2010 Blog Relaunch Mar 2010 Social Messaging Slides from CeBIT Mar 2010 Social Messaging Talk at CeBIT Feb 2010 Welcome Oracle Jan 2010 My last presentation at Sun Jan 2010 Ivan Sutherland on Leadership Jan 2010 Learning French with Sun VDI Jan 2010 Learning Danish with Sun Ray Jan 2010 VDI workshop in Nieuwegein Jan 2010 Happy New Year 2010 Jan 2010 On Creating Slides Dec 2009 Best VDI Ever Nov 2009 How to store the Big Bang Nov 2009 Social Enterprise Tools. Beipiel Sun. Nov 2009 Nov-19 Nov 2009 PDF and ODF links on your blog Nov 2009 Q&A on VDI and MySQL Cluster Nov 2009 Zürich next week: Swiss Intranet Summit 09 Nov 2009 Designing for a Sustainable World - World Usabiltiy Day, Nov-12 Nov 2009 How to export a desktop from VDI 3 Nov 2009 Virtualisation Roadshow in the UK Nov 2009 Project Wonderland at EDUCAUSE 09 Nov 2009 VDI Roadshow in Dublin, Nov-26, 2009 Nov 2009 Sun VDI at EDUCAUSE 09 Nov 2009 Sun VDI 3.1 Architecture and New Features Oct 2009 VDI 3.1 is Early-Access Sep 2009 Virtualization for MySQL on VMware Sep 2009 Silpion & 13. Stock Sommerparty Sep 2009 Sun Ray and VMware View 3.1.1 2009-08-31 New Set of Sun Ray Status Icons 2009-08-25 Virtualizing the VDI Core? 2009-08-23 World Usability Day Hamburg 2009 - CfP 2009-07-16 Rising Sun 2009-07-15 featuring twittermeme 2009-06-19 ISC09 Student Party on June-20 /Hamburg 2009-06-18 Before and behind the curtain of JavaOne 2009-06-09 20k desktops at JavaOne 2009-06-01 sweet microblogging 2009-05-25 VDI 3 - Why you need 3 VDI hosts and what you can do about that? 2009-05-21 IA Konferenz 2009 2009-05-20 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - Power of the Web 2009-05-06 Planet of Sun and Oracle User Experience Design 2009-04-22 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - User Research 2009-04-08 Sun VDI 3 UX Story - Concept Workshops 2009-04-06 Localized documentation for Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager 1.1 2009-04-03 Sun VDI 3 Press Release 2009-03-25 Sun VDI 3 launches today! 2009-03-25 Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager 1.1 Update 2009-03-11 desktop virtualization wiki relaunch 2009-03-06 VDI 3 at CeBIT hall 6, booth E36 2009-03-02 Keyboard layout problems with Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2009-02-23 wikis.sun.com tips & tricks 2009-02-23 Sun VDI 3 is in Early Access 2009-02-09 VirtualCenter unable to decrypt passwords 2009-02-02 Sun & VMware Desktop Training 2009-01-30 VDI at next09? 2009-01-16 Sun VDI: How to use virtual machines with multiple network adapters 2009-01-07 Sun Ray and VMware View 2009-01-07 Hamburg World Usability Day 2008 - Webcasts 2009-01-06 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM slides 2008-12-15 mother of all demos 2008-12-08 Build your own Thumper 2008-12-03 Troubleshooting Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2008-12-02 My Roller Tag Cloud 2008-11-28 Sun Ray Connector: SSL connection to VDM 2008-11-25 Setting up SSL and Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM 2008-11-13 Inspiration for Today and Tomorrow 2008-10-23 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM released 2008-10-14 From Sketchpad to ILoveSketch 2008-10-09 Desktop Virtualization on Xing 2008-10-06 User Experience Forum on Xing 2008-10-06 Sun Ray Connector for VMware VDM certified 2008-09-17 Virtual Clouds over Las Vegas 2008-09-14 Bill Verplank sketches metaphors 2008-09-04 End of Early Access - Sun Ray Connector for VMware 2008-08-27 Early Access: Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2008-08-12 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling Part 2 2008-07-20 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling Part 3 2008-07-20 Sun Virtual Desktop Connector - Insides on Recycling 2008-07-20 lost in wiki space 2008-07-07 Evolution of the Desktop 2008-06-17 Virtual Desktop Webcast 2008-06-16 Woodstock 2008-06-16 What's a Desktop PC anyway? 2008-06-09 Virtual-T-Box 2008-06-05 Virtualization Glossary 2008-05-06 Five User Experience Principles 2008-04-25 Virtualization News Feed 2008-04-21 Acetylcholinesterase - Second Season 2008-04-18 Acetylcholinesterase - End of Signal 2007-12-31 Produkt-Management ist... 2007-10-22 Usability Verbände, Verteiler und Netzwerke. 2007-10-02 The Meaning is the Message 2007-09-28 Visualization Methods 2007-09-10 Inhouse und Open Source Projekte – Usability verankern und Synergien nutzen 2007-09-03 Der Schwabe Darth Vader entdeckt das Virale Marketing 2007-08-29 Dick Hardt 3.0 on Identity 2.0 2007-08-27 quality of written text depends on the tool 2007-07-27 podcasts for reboot9 2007-06-04 It is the user's itch that need to be scratched 2007-05-25 A duel at reboot9 2007-05-14 Taxonomien und Folksonomien - Tagging als neues HCI-Element 2007-05-10 Dueling Interaction Models of Personal-Computing and Web-Computing 2007-03-01 22.März: Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work. /Filmpremiere Hamburg 2007-02-25 Bruce Sterling at UbiComp 2006 /webcast 2006-11-12 FSOSS 2006 /webcasts 2006-11-10 Highway 101 2006-11-09 User Experience Roundtable Hamburg: EuroGEL 2006 2006-11-08 Douglas Adams' Hyperland (BBC 1990) 2006-10-08 Taxonomien und Folksonomien – Tagging als neues HCI-Element 2006-09-13 Usability im Unternehmen 2006-09-13 Doug does HyperScope 2006-08-26 TED Talks and TechTalks 2006-08-21 Kai Krause über seine Freundschaft zu Douglas Adams 2006-07-20 Rebel At Work: Film Portrait on Weizenbaum 2006-07-04 Gabriele Fischer, mp3 2006-06-07 Dick Hardt at ETech 06 2006-06-05 Weinberger: From Control to Conversation 2006-04-16 Eye Tracking at User Experience Roundtable Hamburg 2006-04-14 dropping knowledge 2006-04-09 GEL 2005 2006-03-13 slide photos of reboot7 2006-03-04 Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 2006-02-28 User Experience Newsletter #13: Versioning 2006-02-03 Ester Dyson on Choice and Happyness 2006-02-02 Requirements-Engineering im Spannungsfeld von Individual- und Produktsoftware 2006-01-15 User Experience Newsletter #12: Intuition Quiz 2005-11-30 User Experience und Requirements-Engineering für Software-Projekte 2005-10-31 Ivan Sutherland on "Research and Fun" 2005-10-18 Ars Electronica / Mensch und Computer 2005 2005-09-14 60 Jahre nach Memex: Über die Unvereinbarkeit von Desktop- und Web-Paradigma 2005-08-31 reboot 7 2005-06-30

  Read the article

• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

  Read the article

• Web Platform Installer bundles for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 - and how you can build your own WebPI bundles

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 is  now available via the Web Platform Installer, which means you've got three options: Download the 1.5 GB ISO image Run the 750KB Web Installer (which figures out what you need to download) Install via Web PI Note: I covered some tips for installing VS2010 SP1 last week - including some that apply to all of these, such as removing options you don't use prior to installing the service pack to decrease the installation time and download size. Two Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Web PI packages There are actually two WebPI packages for VS2010 SP1. There's the standard Visual Studio 2010 SP1 package [Web PI link], which includes (quoting ScottGu's post): VS2010 2010 SP1 ASP.NET MVC 3 (runtime + tools support) IIS 7.5 Express SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 (runtime + tools support) Web Deployment 2.0 The notes on that package sum it up pretty well: Looking for the latest everything? Look no further. This will get you Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 and the RTM releases of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS 7.5 Express, SQL Server Compact 4.0 with tooling, and Web Deploy 2.0. It's the value meal of Microsoft products. Tell your friends! Note: This bundle includes the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 web installer, which will dynamically determine the appropriate service pack components to download and install. This is typically in the range of 200-500 MB and will take 30-60 minutes to install, depending on your machine configuration. There is also a Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Core package [Web PI link], which only includes only the SP without any of the other goodies (MVC3, IIS Express, etc.). If you're doing any web development, I'd highly recommend the main pack since it the other installs are small, simple installs, but if you're working in another space, you might want the core package. Installing via the Web Platform Installer I generally like to go with the Web PI when possible since it simplifies most software installations due to things like: Smart dependency management - installing apps or tools which have software dependencies will automatically figure out which dependencies you don't have and add them to the list (which you can review before install) Simultaneous download and install - if your install includes more than one package, it will automatically pull the dependencies first and begin installing them while downloading the others Lists the latest downloads - no need to search around, as they're all listed based on a live feed Includes open source applications - a lot of popular open source applications are included as well as Microsoft software and tools No worries about reinstallation - WebPI installations detect what you've got installed, so for instance if you've got MVC 3 installed you don't need to worry about the VS2010 SP1 package install messing anything up In addition to the links I included above, you can install the WebPI from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx, and if you have Web PI installed you can just tap the Windows key and type "Web Platform" to bring it up in the Start search list. You'll see Visual Studio SP1 listed in the spotlight list as shown below. That's the standard package, which includes MVC 3 / IIS 7.5 Express / SQL Compact / Web Deploy. If you just want the core install, you can use the search box in the upper right corner, typing in "Visual Studio SP1" as shown. Core Install: Use Web PI or the Visual Studio Web Installer? I think the big advantage of using Web PI to install VS 2010 SP1 is that it includes the other new bits. If you're going to install the SP1 core, I don't think there's as much advantage to using Web PI, as the Web PI Core install just downloads the Visual Studio Web Installer anyways. I think Web PI makes it a little easier to find the download, but not a lot. The Visual Studio Web Installer checks dependencies, so there's no big advantage there. If you do happen to hit any problems installing Visual Studio SP1 via Web PI, I'd recommend running the Visual Studio Web Installer, then running the Web PI VS 2010 SP1 package to get all the other goodies. I talked to one person who hit some random snag, recommended that, and it worked out. Custom Web Platform Installer bundles You can create links that will launch the Web Platform Installer with a custom list of tools. You can see an example of this by clicking through on the install button at http://asp.net/downloads (cancelling the installation dialog). You'll see this in the address bar: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;ASPNET;NETFramework4;SQLExpress;VWD Notice that the appid querystring parameter includes a semicolon delimited list, and you can make your own custom Web PI links with your own desired app list. I can think of a lot of cases where that would be handy: linking to a recommended software configuration from a software project or product, setting up a recommended / documented / supported install list for a software development team or IT shop, etc. For instance, here's a link that installs just VS2010 SP1 Core and the SQL CE tools: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=VS2010SP1Core;SQLCETools Note: If you've already got all or some of the products installed, the display will reflect that. On my dev box which has the full SP1 package, here's what the above link gives me: Here's another example - on a fresh box I created a link to install MVC 3 and the Web Farm Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=MVC3;WebFarmFramework) and got the following items added to the cart: But where do I get the App ID's? Aha, that's the trick. You can link to a list of cool packages, but you need to know the App ID's to link to them. To figure that out, I turned on tracing in Web Platform Installer  (also handy if you're ever having trouble with a WebPI install) and from the trace logs saw that the list of packages is pulled from an XML file: DownloadManager Information: 0 : Loading product xml from: https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 DownloadManager Verbose: 0 : Connecting to https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 with (partial) headers: Referer: wpi://2.1.0.0/Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 If-Modified-Since: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:15:27 GMT User-Agent:Platform-Installer/3.0.3.0(Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1) DownloadManager Information: 0 : https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9763242 responded with 302 DownloadManager Information: 0 : Response headers: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Cache-Control: private Content-Length: 175 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Expires: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:52:28 GMT Location: https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:53:27 GMT Browsing to https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/3.0/webproductlist.xml shows the full list. You can search through that in your browser / text editor if you'd like, open it in Excel as an XML table, etc. Here's a list of the App ID's as of today: SMO SMO32 PHP52ForIISExpress PHP53ForIISExpress StaticContent DefaultDocument DirectoryBrowse HTTPErrors HTTPRedirection ASPNET NETExtensibility ASP CGI ISAPIExtensions ISAPIFilters ServerSideIncludes HTTPLogging LoggingTools RequestMonitor Tracing CustomLogging ODBCLogging BasicAuthentication WindowsAuthentication DigestAuthentication ClientCertificateMappingAuthentication IISClientCertificateMappingAuthentication URLAuthorization RequestFiltering IPSecurity StaticContentCompression DynamicContentCompression IISManagementConsole IISManagementScriptsAndTools ManagementService MetabaseAndIIS6Compatibility WASProcessModel WASNetFxEnvironment WASConfigurationAPI IIS6WPICompatibility IIS6ScriptingTools IIS6ManagementConsole LegacyFTPServer FTPServer WebDAV LegacyFTPManagementConsole FTPExtensibility AdminPack AdvancedLogging WebFarmFrameworkNonLoc ExternalCacheNonLoc WebFarmFramework WebFarmFrameworkv2 WebFarmFrameworkv2_beta ExternalCache ECacheUpdate ARRv1 ARRv2Beta1 ARRv2Beta2 ARRv2RC ARRv2NonLoc ARRv2 ARRv2Update MVC MVCBeta MVCRC1 MVCRC2 DBManager DbManagerUpdate DynamicIPRestrictions DynamicIPRestrictionsUpdate DynamicIPRestrictionsLegacy DynamicIPRestrictionsBeta2 FTPOOB IISPowershellSnapin RemoteManager SEOToolkit VS2008RTM MySQL SQLDriverPHP52IIS SQLDriverPHP53IIS SQLDriverPHP52IISExpress SQLDriverPHP53IISExpress SQLExpress SQLManagementStudio SQLExpressAdv SQLExpressTools UrlRewrite UrlRewrite2 UrlRewrite2NonLoc UrlRewrite2RC UrlRewrite2Beta UrlRewrite10 UrlScan MVC3Installer MVC3 MVC3LocInstaller MVC3Loc MVC2 VWD VWD2010SP1Pack NETFramework4 WebMatrix WebMatrix_v1Refresh IISExpress IISExpress_v1 IIS7 AspWebPagesVS AspWebPagesVS_1_0 Plan9 Plan9Loc WebMatrix_WHP SQLCE SQLCETools SQLCEVSTools SQLCEVSTools_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstaller_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerNew_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_EN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_JA_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_FR_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_DE_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ES_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_IT_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_RU_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_KO_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_CN_4_0 SQLCEVSToolsInstallerRepair_ZH_TW_4_0 VWD2008 WebDAVOOB WDeploy WDeploy_v2 WDeployNoSMO WDeploy11 WinCache52 WinCache53 NETFramework35 WindowsImagingComponent VC9Redist NETFramework20SP2 WindowsInstaller31 PowerShell PowerShellMsu PowerShell2 WindowsInstaller45 FastCGIUpdate FastCGIBackport FastCGIIIS6 IIS51 IIS60 SQLNativeClient SQLNativeClient2008 SQLNativeClient2005 SQLCLRTypes SQLCLRTypes32 SMO_10_1 MySQLConnector PHP52 PHP53 PHPManager VSVWD2010Feature VWD2010WebFeature_0 VWD2010WebFeature_1 VWD2010WebFeature_2 VS2010SP1Prerequisite RIAServicesToolkitMay2010 Silverlight4Toolkit Silverlight4Tools VSLS SSMAMySQL WebsitePanel VS2010SP1Core VS2010SP1Installer VS2010SP1Pack MissingVWDOrVSVWD2010Feature VB2010Beta2Express VCS2010Beta2Express VC2010Beta2Express RIAServicesToolkitApr2010 VS2010Beta1 VS2010RC VS2010Beta2 VS2010Beta2Express VS2k8RTM VSCPP2k8RTM VSVB2k8RTM VSCS2k8RTM VSVWDFeature LegacyWinCache SQLExpress2005 SSMS2005

  Read the article

• Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

    Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations.  Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications.  Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

  Read the article

• The last MVVM you'll ever need?

  - by Nuri Halperin

  As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

  Read the article

• Now Available &ndash; Windows Azure SDK 1.6

  - by Shaun

  Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.6. Now people can download the latest product through the WebPI. After you downloaded and installed the SDK you will find that The SDK 1.6 can be stayed side by side with the SDK 1.5, which means you can still using the 1.5 assemblies. But the Visual Studio Tools would be upgraded to 1.6. Different from the previous SDK, in this version it includes 4 components: Windows Azure Authoring Tools, Windows Azure Emulators, Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. There are some significant upgrades in this version, which are Publishing Enhancement: More easily connect to the Windows Azure when publish your application by retrieving a publish setting file. It will let you configure some settings of the deployment, without getting back to the developer portal. Multi-profiles: The publish settings, cloud configuration files, etc. will be stored in one or more MSBuild files. It will be much easier to switch the settings between vary build environments. MSBuild Command-line Build Support. In-Place Upgrade Support.   Publishing Enhancement So let’s have a look about the new features of the publishing. Just create a new Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010 with a MVC 3 Web Role, and right-click the Windows Azure project node in the solution explorer, then select Publish, we will find the new publish dialog. In this version the first thing we need to do is to connect to our Windows Azure subscription. Click the “Sign in to download credentials” link, we will be navigated to the login page to provide the Live ID. The Windows Azure Tool will generate a certificate file and uploaded to the subscriptions those belong to us. Then we will download a PUBLISHSETTINGS file, which contains the credentials and subscriptions information. The Visual Studio Tool will generate a certificate and deployed to the subscriptions you have as the Management Certificate. The VS Tool will use this certificate to connect to the subscription in the next step. In the next step, I would back to the Visual Studio (the publish dialog should be stilling opened) and click the Import button, select the PUBLISHSETTINGS file I had just downloaded. Then all my subscriptions will be shown in the dropdown list. Select a subscription that I want the application to be published and press the Next button, then we can select the hosted service, environment, build configuration and service configuration shown in the dialog. In this version we can create a new hosted service directly here rather than go back to the developer portal. Just select the <Create New …> item in the hosted service. What we need to do is to provide the hosted service name and the location. Once clicked the OK, after several seconds the hosted service will be established. If we went to the developer portal we will find the new hosted service in my subscription. a) Currently we cannot select the Affinity Group when create a new hosted service through the Visual Studio Publish dialog. b) Although we can specify the hosted service name and DNS prefixing through the developer portal, we cannot do so from the VS Tool, which means the DNS prefixing would be the same as what we specified for the hosted service name. For example, we specified our hosted service name as “Sdk16Demo”, so the public URL would be http://sdk16demo.cloudapp.net/. After created a new hosted service we can select the cloud environment (production or staging), the build configuration (release or debug), and the service configuration (cloud or local). And we can set the Remote Desktop by check the related checkbox as well. One thing should be note is that, in this version when we set the Remote Desktop settings we don’t need to specify a certificate by default. This is because the Visual Studio will generate a new certificate for us by default. But we can still specify an existing certificate for RDC, by clicking the “More Options” button. Visual Studio Tool will create another certificate for the Remote Desktop connection. It will NOT use the certificate that managing the subscription. We also can select the “Advanced Settings” page to specify the deployment label, storage account, IntelliTrace and .NET profiling information, etc.. Press Next button, the dialog will display all settings I had just specified and it will save them as a new profile. The last step is to click the Publish button. Since we enabled the Remote Desktop feature, the first step of publishing was uploading the certificate. And then it will verify the storage account we specified and upload the package, then finally created the website in Windows Azure.   Multi-Profiles After published, if we back to the Visual Studio we can find a AZUREPUBXML file under the Profiles folder in the Azure project. It includes all settings we specified before. If we publish this project again, we can just use the current settings (hosted service, environment, RDC, etc.) from this profile without input them again. And this is very useful when we have more than one deployment settings. For example it would be able to have one AZUREPUBXML profile for deploying to testing environment (debug building, less roles with RDC and IntelliTrace) and one for production (release building, more roles but without IntelliTrace).   In-Place Upgrade Support Let’s change some codes in the MVC pages and click the Publish menu from the azure project node. No need to specify any settings,  here we can use the pervious settings by loading the azure profile file (AZUREPUBXML). After clicked the Publish button the VS Tool brought a dialog to us to indicate that there’s a deployment available in the hosted service environment, and prompt to REPLACE it or not. Notice that in this version, the dialog tool said “replace” rather than “delete”, which means by default the VS Tool will use In-Place Upgrade when we deploy to a hosted service that has a deployment already exist. After click Yes the VS Tool will upload the package and perform the In-Place Upgrade. If we back to the developer portal we can find that the status of the hosted service was turned to “Updating…”. But in the previous SDK, it will try to delete the whole deployment and publish a new one.   Summary When the Microsoft announced the features that allows the changing VM size via In-Place Upgrade, they also mentioned that in the next few versions the user experience of publishing the azure application would be improved. The target was trying to accomplish the whole publish experience in Visual Studio, which means no need to touch developer portal any more. In the SDK 1.6 we can see from the new publish dialog, as a developer we can do the whole process, includes creating hosted service, specifying the environment, configuration, remote desktop, etc. values without going back the the developer portal.   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.

  Read the article

• Silverlight for Windows Embedded Tutorial (step 5 and a bit of Windows Phone 7)

  - by Valter Minute

  If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the development and IT communities. One of the most important aspects of this new platform is that it will be programmed using a new set of tools and frameworks, completely different from the ones used on older releases of Windows Mobile (or SmartPhone, or PocketPC or whatever…). WP7S applications can be developed using Silverlight or XNA. If you want to learn something more about WP7S development you can download the preview of Charles Petzold’s book about it: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Charles Petzold is also the author of “Programming Windows”, the first book I ever read about programming on Windows (it was Windows 3.0 at that time!). The fact that even I was able to learn how to develop Windows application is a proof of the quality of Petzold’s work. This book is up to his standards and the 150pages preview is already rich in technical contents without being boring or complicated to understand. I may be able to become a Windows Phone developer thanks to mr. Petzold. Mr. Petzold uses some nice samples to introduce the basic concepts of Silverlight development on WP7S. On this new platform you’ll use managed code to develop your application, so those samples can’t be ported on Windows CE R3 as they are, but I would like to take one of the first samples (called “SilverlightTapHello1”) and adapt it to Silverlight for Windows Embedded to show that even plain old native code can be used to develop “cool” user interfaces! The sample shows the standard WP7S title header and a textbox with an hello world message inside it. When the user touches the textbox, it will change its color. When the user touches the background (Grid) behind it, its default color (plain old White) will be restored. Let’s see how we can implement the same features on our embedded device! I took the XAML code of the sample (you can download the book samples here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/D/B/1DB49641-3956-41F1-BAFA-A021673C709E/CodeSamples_DRAFTPreview_ProgrammingWindowsPhone7Series.zip) and changed it a little bit to remove references to WP7S or managed runtime. If you compare the resulting files you will see that I was able to keep all the resources inside the App.xaml files and the structure of  MainPage.XAML almost intact. This is the Silverlight for Windows Embedded version of MainPage.XAML: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightTapHello1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:phoneNavigation="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="800" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="640" Height="480">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions>   <!--TitleGrid is the name of the application and page title--> <Grid x:Name="TitleGrid" Grid.Row="0"> <TextBlock Text="SILVERLIGHT TAP HELLO #1" x:Name="textBlockPageTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle1Style}"/> <TextBlock Text="main page" x:Name="textBlockListTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle2Style}"/> </Grid>   <!--ContentGrid is empty. Place new content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" MouseLeftButtonDown="ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock" Text="Hello, Silverlight for Windows Embedded!" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> If you compare it to the WP7S sample (not reported here to avoid any copyright issue) you’ll notice that I had to replace the original phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage with UserControl as the root node. This make sense because there is not support for phone applications on CE 6. I also had to specify width and height of my main page (on the WP7S device this will be adjusted by the OS) and I had to replace the multi-touch event handler with the MouseLeftButtonDown event (no multitouch support for Windows CE R3, still). I also changed the hello message, of course. I used XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our application and then added the initialization code to WinMain: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; XRXamlSource dictsrc;   dictsrc.SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_App);   if (FAILED(retcode=app->LoadResourceDictionary(&dictsrc,NULL))) return -1;   MainPage page;   if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;   UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; }   You may have noticed that there is something different from the previous samples. I added the code to load a resource dictionary. Resources are an important feature of XAML that allows you to define some values that could be replaced inside any XAML file loaded by the runtime. You can use resources to define custom styles for your fonts, backgrounds, controls etc. and to support internationalization, by providing different strings for different languages. The rest of our WinMain isn’t that different. It creates an instances of our MainPage object and displays it. The MainPage class implements an event handler for the MouseLeftButtonDown event of the ContentGrid: class MainPage : public TMainPage<MainPage> { public:   HRESULT ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode; IXRSolidColorBrushPtr brush; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRSolidColorBrush,&brush))) return retcode;   COLORREF color=RGBA(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff);   if (args->pOriginalSource==TextBlock) color=RGBA(rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,0xFF);   if (FAILED(retcode=brush->SetColor(color))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TextBlock->SetForeground(brush))) return retcode; return S_OK; } }; As you can see this event is generated when a used clicks inside the grid or inside one of the objects it contains. Since our TextBlock is inside the grid, we don’t need to provide an event handler for its MouseLeftButtonDown event. We can just use the pOriginalSource member of the event arguments to check if the event was generated inside the textblock. If the event was generated inside the grid we create a white brush,if it’s inside the textblock we create some randomly colored brush. Notice that we need to use the RGBA macro to create colors, specifying also a transparency value for them. If we use the RGB macro the resulting color will have its Alpha channel set to zero and will be transparent. Using the SetForeground method we can change the color of our control. You can compare this to the managed code that you can find at page 40-41 of Petzold’s preview book and you’ll see that the native version isn’t much more complex than the managed one. As usual you can download the full code of the sample here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SilverlightTapHello1.zip And remember to pre-order Charles Petzold’s “Programming Windows Phone 7 series”, I bet it will be a best-seller! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

  Read the article

• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

  Read the article

• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

  Read the article

• Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime

  - by Rick Strahl

  I learned something new today. Not uncommon, but it's a core .NET runtime feature I simply did not know although I know I've run into this issue a few times and worked around it in other ways. Today there was no working around it and a few folks on Twitter pointed me in the right direction. The question I ran into is: How do I create a type instance of a generic type when I have dynamically acquired the type at runtime? Yup it's not something that you do everyday, but when you're writing code that parses objects dynamically at runtime it comes up from time to time. In my case it's in the bowels of a custom JSON parser. After some thought triggered by a comment today I realized it would be fairly easy to implement two-way Dictionary parsing for most concrete dictionary types. I could use a custom Dictionary serialization format that serializes as an array of key/value objects. Basically I can use a custom type (that matches the JSON signature) to hold my parsed dictionary data and then add it to the actual dictionary when parsing is complete. Generic Types at Runtime One issue that came up in the process was how to figure out what type the Dictionary<K,V> generic parameters take. Reflection actually makes it fairly easy to figure out generic types at runtime with code like this: if (arrayType.GetInterface("IDictionary") != null) { if (arrayType.IsGenericType) { var keyType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[0]; var valueType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[1]; … } } The GetArrayType method gets passed a type instance that is the array or array-like object that is rendered in JSON as an array (which includes IList, IDictionary, IDataReader and a few others). In my case the type passed would be something like Dictionary<string, CustomerEntity>. So I know what the parent container class type is. Based on the the container type using it's then possible to use GetGenericTypeArguments() to retrieve all the generic types in sequential order of definition (ie. string, CustomerEntity). That's the easy part. Creating a Generic Type and Providing Generic Parameters at RunTime The next problem is how do I get a concrete type instance for the generic type? I know what the type name and I have a type instance is but it's generic, so how do I get a type reference to keyvaluepair<K,V> that is specific to the keyType and valueType above? Here are a couple of things that come to mind but that don't work (and yes I tried that unsuccessfully first): Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<keyType, valueType>); Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<typeof(keyType), typeof(valueType)>); The problem is that this explicit syntax expects a type literal not some dynamic runtime value, so both of the above won't even compile. I turns out the way to create a generic type at runtime is using a fancy bit of syntax that until today I was completely unaware of: Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<,>).MakeGenericType(keyType, valueType); The key is the type(keyvalue<,>) bit which looks weird at best. It works however and produces a non-generic type reference. You can see the difference between the full generic type and the non-typed (?) generic type in the debugger: The nonGenericType doesn't show any type specialization, while the elementType type shows the string, CustomerEntity (truncated above) in the type name. Once the full type reference exists (elementType) it's then easy to create an instance. In my case the parser parses through the JSON and when it completes parsing the value/object it creates a new keyvalue<T,V> instance. Now that I know the element type that's pretty trivial with: // Objects start out null until we find the opening tag resultObject = Activator.CreateInstance(elementType); Here the result object is picked up by the JSON array parser which creates an instance of the child object (keyvalue<K,V>) and then parses and assigns values from the JSON document using the types  key/value property signature. Internally the parser then takes each individually parsed item and adds it to a list of  List<keyvalue<K,V>> items. Parsing through a Generic type when you only have Runtime Type Information When parsing of the JSON array is done, the List needs to be turned into a defacto Dictionary<K,V>. This should be easy since I know that I'm dealing with an IDictionary, and I know the generic types for the key and value. The problem is again though that this needs to happen at runtime which would mean using several Convert.ChangeType() calls in the code to dynamically cast at runtime. Yuk. In the end I decided the easier and probably only slightly slower way to do this is a to use the dynamic type to collect the items and assign them to avoid all the dynamic casting madness: else if (IsIDictionary) { IDictionary dict = Activator.CreateInstance(arrayType) as IDictionary; foreach (dynamic item in items) { dict.Add(item.key, item.value); } return dict; } This code creates an instance of the generic dictionary type first, then loops through all of my custom keyvalue<K,V> items and assigns them to the actual dictionary. By using Dynamic here I can side step all the explicit type conversions that would be required in the three highlighted areas (not to mention that this nested method doesn't have access to the dictionary item generic types here). Static <- -> Dynamic Dynamic casting in a static language like C# is a bitch to say the least. This is one of the few times when I've cursed static typing and the arcane syntax that's required to coax types into the right format. It works but it's pretty nasty code. If it weren't for dynamic that last bit of code would have been a pretty ugly as well with a bunch of Convert.ChangeType() calls to litter the code. Fortunately this type of type convulsion is rather rare and reserved for system level code. It's not every day that you create a string to object parser after all :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET  CSharp   Tweet (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); })();

  Read the article

• Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

  - by terje

  Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ 実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. Filtering capabilities Caching for performan...Designit Video Embed Package: Release 1.1.0 beta1: You can now either have the video embeded directly in the template or have a preview in template that opens the video in a lightbox window.FsUnit: FsUnit 0.9.0 for NUnit: This release is for F# 2.0 and NUnit 2.5+.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog 0.0.1: Laughing Dog - Alpla - v 0.0.1 First released version of the Laughing Dog framework.LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2: Version 3.2Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Win...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi March 26: This version adds the Join feature for creating a new "featureset" with attributes that are joined with attributes from a Excel data label named 'D...Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor: Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor 1.2.2: This edition supports: Newer and older editions of Birdstep Technology's EasyConnect HUAWEI Mobile Partner MWConn User defined location for s...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_351_0: A beta release of the next version. Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. In 0.8.2 a bug was found that if episode number is less then 10, then the preceding 0...RapidWebDev - .NET Enterprise Software Development Infrastructure: RapidWebDev 1.52: RapidWebDev is an infrastructure helps to develop enterprise software solutions in Microsoft .NET easily and productively. This is the release vers...thommo cannon: game: gamethommo cannon: setup: setupthommo cannon: test: testTinare: Tinare DLL: Tinare DLL is a dynamic-link library written in C# which provides the functions to encrypt and decrypt a byte stream with tinare.WeatherBar: WeatherBar 2.1 [No Installation]: Minor changes to release 2.0 (http://weatherbar.codeplex.com/releases/view/42490). Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

  Read the article

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Rolling with Razor in MVC v3 Preview

  - by mbridge

  Razor is an alternate view engine for asp.net MVC.  It was introduced in the “WebMatrix” tool and has now been released as part of the asp.net MVC 3 preview 1.  Basically, Razor allows us to replace the clunky <% %> syntax with a much cleaner coding model, which integrates very nicely with HTML.  Additionally, it provides some really nice features for master page type scenarios and you don’t lose access to any of the features you are currently familiar with, such as HTML helper methods. First, download and install the ASP.NET MVC Preview 1.  You can find this at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cb42f741-8fb1-4f43-a5fa-812096f8d1e8&displaylang=en. Now, follow these steps to create your first asp.net mvc project using Razor: 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 2. Create a new project.  Select File->New->Project (Shift Control N) 3. You will see the list of project types which should look similar to what’s shown:   4. Select “ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application (Razor).”  Set the application name to RazorTest and the path to c:projectsRazorTest for this tutorial. If you select accidently select ASPX, you will end up with the standard asp.net view engine and template, which isn’t what you want. 5. For this tutorial, and ONLY for this tutorial, select “No, do not create a unit test project.”  In general, you should create and use a unit test project.  Code without unit tests is kind of like diet ice cream.  It just isn’t very good. Now, once we have this done, our brand new project will be created.    In all likelihood, Visual Studio will leave you looking at the “HomeController.cs” class, as shown below: Immediately, you should notice one difference.  The Index action used to look like: public ActionResult Index () { ViewData[“Message”] = “Welcome to ASP.Net MVC!”; Return View(); } While this will still compile and run just fine, ASP.Net MVC 3 has a much nicer way of doing this: public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = “Welcome to ASP.Net MVC!”; Return View(); } Instead of using ViewData we are using the new ViewModel object, which uses the new dynamic data typing of .Net 4.0 to allow us to express ourselves much more cleanly.  This isn’t a tutorial on ALL of MVC 3, but the ViewModel concept is one we will need as we dig into Razor. What comes in the box? When we create a project using the ASP.Net MVC 3 Template with Razor, we get a standard project setup, just like we did in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 but with some differences.  Instead of seeing “.aspx” view files and “.ascx” files, we see files with the “.cshtml” which is the default razor extension.  Before we discuss the details of a razor file, one thing to keep in mind is that since this is an extremely early preview, intellisense is not currently enabled with the razor view engine.  This is promised as an updated before the final release.  Just like with the aspx view engine, the convention of the folder name for a set of views matching the controller name without the word “Controller” still stands.  Similarly, each action in the controller will usually have a corresponding view file in the appropriate view directory.  Remember, in asp.net MVC, convention over configuration is key to successful development! The initial template organizes views in the following folders, located in the project under Views: - Account – The default account management views used by the Account controller.  Each file represents a distinct view. - Home – Views corresponding to the appropriate actions within the home controller. - Shared – This contains common view objects used by multiple views.  Within here, master pages are stored, as well as partial page views (user controls).  By convention, these partial views are named “_XXXPartial.cshtml” where XXX is the appropriate name, such as _LogonPartial.cshtml.  Additionally, display templates are stored under here. With this in mind, let us take a look at the index.cshtml file under the home view directory.  When you open up index.cshtml you should see 1:   @inherits System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage 2:  @{ 3:          View.Title = "Home Page"; 4:       LayoutPage = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; 5:   } 6:  <h2>@View.Message</h2> 7:  <p> 8:     To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC     9:    Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. 10:  </p> So looking through this, we observe the following facts: Line 1 imports the base page that all views (using Razor) are based on, which is System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.  Note that this is different than System.Web.MVC.ViewPage which is used by asp.net MVC 2.0 Also note that instead of the <% %> syntax, we use the very simple ‘@’ sign.  The View Engine contains enough context sensitive logic that it can even distinguish between @ in code and @ in an email.  It’s a very clean markup.  Line 2 introduces the idea of a code block in razor.  A code block is a scoping mechanism just like it is in a normal C# class.  It is designated by @{… }  and any C# code can be placed in between.  Note that this is all server side code just like it is when using the aspx engine and <% %>.  Line 3 allows us to set the page title in the client page’s file.  This is a new feature which I’ll talk more about when we get to master pages, but it is another of the nice things razor brings to asp.net mvc development. Line 4 is where we specify our “master” page, but as you can see, you can place it almost anywhere you want, because you tell it where it is located.  A Layout Page is similar to a master page, but it gains a bit when it comes to flexibility.  Again, we’ll come back to this in a later installment.  Line 6 and beyond is where we display the contents of our view.  No more using <%: %> intermixed with code.  Instead, we get to use very clean syntax such as @View.Message.  This is a lot easier to read than <%:@View.Message%> especially when intermixed with html.  For example: <p> My name is @View.Name and I live at @View.Address </p> Compare this to the equivalent using the aspx view engine <p> My name is <%:View.Name %> and I live at <%: View.Address %> </p> While not an earth shaking simplification, it is easier on the eyes.  As  we explore other features, this clean markup will become more and more valuable.

  Read the article

• DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network

  Even though IPv6 might not be that important within your local network it might be good to get yourself into shape, and be able to provide some details of your infrastructure automatically to your network clients. This is the second article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. IPv6 addresses for everyone (in your network) Okay, after setting up the configuration of your local system, it might be interesting to enable all your machines in your network to use IPv6. There are two options to solve this kind of requirement... Either you're busy like a bee and you go around to configure each and every system manually, or you're more the lazy and effective type of network administrator and you prefer to work with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Obviously, I'm of the second type. Enabling dynamic IPv6 address assignments can be done with a new or an existing instance of a DHCPd. In case of Ubuntu-based installation this might be isc-dhcp-server. The isc-dhcp-server allows address pooling for IP and IPv6 within the same package, you just have to run to independent daemons for each protocol version. First, check whether isc-dhcp-server is already installed and maybe running your machine like so: $ service isc-dhcp-server6 status In case, that the service is unknown, you have to install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server Please bear in mind that there is no designated installation package for IPv6. Okay, next you have to create a separate configuration file for IPv6 address pooling and network parameters called /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf. This file is not automatically provided by the package, compared to IPv4. Again, use your favourite editor and put the following lines: $ sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf authoritative;default-lease-time 14400; max-lease-time 86400;log-facility local7;subnet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 {    option dhcp6.name-servers 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844;    option dhcp6.domain-search "ios.mu";    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::100 2001:db8:bad:a55::199;    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 temporary;} Next, save the file and start the daemon as a foreground process to see whether it is going to listen to requests or not, like so: $ sudo /usr/sbin/dhcpd -6 -d -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf eth0 The parameters are explained quickly as -6 we want to run as a DHCPv6 server, -d we are sending log messages to the standard error descriptor (so you should monitor your /var/log/syslog file, too), and we explicitely want to use our newly created configuration file (-cf). You might also use the command switch -t to test the configuration file prior to running the server. In my case, I ended up with a couple of complaints by the server, especially reporting that the necessary lease file wouldn't exist. So, ensure that the lease file for your IPv6 address assignments is present: $ sudo touch /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases$ sudo chown dhcpd:dhcpd /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases Now, you should be good to go. Stop your foreground process and try to run the DHCPv6 server as a service on your system: $ sudo service isc-dhcp-server6 startisc-dhcp-server6 start/running, process 15883 Check your log file /var/log/syslog for any kind of problems. Refer to the man-pages of isc-dhcp-server and you might check out Chapter 22.6 of Peter Bieringer's IPv6 Howto. The instructions regarding DHCPv6 on the Ubuntu Wiki are not as complete as expected and it might not be as helpful as this article or Peter's HOWTO. But see for yourself. Does the client get an IPv6 address? Running a DHCPv6 server on your local network surely comes in handy but it has to work properly. The following paragraphs describe briefly how to check the IPv6 configuration of your clients, Linux - ifconfig or ip command First, you have enable IPv6 on your Linux by specifying the necessary directives in the /etc/network/interfaces file, like so: $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces iface eth1 inet6 dhcp Note: Your network device might be eth0 - please don't just copy my configuration lines. Then, either restart your network subsystem, or enable the device manually using the dhclient command with IPv6 switch, like so: $ sudo dhclient -6 You would either use the ifconfig or (if installed) the ip command to check the configuration of your network device like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth1eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:09:5d:8d:98            inet addr:192.168.160.147  Bcast:192.168.160.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::193/64 Scope:Global          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5d:8d98/64 Scope:Link          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1 Looks good, the client has an IPv6 assignment. Now, let's see whether DNS information has been provided, too. $ less /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTENnameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844nameserver 192.168.1.2nameserver 127.0.1.1search ios.mu Nicely done. Windows - netsh Per description on TechNet the netsh is defined as following: "Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Netsh also provides a scripting feature that allows you to run a group of commands in batch mode against a specified computer. Netsh can also save a configuration script in a text file for archival purposes or to help you configure other servers." And even though TechNet states that it applies to Windows Server (only), it is also available on Windows client operating systems, like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In order to get or even set information related to IPv6 protocol, we have to switch the netsh interface context prior to our queries. Open a command prompt in Windows and run the following statements: C:\Users\joki>netshnetsh>interface ipv6netsh interface ipv6>show interfaces Select the device index from the Idx column to get more details about the IPv6 address and DNS server information (here: I'm going to use my WiFi device with device index 11), like so: netsh interface ipv6>show address 11 Okay, address information has been provided. Now, let's check the details about DNS and resolving host names: netsh interface ipv6> show dnsservers 11 Okay, that looks good already. Our Windows client has a valid IPv6 address lease with lifetime information and details about the configured DNS servers. Talking about DNS server... Your clients should be able to connect to your network servers via IPv6 using hostnames instead of IPv6 addresses. Please read on about how to enable a local named with IPv6.

  Read the article

• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

  Read the article

• The DOS DEBUG Environment

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I thought I would go back in time and have a look at the DEBUG command that has been available since the beginning of dawn in DOS, MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. up to today I always knew it was there, but had no clue on how to use it so for those that are interested this might be a great geek party trick to pull out when you want the awe the younger generation and want to show them what “real” programming is about. But wait, you will have to do it relatively quickly as it seems like DEBUG was finally dumped from the Windows group in Windows 7. Not to worry, pull out that Windows XP box which will get you even more geek points and you can still poke DEBUG a bit. So, for those that are interested and want to find out a bit about the history of DEBUG read the wiki link here. That all put aside, lets get our hands dirty.. How to Start DEBUG in Windows Make sure your version of Windows supports DEBUG. Open up a console window Make a directory where you want to play with debug – in my instance I called it C221 Enter the directory and type Debug You will get a response with a – as illustrated in the image below…   The commands available in DEBUG There are several commands available in DEBUG. The most common ones are A (Assemble) R (Register) T (Trace) G (Go) D (Dump or Display) U (Unassemble) E (Enter) P (Proceed) N (Name) L (Load) W (Write) H (Hexadecimal) I (Input) O (Output) Q (Quit) I am not going to cover all these commands, but what I will do is go through a few of them briefly. A is for Assemble Command (to write code) The A command translates assembly language statements into machine code. It is quite useful for writing small assembly programs. Below I have written a very basic assembly program. The code typed out is as follows mov ax,0015 mov cx,0023 sub cx,ax mov [120],al mov cl,[120]A nop R is for Register (to jump to a point in memory) The r command turns out to be one of the most frequent commands you will use in DEBUG. It allows you to view the contents of registers and to change their values. It can be used with the following combinations… R – Displays the contents of all the registers R f – Displays the flags register R register_name – Displays the contents of a specific register All three methods are illustrated in the image above T is for Trace (To execute a program step by step) The t command allows us to execute the program step by step. Before we can trace the program we need to point back to the beginning of the program. We do this by typing in r ip, which moves us back to memory point 100. We then type trace which executes the first line of code (line 100) (As shown in the image below starting from the red arrow). You can see from the above image that the register AX now contains 0015 as per our instruction mov ax,0015 You can also see that the IP points to line 0103 which has the MOV CX,0023 command If we type t again it will now execute the second line of the program which moves 23 in the cx register. Again, we can see that the line of code was executed and that the CX register now holds the value of 23. What I would like to highlight now is the section underlined in red. These are the status flags. The ones we are going to look at now are 1st (NV), 4th (PL), 5th (NZ) & 8th (NC) NV means no overflow, the alternate would be OV PL means that the sign of the previous arithmetic operation was Plus, the alternate would be NG (Negative) NZ means that the results of the previous arithmetic operation operation was Not Zero, the alternate would be ZR NC means that No final Carry resulted from the previous arithmetic operation. CY means that there was a final Carry. We could now follow this process of entering the t command until the entire program is executed line by line. G is for Go (To execute a program up to a certain line number) So we have looked at executing a program line by line, which is fine if your program is minuscule BUT totally unpractical if we have any decent sized program. A quicker way to run some lines of code is to use the G command. The ‘g’ command executes a program up to a certain specified point. It can be used in connection with the the reset IP command. You would set your initial point and then run the G command with the line you want to end on. P is for Proceed (Similar to trace but slightly more streamlined) Another command similar to trace is the proceed command. All that the p command does is if it is called and it encounters a CALL, INT or LOOP command it terminates the program execution. In the example below I modified our example program to include an int 20 at the end of it as illustrated in the image below… Then when executing the code when I encountered the int 20 command I typed the P command and the program terminated normally (illustrated below). D is for Dump (or for those more polite Display) So, we have all these assembly lines of code, but if you have ever opened up an exe or com file in a text/hex editor, it looks nothing like assembly code. The D command is a way that we can see what our code looks like in memory (or in a hex editor). If we examined the image above, we can see that Debug is storing our assembly code with each instruction following immediately after the previous one. For instance in memory address 110 we have int and 111 we have 20. If we examine the dump of memory we can see at memory point 110 CD is stored and at memory point 111 20 is stored. U is for Unassemble (or Convert Machine code to Assembly Code) So up to now we have gone through a bunch of commands, but probably one of the most useful is the U command. Let’s say we don’t understand machine code so well and so instead we want to see it in its equivalent assembly code. We can type the U command followed by the start memory point, followed by the end memory point and it will show us the assembly code equivalent of the machine code. E is for a bunch of things… The E command can be used for a bunch of things… One example is to enter data or machine code instructions directly into memory. It can also be used to display the contents of memory locations. I am not going to worry to much about it in this post. N / L / W is for Name, Load & Write So we have written out assembly code in debug, and now we want to save it to disk, or write it as a com file or load it. This is where the N, L & W command come in handy. The n command is used to give a name to the executable program file and is pretty simple to use. The w command is a bit trickier. It saves to disk all the memory between point bx and point cx so you need to specify the bx memory address and the cx memory address for it to write your code. Let’s look at an example illustrated below. You do this by calling the r command followed by the either bx or cx. We can then go to the directory where we were working and will see the new file with the name we specified. The L command is relatively simple. You would first specify the name of the file you would like to load using the N command, and then call the L command. Q is for Quit The last command that I am going to write about in this post is the Q command. Simply put, calling the Q command exits DEBUG. Commands we did not Cover Out of the standard DEBUG commands we covered A, T, G, D, U, E, P, R, N, L & W. The ones we did not cover were H, I & O – I might make mention of these in a later post, but for the basics they are not really needed. Some Useful Resources Please note this post is based on the COS2213 handouts for UNISA A Guide to DEBUG - http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/debug/debug.htm#NT

  Read the article

• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

  Read the article

• How I do VCS

  - by Wes McClure

  After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267  | Next Page >