static reflection - Page 274

FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo getting old version of an exe swapped at runtime

- by Richard

I have a program executing in c# that is sometimes updated while it is running by swapping the exe to a new one. I want the program to routinely check if it has been updated and if so, restart. I use the following function to do this. public static bool DoINeedToRestart(string exe_name) { Version cur_version = new Version(MainProgram.StartVersion); Version file_version = new Version(GetProductVersion(exe_name)); MessageBox.Show("Comparing cur_version " + cur_version.ToString() + " with " + file_version.ToString()); if (file_version > cur_version) { return true; } return false; } public static string GetProductVersion(string path_name) { FileVersionInfo myFI = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path_name); return myFI.FileVersion; } MainProgram.StartVersion is set when the program is started to be the current version using the GetProductVersion(exe_name) exe_name is set to be the name of the executable that is being updated. The problem I have is once the MainProgram.exe file has been updated (I verify this manually by looking at the file properties and checking the file version), the GetProductVersion still returns the old file version and I have no idea why! Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Class Inside Structure

- by Knvn

Could some one please explain, What happens when a reference type is defined inside the value type. I write the following code: namespace ClassInsideStruct { class ClassInsideStruct { static void Main(string[] args) { ValueType ObjVal = new ValueType(10); ObjVal.Display(); ValueType.ReferenceType ObjValRef = new ValueType.ReferenceType(10); ObjValRef.Display(); Test(ObjVal, ObjValRef); ObjVal.Display(); ObjValRef.Display(); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void Test(ValueType v, ValueType.ReferenceType r) { v.SValue = 50; r.RValue = 50; } } struct ValueType { int StructNum; ReferenceType ObjRef; public ValueType(int i) { StructNum = i; ObjRef = new ReferenceType(i); } public int SValue { get { return StructNum; } set { StructNum = value; ObjRef.RValue = value; } } public void Display() { Console.WriteLine("ValueType: " + StructNum); Console.Write("ReferenceType Inside ValueType Instance: "); ObjRef.Display(); } public class ReferenceType { int ClassNum; public ReferenceType(int i) { ClassNum = i; } public void Display() { Console.WriteLine("Reference Type: " + ClassNum); } public int RValue { get { return ClassNum; } set { ClassNum = value; } } } } } Which outputs: ValueType: 10 ReferenceType Inside ValueType Instance: Reference Type: 10 Reference Type: 10 ValueType: 10 ReferenceType Inside ValueType Instance: Reference Type: 50 Reference Type: 50 I'm curious to know, after calling the method Test(ObjVal, ObjValRef), how the values of ReferenceType is changed to 50 which resides inside the ValueType who's value is not changed?

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java:25: '.class' expected error while merging arrays

- by user3677712

Here is my code, it is asking me to call a class, I am confused as to do this. Noob to java, so any help would be greatly appreciated. line 25 is where the error occurs. This program is merging two arrays together into a new array. public class Merge{ public static void main(String[] args){ int[] a = {1, 1, 4, 5, 7}; int[] b = {2, 4, 6, 8}; int[] mergedArray = merge(a, b); for(int i = 0; i < mergedArray.length; i++){ System.out.print(mergedArray[i] + " "); } } public static int[] merge(int[] a, int[] b){ // WRITE CODE HERE int[] mergedArray = new int[a.length[] + b.length[]]; int i = 0, j = 0, k = 0; while (i < a.length() && j < b.length()) //error occurs at this line { if (a[i] < b[j]) { mergedArray[k] = a[i]; i++; } else { mergedArray[k] = b[j]; j++; } k++; } while (i < a.length()) { mergedArray[k] = a[i]; i++; k++; } while (j < b.length()) { mergedArray[k] = b[j]; j++; k++; } return mergedArray; } } This program is merging two arrays together into a new array.

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gmail app 504 server timeout

- by Hui

this is the part of code I use for getting info from gmail, it's working alright on my localhost, but somehow when i deploy it online, I got 504 gateway timeout error. Did I missed something in my code? can someone give some advices , thanks a lot public class GetGmail { static String last = null; public static ArrayList run(String username, String password, String lastloggin)throws Exception { ArrayList result = null; System.out.println("Getting Gmail......"); last = lastloggin; Properties props = System.getProperties(); props.setProperty("mail.store.protocol", "imaps"); try { Session session = Session.getDefaultInstance(props, null); Store store = session.getStore("imaps"); store.connect("imap.googlemail.com", username, password); result = readMessage(store); store.close(); } catch (NoSuchProviderException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } catch (MessagingException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } return result; } }

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c# getting file version of a swapped exe at runtime

- by Richard

I have a program executing in c# that is sometimes updated while it is running by swapping the exe to a new one. I want the program to routinely check if it has been updated and if so, restart. I use the following function to do this. public static bool DoINeedToRestart(string exe_name) { Version cur_version = new Version(MainProgram.StartVersion); Version file_version = new Version(GetProductVersion(exe_name)); MessageBox.Show("Comparing cur_version " + cur_version.ToString() + " with " + file_version.ToString()); if (file_version > cur_version) { return true; } return false; } public static string GetProductVersion(string path_name) { FileVersionInfo myFI = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path_name); return myFI.FileVersion; } StartVersion is set when the program is started to be the current version using the GetProductVersion(exe_name). exe_name is set to be the name of the executable that is being updated. The problem I have is once the MainProgram.exe file has been updated (I verify this manually by looking at the file properties and checking the file version), the GetProductVersion still returns the old file version and I have no idea why! Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Removing the XML Formatter from ASP.NET Web API Applications

- by Rick Strahl

ASP.NET Web API's default output format is supposed to be JSON, but when I access my Web APIs using the browser address bar I'm always seeing an XML result instead. When working on AJAX application I like to test many of my AJAX APIs with the browser while working on them. While I can't debug all requests this way, GET requests are easy to test in the browser especially if you have JSON viewing options set up in your various browsers. If I preview a Web API request in most browsers I get an XML response like this: Why is that? Web API checks the HTTP Accept headers of a request to determine what type of output it should return by looking for content typed that it has formatters registered for. This automatic negotiation is one of the great features of Web API because it makes it easy and transparent to request different kinds of output from the server. In the case of browsers it turns out that most send Accept headers that look like this (Chrome in this case): Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Web API inspects the entire list of headers from left to right (plus the quality/priority flag q=) and tries to find a media type that matches its list of supported media types in the list of formatters registered. In this case it matches application/xml to the Xml formatter and so that's what gets returned and displayed. To verify that Web API indeed defaults to JSON output by default you can open the request in Fiddler and pop it into the Request Composer, remove the application/xml header and see that the output returned comes back in JSON instead. An accept header like this: Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,*/*;q=0.9 or leaving the Accept header out altogether should give you a JSON response. Interestingly enough Internet Explorer 9 also displays JSON because it doesn't include an application/xml Accept header: Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */* which for once actually seems more sensible. Removing the XML Formatter We can't easily change the browser Accept headers (actually you can by delving into the config but it's a bit of a hassle), so can we change the behavior on the server? When working on AJAX applications I tend to not be interested in XML results and I always want to see JSON results at least during development. Web API uses a collection of formatters and you can go through this list and remove the ones you don't want to use - in this case the XmlMediaTypeFormatter. To do this you can work with the HttpConfiguration object and the static GlobalConfiguration object used to configure it: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // remove default Xml handler var matches = config.Formatters .Where(f = f.SupportedMediaTypes .Where(m = m.MediaType.ToString() == "application/xml" || m.MediaType.ToString() == "text/xml") .Count() 0) .ToList() ; foreach (var match in matches) config.Formatters.Remove(match); } } That LINQ code is quite a mouthful of nested collections, but it does the trick to remove the formatter based on the content type. You can also look for the specific formatter (XmlMediatTypeFormatter) by its type name which is simpler, but it's better to search for the supported types as this will work even if there are other custom formatters added. Once removed, now the browser request results in a JSON response: It's a simple solution to a small debugging task that's made my life easier. Maybe you find it useful too…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api ASP.NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Programação paralela no .NET Framework 4 – Parte II

- by anobre

Olá pessoal, tudo bem? Este post é uma continuação da série iniciada neste outro post, sobre programação paralela. Meu objetivo hoje é apresentar o PLINQ, algo que poderá ser utilizado imediatamente nos projetos de vocês. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) PLINQ nada mais é que uma implementação de programação paralela ao nosso famoso LINQ, através de métodos de extensão. O LINQ foi lançado com a versão 3.0 na plataforma .NET, apresentando uma maneira muito mais fácil e segura de manipular coleções IEnumerable ou IEnumerable<T>. O que veremos hoje é a “alteração” do LINQ to Objects, que é direcionado a coleções de objetos em memória. A principal diferença entre o LINQ to Objects “normal” e o paralelo é que na segunda opção o processamento é realizado tentando utilizar todos os recursos disponíveis para tal, obtendo uma melhora significante de performance. CUIDADO: Nem todas as operações ficam mais rápidas utilizando recursos de paralelismo. Não deixe de ler a seção “Performance” abaixo. ParallelEnumerable Tudo que a gente precisa para este post está organizado na classe ParallelEnumerable. Esta classe contém os métodos que iremos utilizar neste post, e muito mais: AsParallel AsSequential AsOrdered AsUnordered WithCancellation WithDegreeOfParallelism WithMergeOptions WithExecutionMode ForAll … O exemplo mais básico de como executar um código PLINQ é utilizando o métodos AsParallel, como o exemplo: var source = Enumerable.Range(1, 10000); var evenNums = from num in source.AsParallel() where Compute(num) > 0 select num; Algo tão interessante quanto esta facilidade é que o PLINQ não executa sempre de forma paralela. Dependendo da situação e da análise de alguns itens no cenário de execução, talvez seja mais adequado executar o código de forma sequencial – e nativamente o próprio PLINQ faz esta escolha. É possível forçar a execução para sempre utilizar o paralelismo, caso seja necessário. Utilize o método WithExecutionMode no seu código PLINQ. Um teste muito simples onde podemos visualizar a diferença é demonstrado abaixo: static void Main(string[] args) { IEnumerable<int> numbers = Enumerable.Range(1, 1000); IEnumerable<int> results = from n in numbers.AsParallel() where IsDivisibleByFive(n) select n; Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); IList<int> resultsList = results.ToList(); Console.WriteLine("{0} itens", resultsList.Count()); sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Tempo de execução: {0} ms", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); Console.WriteLine("Fim..."); Console.ReadKey(true); } static bool IsDivisibleByFive(int i) { Thread.SpinWait(2000000); return i % 5 == 0; } Basta remover o AsParallel da instrução LINQ que você terá uma noção prática da diferença de performance. 1. Instrução utilizando AsParallel 2. Instrução sem utilizar paralelismo Performance Apesar de todos os benefícios, não podemos utilizar PLINQ sem conhecer todos os seus detalhes. Lembre-se de fazer as perguntas básicas: Eu tenho trabalho suficiente que justifique utilizar paralelismo? Mesmo com o overhead do PLINQ, vamos ter algum benefício? Por este motivo, visite este link e conheça todos os aspectos, antes de utilizar os recursos disponíveis. Conclusão Utilizar recursos de paralelismo é ótimo, aumenta a performance, utiliza o investimento realizado em hardware – tudo isso sem custo de produtividade. Porém, não podemos usufruir de qualquer tipo de tecnologia sem conhece-la a fundo antes. Portanto, faça bom uso, mas não esqueça de manter o conhecimento a frente da empolgação. Abraços.

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Parallelism in .NET – Part 20, Using Task with Existing APIs

- by Reed

Although the Task class provides a huge amount of flexibility for handling asynchronous actions, the .NET Framework still contains a large number of APIs that are based on the previous asynchronous programming model. While Task and Task<T> provide a much nicer syntax as well as extending the flexibility, allowing features such as continuations based on multiple tasks, the existing APIs don’t directly support this workflow. There is a method in the TaskFactory class which can be used to adapt the existing APIs to the new Task class: TaskFactory.FromAsync. This method provides a way to convert from the BeginOperation/EndOperation method pair syntax common through .NET Framework directly to a Task<T> containing the results of the operation in the task’s Result parameter. While this method does exist, it unfortunately comes at a cost – the method overloads are far from simple to decipher, and the resulting code is not always as easily understood as newer code based directly on the Task class. For example, a single call to handle WebRequest.BeginGetResponse/EndGetReponse, one of the easiest “pairs” of methods to use, looks like the following: var task = Task.Factory.FromAsync<WebResponse>( request.BeginGetResponse, request.EndGetResponse, null); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The compiler is unfortunately unable to infer the correct type, and, as a result, the WebReponse must be explicitly mentioned in the method call. As a result, I typically recommend wrapping this into an extension method to ease use. For example, I would place the above in an extension method like: public static class WebRequestExtensions { public static Task<WebResponse> GetReponseAsync(this WebRequest request) { return Task.Factory.FromAsync<WebResponse>( request.BeginGetResponse, request.EndGetResponse, null); } } This dramatically simplifies usage. For example, if we wanted to asynchronously check to see if this blog supported XHTML 1.0, and report that in a text box to the user, we could do: var webRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.reedcopsey.com"); webRequest.GetReponseAsync().ContinueWith(t => { using (var sr = new StreamReader(t.Result.GetResponseStream())) { string str = sr.ReadLine();; this.textBox1.Text = string.Format("Page at {0} supports XHTML 1.0: {1}", t.Result.ResponseUri, str.Contains("XHTML 1.0")); } }, TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext()); By using a continuation with a TaskScheduler based on the current synchronization context, we can keep this request asynchronous, check based on the first line of the response string, and report the results back on our UI directly.

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Initializing and drawing a mesh using OpenTK

- by Boreal

I'm implementing a "Mesh" class to use in my OpenTK game. You pass in a vertex array and an index array, and then you can call Mesh.Draw() to draw it using a shader. I've heard VBO's and VAO's are the way to go for this approach, but nowhere have I found a guide that shows how to get Data Video Memory Shader. Can someone give me a quick rundown of how this works? EDIT: So far, I have this: struct Vertex { public Vector3 position; public Vector3 normal; public Vector3 color; public static int memSize = 9 * sizeof(float); public static byte[] memOffset = { 0, 3 * sizeof(float), 6 * sizeof(float) }; } class Mesh { private uint vbo; private uint ibo; // stores the numbers of vertices and indices private int numVertices; private int numIndices; public Mesh(int numVertices, Vertex[] vertices, int numIndices, ushort[] indices) { // set numbers this.numVertices = numVertices; this.numIndices = numIndices; // generate buffers GL.GenBuffers(1, out vbo); GL.GenBuffers(1, out ibo); GL.BindBuffer(BufferTarget.ArrayBuffer, vbo); GL.BindBuffer(BufferTarget.ElementArrayBuffer, ibo); // send data to the buffers GL.BufferData(BufferTarget.ArrayBuffer, new IntPtr(Vertex.memSize * numVertices), vertices, BufferUsageHint.StaticDraw); GL.BufferData(BufferTarget.ElementArrayBuffer, new IntPtr(sizeof(ushort) * numIndices), indices, BufferUsageHint.StaticDraw); } public void Render() { // bind buffers GL.BindBuffer(BufferTarget.ArrayBuffer, vbo); GL.BindBuffer(BufferTarget.ElementArrayBuffer, ibo); // define offsets GL.VertexPointer(3, VertexPointerType.Float, Vertex.memSize, new IntPtr(Vertex.memOffset[0])); GL.NormalPointer(NormalPointerType.Float, Vertex.memSize, new IntPtr(Vertex.memOffset[1])); GL.ColorPointer(3, ColorPointerType.Float, Vertex.memSize, new IntPtr(Vertex.memOffset[2])); // draw GL.DrawElements(BeginMode.Triangles, numIndices, DrawElementsType.UnsignedInt, (IntPtr)0); } } class Application : GameWindow { Mesh triangle; protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) { base.OnLoad(e); GL.ClearColor(0.1f, 0.2f, 0.5f, 0.0f); GL.Enable(EnableCap.DepthTest); GL.Enable(EnableCap.VertexArray); GL.Enable(EnableCap.NormalArray); GL.Enable(EnableCap.ColorArray); Vertex v0 = new Vertex(); v0.position = new Vector3(-1.0f, -1.0f, 4.0f); v0.normal = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f); v0.color = new Vector3(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); Vertex v1 = new Vertex(); v1.position = new Vector3(1.0f, -1.0f, 4.0f); v1.normal = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f); v1.color = new Vector3(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); Vertex v2 = new Vertex(); v2.position = new Vector3(0.0f, 1.0f, 4.0f); v2.normal = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f); v2.color = new Vector3(0.2f, 0.9f, 1.0f); Vertex[] va = { v0, v1, v2 }; ushort[] ia = { 0, 1, 2 }; triangle = new Mesh(3, va, 3, ia); } protected override void OnRenderFrame(FrameEventArgs e) { base.OnRenderFrame(e); GL.Clear(ClearBufferMask.ColorBufferBit | ClearBufferMask.DepthBufferBit); Matrix4 modelview = Matrix4.LookAt(Vector3.Zero, Vector3.UnitZ, Vector3.UnitY); GL.MatrixMode(MatrixMode.Modelview); GL.LoadMatrix(ref modelview); triangle.Render(); SwapBuffers(); } } It doesn't draw anything.

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OBIEE 11.1.1 - Introduction to OBIEE 11g Full Sample App

- by user809526

Isn't it nice to discover OBIEE 11g around a nice "How To" catalog of features? to observe OBI and Essbase relationships at work? to discover TimesTen? The OBIEE 11g Full Sample App (FSA) is a comprehensive collection of examples designed to demonstrate the latest Oracle BIEE 11g capabilities and design best practices: Enhanced visualizations as Geo-spacial maps and interactive dashboards, Action Framework, BI Publisher, Scorecard and Strategy Management, Mobile style sheets, Semantic layer modeling, Multi-source federation, Integration with products such as Essbase, Oracle OLAP, ODM, TimesTen, ODI and more The FSA is intended to be comprehensive, it is big (see CAVEAT below). The FSA is not an Oracle product, it is a good will free deployment of OBIEE/Essbase designed to exemplify OBIEE features, infrastructure and security around the Fusion Middleware components. Its contents and code are distributed free for demonstrative purposes only. It is neither maintained nor supported by Oracle as a licensed product. The OBIEE Full Sample App is independent of the default Sample App that comes with the OBIEE product. BENEFITS The FSA helps as a demonstrator of OBIEE 11g best practices, a tutorial, an environment "Test & Scrap", a SR bench (regression, conflicts), a tuning bench, a quick ready made POC seed for projects, a security options environment, ... The FSA - Is organized around a catalog of functional features - Has been deployed over 1000 times, it should be stable RELEASE The Full Sample App (V107) is bound to OBIEE 11.1.1.5 and Essbase 11.1.2.1 (November 2011). The FSA release dates are independent of the Product GA date (OBIEE). In early December 2011, a new functional Patch (V110) is released. It is easily applied (in less than 15 mins) on top of OBIEE SampleApp 11.1.1.5 (V107). The patch (V110) includes additional functional examples: 1. Web Catalog Statistics Application: Provides detailed insight into your web catalog content, dormant catalog objects, webcat impact analysis for metadata changes and more 2. Data inflation Scripts: A set of simple SQL procedures to quickly inflate SampleApp Fact and Dimension data to millions of records in a few minutes 3. Public Content Extensions Framework: A patching framework for public examples and contributions leveraging SampleApp 4. Additional report examples (including bridge report, external chart integrations) and bug fixes DISTRIBUTION as VBox image (November 2011) The ready made VBox image is designed to run on Virtual Box. It can be converted to VMware (see another BLOG). 1/ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/obiee-samples-167534.html VBox Image Deployment Guide Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf - VBox image key file The above http URL provides the user:password for the ftp URLs below. 2/ ftp://user:[email protected]/static/SampleAppV107/ 12 "7-zip" files Sampleapp_v107_GA_7_20.7z.001 -> .012 We recommend 7-zip file manager for unzipping (http://www.7-zip.org/). Select Unzip here option, it will create the contents under a directory named "SampleApp_10722". On Windows, it is important to download and save zip file under the root directory (e.g. C:\ or D:\) because of possible long pathnames. 3/ ftp://user:[email protected]/static/SampleAppV107/Unzipped_Version/ 4 files Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk[1234].vmdk Important note: Check the provided checksums (md5sum). Please do it! DISTRIBUTION as Installation files for existing OBI 11.1.1.5 (November 2011) http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/obiee-samples-167534.html Install files Deployment Guide SampleApp_10722_1.zip - 198 MB CAVEAT Many computers have RAM chips problems that keep often silent ... until you manipulate big files. It is strongly advised you run some memory check program eg MEMTEST in GRUB boot manager. Running md5sum repeatedly onto the very same big file must be consistent [same result], else a hardware memory problem is suspected. For Virtual Box, you should most likely enable VT-X (Vanderpool) hardware virtualization in BIOS. A free disk space of 80 GB is required to perform safely the VBox image installation. A Virtual Machine of minimum 6 to 7 GB memory fits the needs of combining OBIEE and Essbase execution.

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JustMock and Moles – A short overview for TDD alpha geeks

- by RoyOsherove

People have been lurking near my house, asking me to write something about Moles and JustMock, so I’ll try to be as objective as possible, taking in the fact that I work at Typemock. If I were NOT working at Typemock I’d write: JustMock JustMock tries to be Typemock at so many levels it’s not even funny. Technically they work the same and the API almost looks like it’s a search and replace work based on the Isolator API (awesome compliment!), but JustMock still has too many growing pains and bugs to be usable. Also, JustMock is missing alot of the legacy abilities such as Non public faking, faking all types and various other things that are really needed in real legacy code. Biggest thing (in terms of isolation integration) is that it does not integrate with other profilers such as coverage, NCover etc.) When JustMock comes out of beta, I feel that it should cost about half as Isolator costs, as it currently provides about half the abilities. Moles Moles is an addon of Pex and was originally only intended to work within the Pex environment. It started as a research project and now it’s a power-tool for VS (so it’s a separate install) Now it’s it’s own little stubbing framework. It’s not really an Isolation framework in the classic sense, because it does not provide any kind of API built in to verify object interactions. You have to use manual flags all on your own to do that. It generates two types of classes per assembly: Manual Stubs(just like you’d hand code them) and Mole classes. Each Mole class is a special API to change and break the behavior that the corresponding type. so MDateTime is how you change behavior for DateTime. In that sense the API is al over the place, and it can become highly unreadable and unmentionable over time in your test. Also, the Moles API isn’t really designed to deal with real Legacy code. It only deals with public types and methods. anything internal or private is ignored and you can’t change its behavior. You also can’t control static constructors. That takes about 95% of legacy scenarios out of the picture if that’s what you’re trying to use it for. Personally, I found it hard to get used to the idea of two parallel APIs for different abilities, and when to choose which. and I know this stuff. I would expect more usability from the API to make it more widely used. I don’t think that Moles in planning to go that route. Publishing it as an Isolation framework is really an afterthought of a tool that was design with a specific task in mind, and generic Isolation isn’t it. it’s only hope is DEQ – a simple code example that shows a simple Isolation API built on the Moles generic engine. Moles can and should be used for very simple cases of detouring functionality such a simple static methods or interfaces and virtual functions (like rhinomock and MOQ do). Oh, Wait. Ah, good thing I work at Typemock. I won’t write all that. I’ll just write: JustMock and Moles are great tools that enlarge the market space for isolation related technologies, and they prove that the idea of productivity and unit testing can go hand in hand and get people hooked. I look forward to compete with them at this growing market.

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Subterranean IL: Pseudo custom attributes

- by Simon Cooper

Custom attributes were designed to make the .NET framework extensible; if a .NET language needs to store additional metadata on an item that isn't expressible in IL, then an attribute could be applied to the IL item to represent this metadata. For instance, the C# compiler uses DecimalConstantAttribute and DateTimeConstantAttribute to represent compile-time decimal or datetime constants, which aren't allowed in pure IL, and FixedBufferAttribute to represent fixed struct fields. How attributes are compiled Within a .NET assembly are a series of tables containing all the metadata for items within the assembly; for instance, the TypeDef table stores metadata on all the types in the assembly, and MethodDef does the same for all the methods and constructors. Custom attribute information is stored in the CustomAttribute table, which has references to the IL item the attribute is applied to, the constructor used (which implies the type of attribute applied), and a binary blob representing the arguments and name/value pairs used in the attribute application. For example, the following C# class: [Obsolete("Please use MyClass2", true)] public class MyClass { // ... } corresponds to the following IL class definition: .class public MyClass { .custom instance void [mscorlib]System.ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool) = { string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true) } // ... } and results in the following entry in the CustomAttribute table: TypeDef(MyClass) MemberRef(ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool)) blob -> {string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true)} However, there are some attributes that don't compile in this way. Pseudo custom attributes Just like there are some concepts in a language that can't be represented in IL, there are some concepts in IL that can't be represented in a language. This is where pseudo custom attributes come into play. The most obvious of these is SerializableAttribute. Although it looks like an attribute, it doesn't compile to a CustomAttribute table entry; it instead sets the serializable bit directly within the TypeDef entry for the type. This flag is fully expressible within IL; this C#: [Serializable] public class MySerializableClass {} compiles to this IL: .class public serializable MySerializableClass {} For those interested, a full list of pseudo custom attributes is available here. For the rest of this post, I'll be concentrating on the ones that deal with P/Invoke. P/Invoke attributes P/Invoke is built right into the CLR at quite a deep level; there are 2 metadata tables within an assembly dedicated solely to p/invoke interop, and many more that affect it. Furthermore, all the attributes used to specify p/invoke methods in C# or VB have their own keywords and syntax within IL. For example, the following C# method declaration: [DllImport("mscorsn.dll", SetLastError = true)] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] private static extern bool StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string wszFilePath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] bool fForceVerification, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] ref bool pfWasVerified); compiles to the following IL definition: .method private static pinvokeimpl("mscorsn.dll" lasterr winapi) bool marshal(unsigned int8) StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( string marshal(lpwstr) wszFilePath, bool marshal(unsigned int8) fForceVerification, bool& marshal(unsigned int8) pfWasVerified) cil managed preservesig {} As you can see, all the p/invoke and marshal properties are specified directly in IL, rather than using attributes. And, rather than creating entries in CustomAttribute, a whole bunch of metadata is emitted to represent this information. This single method declaration results in the following metadata being output to the assembly: A MethodDef entry containing basic information on the method Four ParamDef entries for the 3 method parameters and return type An entry in ModuleRef to mscorsn.dll An entry in ImplMap linking ModuleRef and MethodDef, along with the name of the function to import and the pinvoke options (lasterr winapi) Four FieldMarshal entries containing the marshal information for each parameter. Phew! Applying attributes Most of the time, when you apply an attribute to an element, an entry in the CustomAttribute table will be created to represent that application. However, some attributes represent concepts in IL that aren't expressible in the language you're coding in, and can instead result in a single bit change (SerializableAttribute and NonSerializedAttribute), or many extra metadata table entries (the p/invoke attributes) being emitted to the output assembly.

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Hello World Pagelet

- by astemkov

Introduction The goal of this exercise is to give you a basic feel of how you can use Pagelet Producer to proxy a web page We will proxy a simple static Hello World web page, cut one section out of that page and present it as a pagelet that you can later insert on your own application page or to your portal page such as WebCenter Portal space or WebCenter Interaction community page. Hello World sample app This is the static web page we will work with: Let's assume the following: The Hello World web page is running on server http://appserver.company.com:1234/ The Hello World web page path is: http://appserver.company.com:1234/helloworld/ Initial Pagelet Producer setup Let's assume that the Pagelet Producer server is running on http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ First let's check that Pagelet Producer is up and running. In order to do that we just need to access the following URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ And this is what should be returned: Now you can access Pagelet Producer administration screens using this URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/admin This is how the UI looks: Now if you connect to the internet via proxy server, you need to configure proxy in Pagelet Producer settings. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Settings Click on "Proxy" Enter your proxy server configuration: Creating a resource First thing that you need to do is to create a resource for your web page. This will tell Pagelet Producer that all sub-paths of the web page should be proxied. It also will allow you to setup common rules of how your web page should be proxied and will serve as a container for your pagelets. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Resources Click on any existing resource (ex. welcome_resource) Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Select "Web" in the "Select Producer Type" dialog box and click "OK" Now after the resource is created let's click on "General" sub-item a specify the following values Name = AppServer Source URL = http://appserver.company.com:1234/ Destination URL = /appserver/ Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane After the resource is created our web page becomes accessible by the URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/appserver/helloworld/ So in original web page address Source URL is replaced with Pagelet Producer URL (http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets) + Destination URL Creating a pagelet Now let's create "Hello World" pagelet. Under the resource node activate Pagelets subnode Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Click on "General" sub-node of newly created pagelet and specify the following values Name = Hello_World Library = MyLib Library is used for logical grouping. The portals use the "Library" value to group pagelets in their respective UI's. For example, when adding pagelets to a WebCenter Portal space you would see the individual pagelets listed under the "Library" name. URL Suffix = helloworld/index.html this is where the Hello World page html is served from Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane The Library name can be anything you want, it doesn't have to match the resource name at all. It is used as a logical grouping of pagelets, and you can include pagelets from multiple resources into the same library or create a new library for each pagelet. After you save the pagelet you can access it here: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/MyLib/Hello_World which is : http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/ + [Library] + [Name] Or to test the injection of a pagelet into iframe you can click on the pagelets "Documentation" sub-node and use "Access Pagelet using REST" URL: This is what we will see: Clipping The pagelet that we just created covers the whole web page, but we want just the "Hello World" segment of it. So let's clip it. Under the Hello_World pagelet node activate Clipper sub-node Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Specify a Name for newly created clipper. For example: "c1" Click on "Content" sub-node of the clipper Click on "Launch Clipper" button New browser window will open By moving a mouse pointer over the web page select the area you want to clip: Click left mouse button - the browser window will disappear and you will see that Clipping Path was automatically generated Now let's save and access the link from the "Documentation" page again Here's our pagelet nicely clipped and ready for being used on your Web Center Space

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Using Lambdas for return values in Rhino.Mocks

- by PSteele

In a recent StackOverflow question, someone showed some sample code they’d like to be able to use. The particular syntax they used isn’t supported by Rhino.Mocks, but it was an interesting idea that I thought could be easily implemented with an extension method. Background When stubbing a method return value, Rhino.Mocks supports the following syntax: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Return(new Order()); The method signature is generic and therefore you get compile-time type checking that the object you’re returning matches the return value defined by the “GetSomething” method. You could also have Rhino.Mocks execute arbitrary code using the “Do” method: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Do((Func<Order>) (() => new Order())); This requires the cast though. It works, but isn’t as clean as the original poster wanted. They showed a simple example of something they’d like to see: dependency.Stub(s => s.GetSomething()).Return(() => new Order()); Very clean, simple and no casting required. While Rhino.Mocks doesn’t support this syntax, it’s easy to add it via an extension method. The Rhino.Mocks “Stub” method returns an IMethodOptions<T>. We just need to accept a Func<T> and use that as the return value. At first, this would seem straightforward: public static IMethodOptions<T> Return<T>(this IMethodOptions<T> opts, Func<T> factory) { opts.Return(factory()); return opts; } And this would work and would provide the syntax the user was looking for. But the problem with this is that you loose the late-bound semantics of a lambda. The Func<T> is executed immediately and stored as the return value. At the point you’re setting up your mocks and stubs (the “Arrange” part of “Arrange, Act, Assert”), you may not want the lambda executing – you probably want it delayed until the method is actually executed and Rhino.Mocks plugs in your return value. So let’s make a few small tweaks: public static IMethodOptions<T> Return<T>(this IMethodOptions<T> opts, Func<T> factory) { opts.Return(default(T)); // required for Rhino.Mocks on non-void methods opts.WhenCalled(mi => mi.ReturnValue = factory()); return opts; } As you can see, we still need to set up some kind of return value or Rhino.Mocks will complain as soon as it intercepts a call to our stubbed method. We use the “WhenCalled” method to set the return value equal to the execution of our lambda. This gives us the delayed execution we’re looking for and a nice syntax for lambda-based return values in Rhino.Mocks. Technorati Tags: .NET,Rhino.Mocks,Mocking,Extension Methods

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Reverse subarray of an array with O(1)

- by Babibu

I have an idea how to implement sub array reverse with O(1), not including precalculation such as reading the input. I will have many reverse operations, and I can't use the trivial solution of O(N). Edit: To be more clear I want to build data structure behind the array with access layer that knows about reversing requests and inverts the indexing logic as necessary when someone wants to iterate over the array. Edit 2: The data structure will only be used for iterations I been reading this and this and even this questions but they aren't helping. There are 3 cases that need to be taking care of: Regular reverse operation Reverse that including reversed area Intersection between reverse and part of other reversed area in the array Here is my implementation for the first two parts, I will need your help with the last one. This is the rule class: class Rule { public int startingIndex; public int weight; } It is used in my basic data structure City: public class City { Rule rule; private static AtomicInteger _counter = new AtomicInteger(-1); public final int id = _counter.incrementAndGet(); @Override public String toString() { return "" + id; } } This is the main class: public class CitiesList implements Iterable<City>, Iterator<City> { private int position; private int direction = 1; private ArrayList<City> cities; private ArrayDeque<City> citiesQeque = new ArrayDeque<>(); private LinkedList<Rule> rulesQeque = new LinkedList<>(); public void init(ArrayList<City> cities) { this.cities = cities; } public void swap(int index1, int index2){ Rule rule = new Rule(); rule.weight = Math.abs(index2 - index1); cities.get(index1).rule = rule; cities.get(index2 + 1).rule = rule; } @Override public void remove() { throw new IllegalStateException("Not implemented"); } @Override public City next() { City city = cities.get(position); if (citiesQeque.peek() == city){ citiesQeque.pop(); changeDirection(); position += (city.rule.weight + 1) * direction; city = cities.get(position); } if(city.rule != null){ if(city.rule != rulesQeque.peekLast()){ rulesQeque.add(city.rule); position += city.rule.weight * direction; changeDirection(); citiesQeque.push(city); } else{ rulesQeque.removeLast(); position += direction; } } else{ position += direction; } return city; } private void changeDirection() { direction *= -1; } @Override public boolean hasNext() { return position < cities.size(); } @Override public Iterator<City> iterator() { position = 0; return this; } } And here is a sample program: public static void main(String[] args) { ArrayList<City> list = new ArrayList<>(); for(int i = 0 ; i < 20; i++){ list.add(new City()); } CitiesList citiesList = new CitiesList(); citiesList.init(list); for (City city : citiesList) { System.out.print(city + " "); } System.out.println("\n******************"); citiesList.swap(4, 8); for (City city : citiesList) { System.out.print(city + " "); } System.out.println("\n******************"); citiesList.swap(2, 15); for (City city : citiesList) { System.out.print(city + " "); } } How do I handle reverse intersections?

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How can I back up my ubuntu system?

- by Eloff

I'm sure there's a lot of questions on here similar to this, and I've been reading them, but I still feel this warrants a new question. I want nightly, incremental backups (full disk images would waste a lot of space - unless compressed somehow.) Preferably rotating or deleting old backups when running out of space or after a fixed number of backups. I want to be able to quickly and painlessly restore my system from these backups. This is my first time running ubuntu as my main development machine and I know from my experience with it as a server and in virtual machines that I regularly manage to make it unbootable or damage it to the point of being unable to rescue it. So how would you recommend I do this? There are so many options out there I really don't know where to start. There seems to be a vocal school of thought that it's sufficient to backup your home directory and the list of installed packages from the package manager. I've already installed lots of things from source, or outside of the package manager (development tools, ides, compilers, graphics drivers, etc.) So at the very least, if I do not back up the operating system itself I need to grab all config files, all program binaries, all created but required files, etc. I'd rather backup too much than too little - an ubuntu install is tiny anyway. Also this drastically reduces the restore time, which would cost me more in my time than the extra storage space. I tried using Deja Dup to backup the root partition, excluding some things like /mnt /media /dev /proc etc. Although many websites assured me you can backup a running linux system this way - that seems to be false as it complained that it could not backup the following files: /boot/System.map-3.0.0-17-generic /boot/System.map-3.2.0-22-generic /boot/vmcoreinfo-3.0.0-17-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-17-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-22-generic /etc/.pwd.lock /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/LAN Connection /etc/apparmor.d/cache/lightdm-guest-session /etc/apparmor.d/cache/sbin.dhclient /etc/apparmor.d/cache/usr.bin.evince /etc/apparmor.d/cache/usr.lib.telepathy /etc/apparmor.d/cache/usr.sbin.cupsd /etc/apparmor.d/cache/usr.sbin.tcpdump /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg /etc/at.deny /etc/ati/inst_path_default /etc/ati/inst_path_override /etc/chatscripts /etc/cups/ssl /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf.O /etc/default/cacerts /etc/fuse.conf /etc/group- /etc/gshadow /etc/gshadow- /etc/mtab.fuselock /etc/passwd- /etc/ppp/chap-secrets /etc/ppp/pap-secrets /etc/ppp/peers /etc/security/opasswd /etc/shadow /etc/shadow- /etc/ssl/private /etc/sudoers /etc/sudoers.d/README /etc/ufw/after.rules /etc/ufw/after6.rules /etc/ufw/before.rules /etc/ufw/before6.rules /lib/ufw/user.rules /lib/ufw/user6.rules /lost+found /root /run/crond.reboot /run/cups/certs /run/lightdm /run/lock/whoopsie/lock /run/udisks /var/backups/group.bak /var/backups/gshadow.bak /var/backups/passwd.bak /var/backups/shadow.bak /var/cache/apt/archives/lock /var/cache/cups/job.cache /var/cache/cups/job.cache.O /var/cache/cups/ppds.dat /var/cache/debconf/passwords.dat /var/cache/ldconfig /var/cache/lightdm/dmrc /var/crash/_usr_lib_x86_64-linux-gnu_colord_colord.102.crash /var/lib/apt/lists/lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock /var/lib/dpkg/triggers/Lock /var/lib/lightdm /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db /var/lib/polkit-1 /var/lib/sudo /var/lib/urandom/random-seed /var/lib/ureadahead/pack /var/lib/ureadahead/run.pack /var/log/btmp /var/log/installer/casper.log /var/log/installer/debug /var/log/installer/partman /var/log/installer/syslog /var/log/installer/version /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log /var/log/lightdm/x-0.log /var/log/speech-dispatcher /var/log/upstart/alsa-restore.log /var/log/upstart/alsa-restore.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/console-setup.log /var/log/upstart/console-setup.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/container-detect.log /var/log/upstart/container-detect.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/hybrid-gfx.log /var/log/upstart/hybrid-gfx.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/modemmanager.log /var/log/upstart/modemmanager.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/module-init-tools.log /var/log/upstart/module-init-tools.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/procps-static-network-up.log /var/log/upstart/procps-static-network-up.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/procps-virtual-filesystems.log /var/log/upstart/procps-virtual-filesystems.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/rsyslog.log /var/log/upstart/rsyslog.log.1.gz /var/log/upstart/ureadahead.log /var/log/upstart/ureadahead.log.1.gz /var/spool/anacron/cron.daily /var/spool/anacron/cron.monthly /var/spool/anacron/cron.weekly /var/spool/cron/atjobs /var/spool/cron/atspool /var/spool/cron/crontabs /var/spool/cups

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Deploying a SharePoint 2007 theme using Features

- by Kelly Jones

I recently had a requirement to update the branding on an existing Windows SharePoint Services (WSS version 3.0) site. I needed to update the theme, along with the master page. An additional requirement is that my client likes to have all changes bundled up in SharePoint solutions. This makes it much easier to move code from dev to test to prod and more importantly, makes it easier to undo code migrations if any issues would arise (I agree with this approach). Updating the theme was easy enough. I created a new theme, along with a two new features. The first feature, scoped at the farm level, deploys the theme, adding it to the spthemes.xml file (in the 12 hive –> \Template\layouts\1033 folder). Here’s the method that I call from the feature activated event: private static void AddThemeToSpThemes(string id, string name, string description, string thumbnail, string preview, SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { XmlDocument spThemes = new XmlDocument(); //use GetGenericSetupPath to find the 12 hive folder string spThemesPath = SPUtility.GetGenericSetupPath(@"TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\spThemes.xml"); //load the spthemes file into our xmldocument, since it is just xml spThemes.Load(spThemesPath); XmlNode root = spThemes.DocumentElement; //search the themes file to see if our theme is already added bool found = false; foreach (XmlNode node in root.ChildNodes) { foreach (XmlNode prop in node.ChildNodes) { if (prop.Name.Equals("TemplateID")) { if (prop.InnerText.Equals(id)) { found = true; break; } } } if (found) { break; } } if (!found) //theme not found, so add it { //This is what we need to add: // <Templates> // <TemplateID>ThemeName</TemplateID> // <DisplayName>Theme Display Name</DisplayName> // <Description>My theme description</Description> // <Thumbnail>images/mythemethumb.gif</Thumbnail> // <Preview>images/mythemepreview.gif</Preview> // </Templates> StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<Templates><TemplateID>"); sb.Append(id); sb.Append("</TemplateID><DisplayName>"); sb.Append(name); sb.Append("</DisplayName><Description>"); sb.Append(description); sb.Append("</Description><Thumbnail>"); sb.Append(thumbnail); sb.Append("</Thumbnail><Preview>"); sb.Append(preview); sb.Append("</Preview></Templates>"); root.CreateNavigator().AppendChild(sb.ToString()); spThemes.Save(spThemesPath); } } Just as important, is the code that removes the theme when the feature is deactivated: private static void RemoveThemeFromSpThemes(string id) { XmlDocument spThemes = new XmlDocument(); string spThemesPath = HostingEnvironment.MapPath("/_layouts/") + @"1033\spThemes.xml"; spThemes.Load(spThemesPath); XmlNode root = spThemes.DocumentElement; foreach (XmlNode node in root.ChildNodes) { foreach (XmlNode prop in node.ChildNodes) { if (prop.Name.Equals("TemplateID")) { if (prop.InnerText.Equals(id)) { root.RemoveChild(node); spThemes.Save(spThemesPath); break; } } } } } So, that takes care of deploying the theme. In order to apply the theme to the web, my activate feature method looks like this: public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent) { curweb.ApplyTheme("myThemeName"); curweb.Update(); } } Deactivating is just as simple: public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent) { curweb.ApplyTheme("none"); curweb.Update(); } } Ok, that’s the code necessary to deploy, apply, un-apply, and retract the theme. Also, the solution (WSP file) contains the actual theme files. SO, next is the master page, which I’ll cover in my next blog post.

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256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

- by Alan Smith

For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour. This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005> define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2 diffuse 0.7 specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1 lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7 } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } } viewpoint { from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60 resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 } light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20> object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden } object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome } After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000 As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72 Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: · On-Premise o Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. · Windows Azure o Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment. The architecture of each worker role is shown below. The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" > <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> </Imports> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" /> </LocalResources> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1. The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2. PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3. DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4. The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5. A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6. The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7. The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() { // Set environment variables string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation); string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation); LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder"); string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath; JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs"); JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs"); CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes"); CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images"); RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource(); Frames = 0; while (true) { // Get the render job from the queue CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get(); if (jobMsg != null) { // Get the file details string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString; string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga"); string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg"); string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile); string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile); string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile); // Copy the scene file to local storage sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath); // Run the ray tracer. string polyrayArguments = string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath); Process polyRayProcess = new Process(); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments; polyRayProcess.Start(); polyRayProcess.WaitForExit(); // Convert the image string dtaArguments = string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath)); Process dtaProcess = new Process(); dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath); dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments; dtaProcess.Start(); dtaProcess.WaitForExit(); // Upload the image to blob storage imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath); // Add a download job. downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile); // Delete the render job message jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg); Frames++; } else { Thread.Sleep(1000); } // Log the worker role activity. roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames); } } Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage. public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity { public string ServerName { get; set; } public string Status { get; set; } public DateTime StartTime { get; set; } public DateTime EndTime { get; set; } public long SecondsRunning { get; set; } public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; } public int Frames { get; set; } public string Comment { get; set; } public RoleLifecycle() { } public RoleLifecycle(string roleName) { PartitionKey = roleName; RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey(); Status = "Started"; StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow; LastActiveTime = StartTime; EndTime = StartTime; SecondsRunning = 0; Frames = 0; } } A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="16" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames. Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation. With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes. At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="256" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames. Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds. We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes. The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each. Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. · Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. · The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. · Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. · No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. · Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. · Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. · Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. · Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. · If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. · Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. · Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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Templated Razor Delegates – Phil Haack

- by nmarun

This post is largely based off of Phil Haack’s article titled Templated Razor Delegates. I strongly recommend reading this article first. Here’s a sample code for the same, so you can have a look at. I also have a custom type being rendered as a table. 1: // my custom type 2: public class Device 3: { 4: public int Id { get; set; } 5: public string Name { get; set; } 6: public DateTime MfgDate { get; set; } 7: } Now I can write an extension method just for this type. 1: public static class RazorExtensions 2: { 3: public static HelperResult List(this IList<Models.Device> devices, Func<Models.Device, HelperResult> template) 4: { 5: return new HelperResult(writer => 6: { 7: foreach (var device in devices) 8: { 9: template(device).WriteTo(writer); 10: } 11: }); 12: } 13: // ... 14: } Modified my view to make it a strongly typed one and included html to render my custom type collection in a table. 1: @using TemplatedRazorDelegates 2: @model System.Collections.Generic.IList<TemplatedRazorDelegates.Models.Device> 3: 4: @{ 5: ViewBag.Title = "Home Page"; 6: } 7: 8: <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2> 9: 10: @{ 11: var items = new[] { "one", "two", "three" }; 12: IList<int> ints = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3 }; 13: } 14: 15: <ul> 16: @items.List(@<li>@item</li>) 17: </ul> 18: <ul> 19: @ints.List(@<li>@item</li>) 20: </ul> 21: 22: <table> 23: <tr><th>Id</th><th>Name</th><th>Mfg Date</th></tr> 24: @Model.List(@<tr><td>@item.Id</td><td>@item.Name</td><td>@item.MfgDate.ToShortDateString()</td></tr>) 25: </table> We get intellisense as well! Just added some items in the action method of the controller: 1: public ActionResult Index() 2: { 3: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; 4: IList<Device> devices = new List<Device> 5: { 6: new Device {Id = 1, Name = "abc", MfgDate = new DateTime(2001, 10, 19)}, 7: new Device {Id = 2, Name = "def", MfgDate = new DateTime(2011, 1, 1)}, 8: new Device {Id = 3, Name = "ghi", MfgDate = new DateTime(2003, 3, 15)}, 9: new Device {Id = 4, Name = "jkl", MfgDate = new DateTime(2007, 6, 6)} 10: }; 11: return View(devices); 12: } Running this I get the output as: Absolutely brilliant! Thanks to both Phil Haack and to David Fowler for bringing this out to us. Download the code for this from here. Verdict: RazorViewEngine.Points += 1;

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Tip on Reusing Classes in Different .NET Project Types

- by psheriff

All of us have class libraries that we developed for use in our projects. When you create a .NET Class Library project with many classes, you can use that DLL in ASP.NET, Windows Forms and WPF applications. However, for Silverlight and Windows Phone, these .NET Class Libraries cannot be used. The reason is Silverlight and Windows Phone both use a scaled down version of .NET and thus do not have access to the full .NET framework class library. However, there are many classes and functionality that will work in the full .NET and in the scaled down versions that Silverlight and Windows Phone use.Let’s take an example of a class that you might want to use in all of the above mentioned projects. The code listing shown below might be something that you have in a Windows Form or an ASP.NET application. public class StringCommon{ public static bool IsAllLowerCase(string value) { return new Regex(@"^([^A-Z])+$").IsMatch(value); } public static bool IsAllUpperCase(string value) { return new Regex(@"^([^a-z])+$").IsMatch(value); }} The StringCommon class is very simple with just two methods, but you know that the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace is available in Silverlight and Windows Phone. Thus, you know that you may reuse this class in your Silverlight and Windows Phone projects. Here is the problem: if you create a Silverlight Class Library project and you right-click on that project in Solution Explorer and choose Add | Add Existing Item… from the menu, the class file StringCommon.cs will be copied from the original location and placed into the Silverlight Class Library project. You now have two files with the same code. If you want to change the code you will now need to change it in two places! This is a maintenance nightmare that you have just created. If you then add this to a Windows Phone Class Library project, you now have three places you need to modify the code! Add As LinkInstead of creating three separate copies of the same class file, you want to leave the original class file in its original location and just create a link to that file from the Silverlight and Windows Phone class libraries. Visual Studio will allow you to do this, but you need to do one additional step in the Add Existing Item dialog (see Figure 1). You will still right mouse click on the project and choose Add | Add Existing Item… from the menu. You will still highlight the file you want to add to your project, but DO NOT click on the Add button. Instead click on the drop down portion of the Add button and choose the “Add As Link” menu item. This will now create a link to the file on disk and will not copy the file into your new project. Figure 1: Add as Link will create a link, not copy the file over. When this linked file is added to your project, there will be a different icon next to that file in the Solution Explorer window. This icon signifies that this is a link to a file in another folder on your hard drive. Figure 2: The Linked file will have a different icon to show it is a link. Of course, if you have code that will not work in Silverlight or Windows Phone -- because the code has dependencies on features of .NET that are not supported on those platforms – you can always wrap conditional compilation code around the offending code so it will be removed when compiled in those class libraries. SummaryIn this short blog entry you learned how to reuse one of your class libraries from ASP.NET, Windows Forms or WPF applications in your Silverlight or Windows Phone class libraries. You can do this without creating a maintenance nightmare by using the “Add a Link” feature of the Add Existing Item dialog. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.

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Camera frustum calculation coming out wrong

- by Telanor

I'm trying to calculate a view/projection/bounding frustum for the 6 directions of a point light and I'm having trouble with the views pointing along the Y axis. Our game uses a right-handed, Y-up system. For the other 4 directions I create the LookAt matrix using (0, 1, 0) as the up vector. Obviously that doesn't work when looking along the Y axis so for those I use an up vector of (-1, 0, 0) for -Y and (1, 0, 0) for +Y. The view matrix seems to come out correctly (and the projection matrix always stays the same), but the bounding frustum is definitely wrong. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong? This is the code I'm using: camera.Projection = Matrix.PerspectiveFovRH((float)Math.PI / 2, ShadowMapSize / (float)ShadowMapSize, 1, 5); for(var i = 0; i < 6; i++) { var renderTargetView = shadowMap.GetRenderTargetView((TextureCubeFace)i); var up = DetermineLightUp((TextureCubeFace) i); var forward = DirectionToVector((TextureCubeFace) i); camera.View = Matrix.LookAtRH(this.Position, this.Position + forward, up); camera.BoundingFrustum = new BoundingFrustum(camera.View * camera.Projection); } private static Vector3 DirectionToVector(TextureCubeFace direction) { switch (direction) { case TextureCubeFace.NegativeX: return -Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.NegativeY: return -Vector3.UnitY; case TextureCubeFace.NegativeZ: return -Vector3.UnitZ; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveX: return Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveY: return Vector3.UnitY; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveZ: return Vector3.UnitZ; default: throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("direction"); } } private static Vector3 DetermineLightUp(TextureCubeFace direction) { switch (direction) { case TextureCubeFace.NegativeY: return -Vector3.UnitX; case TextureCubeFace.PositiveY: return Vector3.UnitX; default: return Vector3.UnitY; } } Edit: Here's what the values are coming out to for the PositiveX and PositiveY directions: Constants: Position = {X:0 Y:360 Z:0} camera.Projection = [M11:0.9999999 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0.9999999 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:0 M32:0 M33:-1.25 M34:-1] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:-1.25 M44:0] PositiveX: up = {X:0 Y:1 Z:0} target = {X:1 Y:360 Z:0} camera.View = [M11:0 M12:0 M13:-1 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:1 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:1 M32:0 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:-360 M43:0 M44:1] camera.BoundingFrustum: Matrix = [M11:0 M12:0 M13:1.25 M14:1] [M21:0 M22:0.9999999 M23:0 M24:0] [M31:0.9999999 M32:0 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:-360 M43:-1.25 M44:0] Top = {A:0.7071068 B:-0.7071068 C:0 D:254.5584} Bottom = {A:0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5584} Left = {A:0.7071068 B:0 C:0.7071068 D:0} Right = {A:0.7071068 B:0 C:-0.7071068 D:0} Near = {A:1 B:0 C:0 D:-1} Far = {A:-1 B:0 C:0 D:5} PositiveY: up = {X:0 Y:0 Z:-1} target = {X:0 Y:361 Z:0} camera.View = [M11:-1 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0 M23:-1 M24:0] [M31:0 M32:-1 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:360 M44:1] camera.BoundingFrustum: Matrix = [M11:-0.9999999 M12:0 M13:0 M14:0] [M21:0 M22:0 M23:1.25 M24:1] [M31:0 M32:-0.9999999 M33:0 M34:0] [M41:0 M42:0 M43:-451.25 M44:-360] Top = {A:0 B:0.7071068 C:0.7071068 D:-254.5585} Bottom = {A:0 B:0.7071068 C:-0.7071068 D:-254.5585} Left = {A:-0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5585} Right = {A:0.7071068 B:0.7071068 C:0 D:-254.5585} Near = {A:0 B:1 C:0 D:-361} Far = {A:0 B:-1 C:0 D:365} When I use the resulting BoundingFrustum to cull regions outside of it, this is the result: Pass PositiveX: Drew 3 regions Pass NegativeX: Drew 6 regions Pass PositiveY: Drew 400 regions Pass NegativeY: Drew 36 regions Pass PositiveZ: Drew 3 regions Pass NegativeZ: Drew 6 regions There are only 400 regions to draw and the light is in the center of them. As you can see, the PositiveY direction is drawing every single region. With the near/far planes of the perspective matrix set as small as they are, there's no way a single frustum could contain every single region.

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Hello, T4MVC – Goodbye, ASP.NET MVC “magic strings”

- by Brian Schroer

I’m working on my first ASP.NET MVC project, and I really, really like MVC. I hate all of the “magic strings”, though: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", "Index", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", "Create", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li> </ul> </div> They’re prone to misspelling (causing errors that won’t be caught until runtime), there’s duplication, there’s no Intellisense, and they’re not friendly to refactoring tools. I had started down the path of creating static classes with constants for the strings, e.g.: <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", DinnerControllerActions.Index, Controllers.Dinner)%></li> …but that was pretty tedious. Then I discovered T4MVC (http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC). Just add its T4MVC.tt and T4MVC.settings.t4 files to the root of your MVC application, and it magically (and this time, it’s good magic) generates code that allows you to replace the first code sample above with this: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial(MVC.Shared.Views.LogOnUserControl); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Index())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Create())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", MVC.Home.About())%></li> </ul> </div> It gives you a strongly-typed alternative to magic strings for all of these scenarios: Html.Action Html.ActionLink Html.RenderAction Html.RenderPartial Html.BeginForm Url.Action Ajax.ActionLink view names inside controllers But wait, there’s more! It even gives you static helpers for image and script links, e.g.: <img src="<%= Links.Content.nerd_jpg %>" /> <script src="<%= Links.Scripts.Map_js %>" type="text/javascript"></script> …instead of: <img src="/Content/nerd.jpg" /> <script src="/Scripts/Map.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Thanks to David Ebbo for creating this great tool. You can watch an eight and a half minute video about T4MVC on Channel 9 via this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jongalloway/Jon-Takes-Five-with-David-Ebbo-on-T4MVC/. You can download T4MVC from its CodePlex page: http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC.

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SPARC T5-4 LDoms for RAC and WebLogic Clusters

- by Jeff Taylor-Oracle

I wanted to use two Oracle SPARC T5-4 servers to simultaneously host both Oracle RAC and a WebLogic Server Cluster. I chose to use Oracle VM Server for SPARC to create a cluster like this: There are plenty of trade offs and decisions that need to be made, for example: Rather than configuring the system by hand, you might want to use an Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 My configuration is similar to jsavit's: Availability Best Practices - Example configuring a T5-8 but I chose to ignore some of the advice. Maybe I should have included an alternate service domain, but I decided that I already had enough redundancy Both Oracle SPARC T5-4 servers were to be configured like this: Cntl 0.25 4 64GB App LDom 2.75 CPU's 44 cores 704 GB DB LDom One CPU 16 cores 256 GB The systems started with everything in the primary domain: # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL NORM UPTIME primary active -n-c-- UART 512 1023G 0.0% 0.0% 11m # ldm list-spconfig factory-default [current] primary # ldm list -o core,memory,physio NAME primary CORE CID CPUSET 0 (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) 1 (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) 2 (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) -- SNIP 62 (496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503) 63 (504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x30000000 255G 0x80000000000 0x80000000000 256G 0x100000000000 0x100000000000 256G 0x180000000000 0x180000000000 256G # Give this memory block to the DB LDom IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@300 pci_0 pci@340 pci_1 pci@380 pci_2 pci@3c0 pci_3 pci@400 pci_4 pci@440 pci_5 pci@480 pci_6 pci@4c0 pci_7 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE1 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE2 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RIO/NET0 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE3 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE4 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE9 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE10 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE11 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE12 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE5 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE6 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE7 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE8 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE13 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE14 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE15 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE16 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA1 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RIO/NET2 Added an additional service processor configuration: # ldm add-spconfig split # ldm list-spconfig factory-default primary split [current] And removed many of the resources from the primary domain: # ldm start-reconf primary # ldm set-core 4 primary # ldm set-memory 32G primary # ldm rm-io pci@340 primary # ldm rm-io pci@380 primary # ldm rm-io pci@3c0 primary # ldm rm-io pci@400 primary # ldm rm-io pci@440 primary # ldm rm-io pci@480 primary # ldm rm-io pci@4c0 primary # init 6 Needed to add resources to the guest domains: # ldm add-domain db # ldm set-core cid=`seq -s"," 48 63` db # ldm add-memory mblock=0x180000000000:256G db # ldm add-io pci@480 db # ldm add-io pci@4c0 db # ldm add-domain app # ldm set-core 44 app # ldm set-memory 704G app # ldm add-io pci@340 app # ldm add-io pci@380 app # ldm add-io pci@3c0 app # ldm add-io pci@400 app # ldm add-io pci@440 app Needed to set up services: # ldm add-vds primary-vds0 primary # ldm add-vcc port-range=5000-5100 primary-vcc0 primary Needed to add a virtual network port for the WebLogic application domain: # ipadm NAME CLASS/TYPE STATE UNDER ADDR lo0 loopback ok -- -- lo0/v4 static ok -- ... lo0/v6 static ok -- ... net0 ip ok -- ... net0/v4 static ok -- xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24 net0/v6 addrconf ok -- .... net0/v6 addrconf ok -- ... net8 ip ok -- -- net8/v4 static ok -- ... # dladm show-phys LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE net1 Ethernet unknown 0 unknown ixgbe1 net0 Ethernet up 1000 full ixgbe0 net8 Ethernet up 10 full usbecm2 # ldm add-vsw net-dev=net0 primary-vsw0 primary # ldm add-vnet vnet1 primary-vsw0 app Needed to add a virtual disk to the WebLogic application domain: # format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c0t5000CCA02505F874d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02505f874 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD0/disk 1. c0t5000CCA02506C468d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02506c468 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD1/disk 2. c0t5000CCA025067E5Cd0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca025067e5c /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD2/disk 3. c0t5000CCA02506C258d0 <HITACHI-H106060SDSUN600G-A2B0-558.91GB> /scsi_vhci/disk@g5000cca02506c258 /dev/chassis/SPARC_T5-4.AK00084038/SYS/SASBP0/HDD3/disk Specify disk (enter its number): ^C # ldm add-vdsdev /dev/dsk/c0t5000CCA02506C468d0s2 HDD1@primary-vds0 # ldm add-vdisk HDD1 HDD1@primary-vds0 app Add some additional spice to the pot: # ldm set-variable auto-boot\\?=false db # ldm set-variable auto-boot\\?=false app # ldm set-var boot-device=HDD1 app Bind the logical domains: # ldm bind db # ldm bind app At the end of the process, the system is set up like this: # ldm list -o core,memory,physio NAME primary CORE CID CPUSET 0 (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) 1 (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) 2 (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) 3 (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x30000000 32G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@300 pci_0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE1 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE2 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA0 pci@300/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RIO/NET0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME app CORE CID CPUSET 4 (32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39) 5 (40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47) 6 (48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55) 7 (56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63) 8 (64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71) 9 (72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79) 10 (80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87) 11 (88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) 12 (96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103) 13 (104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111) 14 (112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119) 15 (120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127) 16 (128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135) 17 (136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143) 18 (144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151) 19 (152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159) 20 (160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167) 21 (168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175) 22 (176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183) 23 (184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191) 24 (192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199) 25 (200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207) 26 (208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215) 27 (216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223) 28 (224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231) 29 (232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239) 30 (240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247) 31 (248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255) 32 (256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263) 33 (264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271) 34 (272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279) 35 (280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287) 36 (288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295) 37 (296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303) 38 (304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311) 39 (312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319) 40 (320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327) 41 (328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335) 42 (336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343) 43 (344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351) 44 (352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359) 45 (360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367) 46 (368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375) 47 (376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x30000000 0x830000000 192G 0x4000000000 0x80000000000 256G 0x8080000000 0x100000000000 256G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@340 pci_1 pci@380 pci_2 pci@3c0 pci_3 pci@400 pci_4 pci@440 pci_5 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@6 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE3 pci@340/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/RCSA/PCIE4 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE9 pci@380/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE10 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE11 pci@3c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE12 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE5 pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE6 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@e /SYS/RCSA/PCIE7 pci@440/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME db CORE CID CPUSET 48 (384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391) 49 (392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399) 50 (400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407) 51 (408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415) 52 (416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423) 53 (424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431) 54 (432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439) 55 (440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447) 56 (448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455) 57 (456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463) 58 (464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471) 59 (472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479) 60 (480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487) 61 (488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495) 62 (496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503) 63 (504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511) MEMORY RA PA SIZE 0x80000000 0x180000000000 256G IO DEVICE PSEUDONYM OPTIONS pci@480 pci_6 pci@4c0 pci_7 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@a /SYS/RCSA/PCIE13 pci@480/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE14 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE15 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RCSA/PCIE16 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c /SYS/MB/SASHBA1 pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4 /SYS/RIO/NET2 Start the domains: # ldm start app LDom app started # ldm start db LDom db started Make sure to start the vntsd service that was created, above. # svcs -a | grep ldo disabled 8:38:38 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default online 8:38:58 svc:/ldoms/agents:default online 8:39:25 svc:/ldoms/ldmd:default # svcadm enable vntsd Now use the MAC address to configure the Solaris 11 Automated Installation. Database Logical Domain # telnet localhost 5000 {0} ok devalias screen /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@7/display@0 disk7 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p3 disk6 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p2 disk5 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p1 disk4 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0/disk@p0 scsi1 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@c/scsi@0 net3 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0,1 net2 /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0 virtual-console /virtual-devices/console@1 name aliases {0} ok boot net2 Boot device: /pci@4c0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@c/pci@0/pci@4/network@0 File and args: 1000 Mbps full duplex Link up Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx WLS Logical Domain # telnet localhost 5001 {0} ok devalias hdd1 /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0 vnet1 /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 net /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 disk /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/disk@0 virtual-console /virtual-devices/console@1 name aliases {0} ok boot net Boot device: /virtual-devices@100/channel-devices@200/network@0 File and args: Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Requesting Internet Address for xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Repeat the process for the second SPARC T5-4, install Solaris, RAC and WebLogic Cluster, and you are ready to go. Maybe buying a SuperCluster would have been easier.

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Code Contracts: validating arrays and collections

- by DigiMortal

Validating collections before using them is very common task when we use built-in generic types for our collections. In this posting I will show you how to validate collections using code contracts. It is cool how much awful looking code you can avoid using code contracts. Failing code Let’s suppose we have method that calculates sum of all invoices in collection. We have class Invoice and one of properties it has is Sum. I don’t introduce here any complex calculations on invoices because we have another problem to solve in this topic. Here is our code. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) { var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum); return sum; } This method is very simple but it fails when invoices list contains at least one null. Of course, we can test if invoice is null but having nulls in lists like this is not good idea – it opens green way for different coding bugs in system. Our goal is to react to bugs ASAP at the nearest place they occur. There is one more way how to make our method fail. It happens when invoices is null. I thing it is also one common bugs during development and it even happens in production environments under some conditions that are usually hardly met. Now let’s protect our little calculation method with code contracts. We need two contracts: invoices cannot be null invoices cannot contain any nulls Our first contract is easy but how to write the second one? Solution: Contract.ForAll Preconditions in code are checked using Contract.Ensures method. This method takes boolean value as argument that sais if contract holds or not. There is also method Contract.ForAll that takes collection and predicate that must hold for that collection. Nice thing is ForAll returns boolean. So, we have very simple solution. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) { Contract.Requires(invoices != null); Contract.Requires(Contract.ForAll<Invoice>(invoices, p => p != null)); var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum); return sum; } And here are some lines of code you can use to test the contracts quickly. var invoices = new List<Invoice>(); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); invoices.Add(null); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); //CalculateTotal(null); CalculateTotal(invoices); If your code is covered with unit tests then I suggest you to write tests to check that these contracts hold for every code run. Conclusion Although it seemed at first place that checking all elements in collection may end up with for-loops that does not look so nice we were able to solve our problem nicely. ForAll method of contract class offered us simple mechanism to check collections and it does it smoothly the code-contracts-way. P.S. I suggest you also read devlicio.us blog posting Validating Collections with Code Contracts by Derik Whittaker.

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Optimization and Saving/Loading

- by MrPlosion1243

I'm developing a 2D tile based game and I have a few questions regarding it. First I would like to know if this is the correct way to structure my Tile class: namespace TileGame.Engine { public enum TileType { Air, Stone } class Tile { TileType type; bool collidable; static Tile air = new Tile(TileType.Air); static Tile stone = new Tile(TileType.Stone); public Tile(TileType type) { this.type = type; collidable = true; } } } With this method I just say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone and this seems right to me but I'm not a very experienced coder and would like assistance. Now the reason I doubt this so much is because I like everything to be as optimized as possible and there is a major flaw in this that I need help overcoming. It has to do with saving and loading... well more on loading actually. The way it's done relies on the principle of casting an enumeration into a byte which gives you the corresponding number where its declared in the enumeration. Each TileType is cast as a byte and written out to a file. So TileType.Air would appear as 0 and TileType.Stone would appear as 1 in the file (well in byte form obviously). Loading in the file is alot different though because I can't just loop through all the bytes in the file cast them as a TileType and assign it: for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { world[y, x].Type = (TileType)byteReader.ReadByte(); } } This just wont work presumably because I have to actually say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone as apposed to world[y, x].Type = TileType.Stone. In order to be able to say that I need a gigantic switch case statement (I only have 2 tiles but you could imagine what it would look like with hundreds): Tile tile; for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { switch(byteReader.ReadByte()){ case 0: tile = Tile.Air; break; case 1: tile = Tile.Stone; break; } world[y, x] = tile; } } Now you can see how unoptimized this is and I don't know what to do. I would really just like to cast the byte as a TileType and use that but as said before I have to say world[y, x] = Tile.whatever and TileType can't be used this way. So what should I do? I would imagine I need to restructure my Tile class to fit the requirements but I don't know how I would do that. Please help! Thanks.

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