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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks-Part 2: Key Shortcuts

  - by ToStringTheory

  Ask anyone that knows me, and they will confirm that I hate the mouse.  This isn’t because I deny affection to objects that don’t look like their mammalian-named self, but rather for a much more simple and not-insane reason: I have terrible eyesight.  Introduction Thanks to a degenerative eye disease known as Choroideremia, I have learned to rely more on the keyboard which I can feel digital/static positions of keys relative to my fingers, than the much more analog/random position of the mouse.  Now, I would like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts with you now, as I believe that they not only increase my productivity, but yours as well once you know them (if you don’t already of course)...  I share one of my biggest tips for productivity in the conclusion at the end. Visual Studio Key Shortcuts Global Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + X Cut This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is cut from the editor. Ctrl + C Copy This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is copied from the editor. Ctrl + V Paste If you copied an entire line by the method above, the data is pasted in the line above the current caret line. Ctrl + Shift + V Next Clipboard Element Cut/Copy multiple things, and then hit this combo repeatedly to switch to the next clipboard item when pasting. Ctrl + Backspace Delete Previous Will delete the previous word from the editor directly before the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + Del Delete Next Word Will delete the next word/space from the editor directly after the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Shift + Del Delete Focused Line Will delete the line from the editor that the caret is on. If something is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + ? or Ctrl + ? Left/Right by Word This will move the caret left or right by word or special character boundary. Holding Shift will also select the word. Ctrl + F Quick Find Either the Quick Find panel, or the search bar if you have the Productivity Power Tools installed. Ctrl + Shift + F Find in Solution Opens up the 'Find in Files' window, allowing you to search your solution, as well as using regex for pattern matching. F2 Rename File... While not debugging, selecting a file in the solution explorer\navigator and pressing F2 allows you to rename the selected file. Global Application Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten... Again... Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + N New File dialog Opens up the 'New File' dialog to add a new file to the current directory in the Solution\Project. Ctrl + O Open File dialog Opens up the 'Open File' dialog to open a file in the editor, not necessarily in the solution. Ctrl + S Save File dialog Saves the currently focused editor tab back to your HDD/SSD. Ctrl + Shift + S Save All... Quickly save all open/edited documents back to your disk. Ctrl + Tab Switch Panel\Tab Tapping this combo switches between tabs quickly. Holding down Ctrl when hitting tab will bring up a chooser window. Building Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are focused on building and running a solution. These are not usable when the IDE is in Debug mode, as the shortcut changes by context. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + Shift + B Build Solution Starts a build process on the solution according to the current build configuration manager settings. Ctrl + Break Cancel a Building Solution Will cancel a build operation currently in progress. Good for long running builds when you think of one last change. F5 Start Debugging Will build the solution if needed and launch debugging according to the current configuration manager settings. Ctrl + F5 Start Without Debugger Will build the solution if needed and launch the startup project without attaching a debugger. Debugging Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used when debugging a solution. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F5 Continue Execution Continues execution of code until the next breakpoint. Ctrl + Alt + Break Pause Execution Pauses the program execution. Shift + F5 Stop Debugging Stops the current debugging session. NOTE: Web apps will still continue processing after stopping the debugger. Keep this in mind if working on code such as credit card processing. Ctrl + Shift + F5 Restart Debugging Stops the current debugging session and restarts the debugging session from the beginning. F9 Place Breakpoint Toggles/Places a breakpoint in the editor on the current line. Set a breakpoint in condensed code by highlighting the statement first. F10 Step Over Statement When debugging, executes all code in methods/properties on the current line until the next line. F11 Step Into Statement When debugging, steps into a method call so you can walk through the code executed there (if available). Ctrl + Alt + I Immediate Window Open the Immediate Window to execute commands when execution is paused. Navigation Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for navigating in the IDE or editor panel. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F4 Properties Panel Opens the properties panel for the selected item in the editor/designer/solution navigator (context driven). F12 Go to Definition Press F12 with the caret on a member to navigate to its declaration. With the Productivity tools, Ctrl + Click works too. Ctrl + K Ctrl + T View Call Hierarchy View the call hierarchy of the member the caret is on. Great for going through n-tier solutions and interface implementations! Ctrl + Alt + B Breakpoint Window View the breakpoint window to manage breakpoints and their advanced options. Allows easy toggling of breakpoints. Ctrl + Alt + L Solution Navigator Open the solution explorer panel. Ctrl + Alt + O Output Window View the output window to see build\general output from Visual Studio. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Live Web Preview Only available with the Web Essential plugin. Launches the auto-updating Preview panel. Testing Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for running tests in the IDE. Please note, Visual Studio 2010 is all about context. If your caret is within a test method when you use one of these combinations, the combination will apply to that test. If your caret is within a test class, it will apply to that class. If the caret is outside of a test class, it will apply to all tests. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + R T Run Test(s) Run all tests in the current context without a debugger attached. Breakpoints will not be stopped on. Ctrl + R Ctrl + T Run Test(s) (Debug) Run all tests in the current context with a debugger attached. This allows you to use breakpoints. Substitute A for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL tests in the current context. Substitute Y for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL impacted/covering tests for a method in the current context. Advanced Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for more advanced editing in the editor window. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Shift + Alt + ? Shift + Alt + ? Multiline caret up/down Use this combo to edit multiple lines at once. Not too many uses for it, but once in a blue moon one comes along. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Insert Line Above Inserts a blank line above the line the caret is currently on. No need to be at end or start of line, so no cutting off words/code. Ctrl + K Ctrl + C Comment Selection Comments the current selection out of compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + U Uncomment Selection Uncomments the current selection into compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + D Format Document Automatically formats the document into a structured layout. Lines up nodes or code into columns intelligently. Alt + ? Alt + ? Code line up/down *Use this combo to move a line of code up or down quickly. Great for small rearrangements of code. *Requires the Productivity Power pack from Microsoft. Conclusion This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but these are the shortcuts I use regularly every hour/minute of the day. There are still 100s more in Visual Studio that you can discover through the configuration window, or by tooltips. Something that I started doing months ago seems to have interest in my office.. In my last post, I talked about how I hated a cluttered UI. One of the ways that I aimed to resolve that was by systematically cleaning up the toolbars week by week. First day, I removed ALL icons that I already knew shortcuts to, or would never use them (Undo in a toolbar?!). Then, every week from that point on, I make it a point to remove an icon/two from the toolbar and make an effort to remember its key combination. I gain extra space in the toolbar area, AND become more productive at the same time! I hope that you found this article interesting or at least somewhat informative.. Maybe a shortcut or two you didn't know. I know some of them seem trivial, but I often see people going to the edit menu for Copy/Paste... Thought a refresher might be helpful!

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• Ajax-based data loading using jQuery.load() function in ASP.NET

  - by hajan

  In general, jQuery has made Ajax very easy by providing low-level interface, shorthand methods and helper functions, which all gives us great features of handling Ajax requests in our ASP.NET Webs. The simplest way to load data from the server and place the returned HTML in browser is to use the jQuery.load() function. The very firs time when I started playing with this function, I didn't believe it will work that much easy. What you can do with this method is simply call given url as parameter to the load function and display the content in the selector after which this function is chained. So, to clear up this, let me give you one very simple example: $("#result").load("AjaxPages/Page.html"); As you can see from the above image, after clicking the ‘Load Content’ button which fires the above code, we are making Ajax Get and the Response is the entire page HTML. So, rather than using (old) iframes, you can now use this method to load other html pages inside the page from where the script with load function is called. This method is equivalent to the jQuery Ajax Get method $.get(url, data, function () { }) only that the $.load() is method rather than global function and has an implicit callback function. To provide callback to your load, you can simply add function as second parameter, see example: $("#result").load("AjaxPages/Page.html", function () { alert("Page.html has been loaded successfully!") }); Since load is part of the chain which is follower of the given jQuery Selector where the content should be loaded, it means that the $.load() function won't execute if there is no such selector found within the DOM. Another interesting thing to mention, and maybe you've asked yourself is how we know if GET or POST method type is executed? It's simple, if we provide 'data' as second parameter to the load function, then POST is used, otherwise GET is assumed. POST $("#result").load("AjaxPages/Page.html", { "name": "hajan" }, function () { ////callback function implementation });   GET $("#result").load("AjaxPages/Page.html", function () { ////callback function implementation });   Another important feature that $.load() has ($.get() does not) is loading page fragments. Using jQuery's selector capability, you can do this: $("#result").load("AjaxPages/Page.html #resultTable"); In our Page.html, the content now is: So, after the call, only the table with id resultTable will load in our page.   As you can see, we have loaded only the table with id resultTable (1) inside div with id result (2). This is great feature since we won't need to filter the returned HTML content again in our callback function on the master page from where we have called $.load() function. Besides the fact that you can simply call static HTML pages, you can also use this function to load dynamic ASPX pages or ASP.NET ASHX Handlers . Lets say we have another page (ASPX) in our AjaxPages folder with name GetProducts.aspx. This page has repeater control (or anything you want to bind dynamic server-side content) that displays set of data in it. Now, I want to filter the data in the repeater based on the Query String parameter provided when calling that page. For example, if I call the page using GetProducts.aspx?category=computers, it will load only computers… so, this will filter the products automatically by given category. The example ASPX code of GetProducts.aspx page is: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="GetProducts.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.AjaxPages.GetProducts" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title></title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <table id="tableProducts"> <asp:Repeater ID="rptProducts" runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> <tr> <th>Product</th> <th>Price</th> <th>Category</th> </tr> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <tr> <td> <%# Eval("ProductName")%> </td> <td> <%# Eval("Price") %> </td> <td> <%# Eval("Category") %> </td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater> </ul> </div> </form> </body> </html> The C# code-behind sample code is: public partial class GetProducts : System.Web.UI.Page { public List<Product> products; protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { LoadSampleProductsData(); //load sample data base.OnInit(e); } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (Request.QueryString.Count > 0) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["category"])) { string category = Request.QueryString["category"]; //get query string into string variable //filter products sample data by category using LINQ //and add the collection as data source to the repeater rptProducts.DataSource = products.Where(x => x.Category == category); rptProducts.DataBind(); //bind repeater } } } //load sample data method public void LoadSampleProductsData() { products = new List<Product>(); products.Add(new Product() { Category = "computers", Price = 200, ProductName = "Dell PC" }); products.Add(new Product() { Category = "shoes", Price = 90, ProductName = "Nike" }); products.Add(new Product() { Category = "shoes", Price = 66, ProductName = "Adidas" }); products.Add(new Product() { Category = "computers", Price = 210, ProductName = "HP PC" }); products.Add(new Product() { Category = "shoes", Price = 85, ProductName = "Puma" }); } } //sample Product class public class Product { public string ProductName { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public string Category { get; set; } } Mainly, I just have sample data loading function, Product class and depending of the query string, I am filtering the products list using LINQ Where statement. If we run this page without query string, it will show no data. If we call the page with category query string, it will filter automatically. Example: /AjaxPages/GetProducts.aspx?category=shoes The result will be: or if we use category=computers, like this /AjaxPages/GetProducts.aspx?category=computers, the result will be: So, now using jQuery.load() function, we can call this page with provided query string parameter and load appropriate content… The ASPX code in our Default.aspx page, which will call the AjaxPages/GetProducts.aspx page using jQuery.load() function is: <asp:RadioButtonList ID="rblProductCategory" runat="server"> <asp:ListItem Text="Shoes" Value="shoes" Selected="True" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Computers" Value="computers" /> </asp:RadioButtonList> <asp:Button ID="btnLoadProducts" runat="server" Text="Load Products" /> <!-- Here we will load the products, based on the radio button selection--> <div id="products"></div> </form> The jQuery code: $("#<%= btnLoadProducts.ClientID %>").click(function (event) { event.preventDefault(); //preventing button's default behavior var selectedRadioButton = $("#<%= rblProductCategory.ClientID %> input:checked").val(); //call GetProducts.aspx with the category query string for the selected category in radio button list //filter and get only the #tableProducts content inside #products div $("#products").load("AjaxPages/GetProducts.aspx?category=" + selectedRadioButton + " #tableProducts"); }); The end result: You can download the code sample from here. You can read more about jQuery.load() function here. I hope this was useful blog post for you. Please do let me know your feedback. Best Regards, Hajan

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• Tools of the Trade

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 07, 2010New ProjectsAgile Personal Development Methodology: 本项目并不是软件开发项目，它是一个关注个人能力发展的项目，希望通过大家的积极参与和实践，在价值观、原则和最佳实践的基础上不断丰富和完善这些内容。我将主要从生活、工作和个人三个主要方面来指导个人如何快速地提高自己的能力。在工作方面，首先关注的是IT技术人员。 希望本方法论的不断完善，能够对不同阶...Altairis Mail Toolkit: Altairis Mail Toolkit is a component for .NET developers making easy to send templated and localized e-mail messages. Uses standard resource mechan...AmazonPriceTicker: AmazonPriceTicker ist ein kleines ASP.NET-Projekt für unser Studium.CC.Hearts Screen Saver: A complete screensaver that draws pretty hearts. Supports all standard screensaver functionality (preview window, options, multi-monitor). Written...Controle Financeiro com DDD: Projeto para fins de estudo das tencologias: - DDD - TDD - Asp Net MVCDebugWriterTextBox: This is modified TextBox which can catch up Debug.Write() and display log. Also it can write log data to file - all you need is to set up file name!DEIConsultingDev: DEI Consulting DEVEasy Augmented Reality Suite for Silverlight: Easy Augmented Reality Suite for SilverlightEvent Broker: Simple event broker with an hierarchical implementation.fleet It: A WPF Client for Team Space. Developed using WPF and C#. Various URL Shortening services integrated.Gest-Bus: Gest-BusHNV Project: Projects created by Hoàng, Ngọc, VũHotel Management System: Hotel Management System : concerned in making a complete website for a hotel every thing in hotel in just one web application : Finance , managemen...ISEN découverte majeure application mobile: ISEN découverte majeure application mobile contrôle d'un pc par un téléphone portable avec plateforme windows 7 LiveSequence: Based in the sequence diagramming control of Nauman Leghari.NHash: This is a simple project that integrates with Explorer and Computes MD5 and SHA1.NHibernate Sidekick Library: NHibernate Sidekick is a library intended to assist in the development of multi-tiered applications using the NHibernate ORM framework.ScrewTurn ASP.NET Proxy Membership Provider: Plugin for the ScrewTurn Wiki System to use Standard ASP.NET Membership and Role providers.Silverlight SNS: We are going to develop a SNS web application based on Silver lightSilverPoiMap: SilverPoiMap provides interactive searching and management of Points of Interest. It is a Facebook client application which allow you to connect to...Simple Resource Localization Editor: Simple editor that simplifies localization and synchronization of .NET resource files (.resx).SimpleBlog.NET MVC: A very simple blog engine developed in ASP.NET 3.5 MVC2 and C#.Siverlight Project: Hope that everybody continue to develop it.SpaceConquest: Incorporated standard design patterns to build a peer to peer game in Java. The game rules were similar in complexity to games like Civilization an...Yasts: Yasts - Yet Another Space Trading Sim - This is a learning environment project.New ReleasesAgile Personal Development Methodology: 敏捷个人－认识自我，管理自我.pdf: 去年我在blog上写了个人管理系列的一些blog，其中一些文章深受大家的喜欢。想到写这个系列是源于在实施敏捷Scrum方法时，对方法实施是否对人的水平需要高要求的一些思考。自组织团队是建立在敏捷个人之上的，没有个人就没有团队，实施Scrum对人要求不高，但想实施得好，那么对人的要求肯定不低。 ...Altairis Mail Toolkit: 1.0.0 RTM: Initial releaseAndrew's XNA Helpers: Andrew's Xna Helpers V1.1: Currently only supports X86 projects since portions of the code have to be reworked to work with the xbox. I do plan to code it for the 360 though....C#Mail: Higuchi.Mail.dll (2010.6.6 ver): Higuchi.Mail.dll (2010.4.30 ver)Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V31: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Html Agility Pack: Experimental Xpath Updates: In efforts to update make Html Agility Packs Xpath support to be closer to the System.Xml.Xpath implementation I have updated HAP to have all nodes...imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.2: myImdb 0.9.2 Fully changed...and added some more features.. working with XML movie list... Used Backgroundworker more clever results and guess m...InfoService: InfoService v1.6 - MPE1 or RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.6.0.136 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.ISEN découverte majeure application mobile: appli traitement d'image: but : capturer, redimensionner l'image de l'écran d'un pc.Jeremi Stadler: Clipboard Manager: Version 1.0.5.14 It's finally here! I have been working on this one the whole night but it's worth it ;) The program catches clipboard changes an...mesoBoard: mesoBoard 0.9 - Beta: mesoBoard version 0.9 beta Released under the New BSD License. http://mesoboard.codeplex.com/license http://mesoboard.comMiniTwitter: 1.13: MiniTwitter 1.13 変更内容 修正 ダイレクトメッセージの取得に失敗するバグを修正 タイムラインを編集すると落ちるバグを修正 リストのインポートで最初の 20 人しか取得できない問題を修正 追加 URL マウスオーバーでの画像のプレビュー機能を実装MiniTwitter: 1.13.1: MiniTwitter 1.13.1 更新内容 修正 タイムライン追加、編集ダイアログでキャンセルを選ぶと落ちるバグを修正MSTS Editors & Tools: Simis Editor v0.4: Simis Editor v0.4 Open and Save dialogs support full filename filters from BNFs (e.g. "tsection.dat"). Added statusbar and menu help text. Adde...NHibernate Sidekick Library: 0.6.0: v0.6.0 - Initial Release TODONLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.06.001: Changes since the last build:2010-06-05 21:50:21 Jarek Kowalski fixed doc for ${document-uri} 2010-06-05 20:21:53 Jarek Kowalski removed Layout re...NQ - Component-oriented Framework: NQ Core 0.90: Main changes in 0.90 release: Introduction of an additional built-in component loader to load component and service information from XML files ins...PhluffyFotos: v4 Windows Azure: This release has been updated to Visual Studio 2010 as well as the latest StorageClient library. Make sure you run the Provision.cmd in order to b...RIA Services Essentials: Book Club Application (June 6, 2010): The initial release of the BookClub application based on the MIX presentation with a few changes: 1. Some bug fixes 2. Added the ability to Like a ...Samurai.Workflow: 1.1 Stable Release: Removed reference to WPF assemblies so non-WPF applications can use the workflow. For WPF apps, the workflow will use reflection to seek out UI thr...SilverPoiMap: SilverPoiMap Beta: Beta VersionSimple Resource Localization Editor: Release 1: First release.Siverlight Project: Auto Arrange Panel Project: Auto Arrange Panel ProjectSmart Voice: Smart Voice 0.2: Changelog: Corrected a few bugsSmart Voice: Smart Voice 0.2.1: Changelog: Fixed a major bug that was slowing the application Added opt in for usage data In order to contribute with user data, please change t...Spider Compiler: Release 0.1: Contains the setup for the spider compiler. This release includes the changeset #66980.Spider Compiler: Release 0.2: This release includes the changeset #67003.The Lounge Repository: Lounge Repo Binary Release: All in one binary download of the Lounge Repository. Improvements: -More tolerant towards schema changes -Bug fixed regarding array normalization ...UrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer v2.0.1: This release integrate the support of the Full Database Backup.Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 beta 3: This is the last beta version before the official release of Visual WebGui, including support for Visual Studio 2010 and it is fully featured with ...WinGet: Alpha 2: This is the second release of WinGet (0.5.0.2). Is is alpha quality not suitable for use in a production environment and it has bugs (see Known Iss...WoW Character Viewer: WoW Viewer: Newly redesigned layout of the original WoW Character Viewer. Faster access, cleaner layout.Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeASP.NET MVC Time PlannerMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets)NeatUploadOutSyncFileupload AJAXViperWorks IgnitionAgUnit - Silverlight unit testing with ReSharperSQL Nexus ToolSmith Async .NET Memcached ClientMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationStyleCopN2 CMSsmark C# LibraryFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m happy to announce the May 2012 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This newest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes a new file upload control which displays file upload progress. We’ve also added several significant enhancements to the existing HtmlEditorExtender control such as support for uploading images and Source View. You can download and start using the newest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit by entering the following command in the Library Package Manager console in Visual Studio: Install-Package AjaxControlToolkit Alternatively, you can download the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit from CodePlex: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com The New Ajax File Upload Control The most requested new feature for the Ajax Control Toolkit (according to the CodePlex Issue Tracker) has been support for file upload with progress. We worked hard over the last few months to create an entirely new file upload control which displays upload progress. Here is a sample which illustrates how you can use the new AjaxFileUpload control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="01_FileUpload.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1._01_FileUpload" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple File Upload</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:AjaxFileUpload id="ajaxUpload1" OnUploadComplete="ajaxUpload1_OnUploadComplete" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page above includes a ToolkitScriptManager control. This control is required to use any of the controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit because this control is responsible for loading all of the scripts required by a control. The page also contains an AjaxFileUpload control. The UploadComplete event is handled in the code-behind for the page: namespace WebApplication1 { public partial class _01_FileUpload : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void ajaxUpload1_OnUploadComplete(object sender, AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadEventArgs e) { // Generate file path string filePath = "~/Images/" + e.FileName; // Save upload file to the file system ajaxUpload1.SaveAs(MapPath(filePath)); } } } The UploadComplete handler saves each uploaded file by calling the AjaxFileUpload control’s SaveAs() method with a full file path. Here’s a video which illustrates the process of uploading a file: Warning: in order to write to the Images folder on a production IIS server, you need Write permissions on the Images folder. You need to provide permissions for the IIS Application Pool account to write to the Images folder. To learn more, see: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/624/application-pool-identities/ Showing File Upload Progress The new AjaxFileUpload control takes advantage of HTML5 upload progress events (described in the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 standard). This standard is supported by Firefox 8+, Chrome 16+, Safari 5+, and Internet Explorer 10+. In other words, the standard is supported by the most recent versions of all browsers except for Internet Explorer which will support the standard with the release of Internet Explorer 10. The AjaxFileUpload control works with all browsers, even browsers which do not support the new XMLHttpRequest Level 2 standard. If you use the AjaxFileUpload control with a downlevel browser – such as Internet Explorer 9 — then you get a simple throbber image during a file upload instead of a progress indicator. Here’s how you specify a throbber image when declaring the AjaxFileUpload control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="02_FileUpload.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1._02_FileUpload" %> <html> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>File Upload with Throbber</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="ToolkitScriptManager1" runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:AjaxFileUpload id="ajaxUpload1" OnUploadComplete="ajaxUpload1_OnUploadComplete" ThrobberID="MyThrobber" runat="server" /> <asp:Image id="MyThrobber" ImageUrl="ajax-loader.gif" Style="display:None" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the page above includes an image with the Id MyThrobber. This image is displayed while files are being uploaded. I use the website http://AjaxLoad.info to generate animated busy wait images. Drag-And-Drop File Upload If you are using an uplevel browser then you can drag-and-drop the files which you want to upload onto the AjaxFileUpload control. The following video illustrates how drag-and-drop works: Remember that drag-and-drop will not work on Internet Explorer 9 or older. Accepting Multiple Files By default, the AjaxFileUpload control enables you to upload multiple files at a time. When you open the file dialog, use the CTRL or SHIFT key to select multiple files. If you want to restrict the number of files that can be uploaded then use the MaximumNumberOfFiles property like this: <ajaxToolkit:AjaxFileUpload id="ajaxUpload1" OnUploadComplete="ajaxUpload1_OnUploadComplete" ThrobberID="throbber" MaximumNumberOfFiles="1" runat="server" /> In the code above, the maximum number of files which can be uploaded is restricted to a single file. Restricting Uploaded File Types You might want to allow only certain types of files to be uploaded. For example, you might want to accept only image uploads. In that case, you can use the AllowedFileTypes property to provide a list of allowed file types like this: <ajaxToolkit:AjaxFileUpload id="ajaxUpload1" OnUploadComplete="ajaxUpload1_OnUploadComplete" ThrobberID="throbber" AllowedFileTypes="jpg,jpeg,gif,png" runat="server" /> The code above prevents any files except jpeg, gif, and png files from being uploaded. Enhancements to the HTMLEditorExtender Over the past months, we spent a considerable amount of time making bug fixes and feature enhancements to the existing HtmlEditorExtender control. I want to focus on two of the most significant enhancements that we made to the control: support for Source View and support for uploading images. Adding Source View Support to the HtmlEditorExtender When you click the Source View tag, the HtmlEditorExtender changes modes and displays the HTML source of the contents contained in the TextBox being extended. You can use Source View to make fine-grain changes to HTML before submitting the HTML to the server. For reasons of backwards compatibility, the Source View tab is disabled by default. To enable Source View, you need to declare your HtmlEditorExtender with the DisplaySourceTab property like this: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="05_SourceView.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1._05_SourceView" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>HtmlEditorExtender with Source View</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="ToolkitScriptManager1" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox id="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="60" Rows="10" Runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:HtmlEditorExtender id="HEE1" TargetControlID="txtComments" DisplaySourceTab="true" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page above includes a ToolkitScriptManager, TextBox, and HtmlEditorExtender control. The HtmlEditorExtender extends the TextBox so that it supports rich text editing. Notice that the HtmlEditorExtender includes a DisplaySourceTab property. This property causes a button to appear at the bottom of the HtmlEditorExtender which enables you to switch to Source View: Note: when using the HtmlEditorExtender, we recommend that you set the DOCTYPE for the document. Otherwise, you can encounter weird formatting issues. Accepting Image Uploads We also enhanced the HtmlEditorExtender to support image uploads (another very highly requested feature at CodePlex). The following video illustrates the experience of adding an image to the editor: Once again, for backwards compatibility reasons, support for image uploads is disabled by default. Here’s how you can declare the HtmlEditorExtender so that it supports image uploads: <ajaxToolkit:HtmlEditorExtender id="MyHtmlEditorExtender" TargetControlID="txtComments" OnImageUploadComplete="MyHtmlEditorExtender_ImageUploadComplete" DisplaySourceTab="true" runat="server" > <Toolbar> <ajaxToolkit:Bold /> <ajaxToolkit:Italic /> <ajaxToolkit:Underline /> <ajaxToolkit:InsertImage /> </Toolbar> </ajaxToolkit:HtmlEditorExtender> There are two things that you should notice about the code above. First, notice that an InsertImage toolbar button is added to the HtmlEditorExtender toolbar. This HtmlEditorExtender will render toolbar buttons for bold, italic, underline, and insert image. Second, notice that the HtmlEditorExtender includes an event handler for the ImageUploadComplete event. The code for this event handler is below: using System.Web.UI; using AjaxControlToolkit; namespace WebApplication1 { public partial class _06_ImageUpload : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void MyHtmlEditorExtender_ImageUploadComplete(object sender, AjaxFileUploadEventArgs e) { // Generate file path string filePath = "~/Images/" + e.FileName; // Save uploaded file to the file system var ajaxFileUpload = (AjaxFileUpload)sender; ajaxFileUpload.SaveAs(MapPath(filePath)); // Update client with saved image path e.PostedUrl = Page.ResolveUrl(filePath); } } } Within the ImageUploadComplete event handler, you need to do two things: 1) Save the uploaded image (for example, to the file system, a database, or Azure storage) 2) Provide the URL to the saved image so the image can be displayed within the HtmlEditorExtender In the code above, the uploaded image is saved to the ~/Images folder. The path of the saved image is returned to the client by setting the AjaxFileUploadEventArgs PostedUrl property. Not surprisingly, under the covers, the HtmlEditorExtender uses the AjaxFileUpload. You can get a direct reference to the AjaxFileUpload control used by an HtmlEditorExtender by using the following code: void Page_Load() { var ajaxFileUpload = MyHtmlEditorExtender.AjaxFileUpload; ajaxFileUpload.AllowedFileTypes = "jpg,jpeg"; } The code above illustrates how you can restrict the types of images that can be uploaded to the HtmlEditorExtender. This code prevents anything but jpeg images from being uploaded. Summary This was the most difficult release of the Ajax Control Toolkit to date. We iterated through several designs for the AjaxFileUpload control – with each iteration, the goal was to make the AjaxFileUpload control easier for developers to use. My hope is that we were able to create a control which Web Forms developers will find very intuitive. I want to thank the developers on the Superexpert.com team for their hard work on this release.

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• Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

  - by Shaun

  This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 03, 2012Popular ReleasesMini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query: Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the http://pksoftware.net/Content/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...DynamicToSql: DynamicToSql 1.0.0 (beta): 1.0.0 beta versionCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsBack-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation: Back-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation: This is the first release application for Back-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation. It is required .NET Framework 4.0. Check this to use http://backpronn.codeplex.comnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.60: Highlight features & improvements: • Significant performance optimization. • Use AJAX for adding products to the cart. • New flyout mini-shopping cart. • Auto complete suggestions for product searching. • Full-Text support. • EU cookie law support. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。Generic enumeration: Enumeration.zip: Generic enumeration dll with a test console application.Apworks: Apworks (v2.5.4563.21309, 30JUN2012): Installation Prerequisites: 1. Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 SP1 2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 3. Other required libraries & assemblies are now included in the installation package so no more prerequisites needed Functional Updates: 1. Refactor the identity field of the IEntity interface from 'Id' to 'ID' 2. Changed the MySql Storage to use the MySql NetConnector version 6.4.4. 3. Implemented the paging support for the repositories. 4. Added the Eager Loading Property specification t...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5 Intrepid: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) You should delete /home/config/saved.cfg to reset binds/other stuff If you us...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.0.4: Version 1.0.4 Changes: Changes in previous version broke hotkey support; fixed this. When minimizing the window to tray, if there are unsaved changes, then prompt to save first. When changing the path on a folder location, reset the file list. Fixed app not shutting down properly when closed externally. Improved installer to shut down app instead of requiring reboot. Clear History action now clears all history, rather than just the current theme.List Form Manipulation Framework (LFMF) for SharePoint 2010: LFMF v1.1: Added new SPFieldIO field type to reference filenamesSystem.Net.FtpClient: API Reference 2012.06.29: Updated with new file listing example as well as any API changes since the last release.Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.0: User Right Licensing ContentType version 2.0.267.1Designing Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML: Chapters 1 - 7 Release Preview: Source code for all examples from Chapters 1 - 7 for the Release PreviewSQL Server FineBuild: Version 3.1.0: Top SQL Server FineBuild Version 3.1.0This is the stable version of FineBuild for SQL Server 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005 Documentation FineBuild Wiki containing details of the FineBuild process Known Issues Limitations with this release FineBuild V3.1.0 Release Contents List of changes included in this release Please DonateFineBuild is free, but please donate what you think FineBuild is worth as everything goes to charity. Tearfund is one of the UK's leading relief and de...EasySL: RapidSL V2: Rewrite RapidSL UI Framework, Using Silverlight 5.0 EF4.1 Code First Ria Service SP2 + Lastest Silverlight Toolkit.New Projects2DoTasks: This is a simple Dnn Module for Project/Tasks/time management. I hope you all found it useful.AOPify: AOPify lightweight fluent AOP framework that provides basic AOP features both before,after,onerror etc with fluent syntax..Capacitacion: This is my first Project - mvillasecoCLFiling: Client filing with search functionsContoso University MVC NTier: This is first version reference application for ASP.NET MVC NTier.DynamicToSql: DynamicToSql is a lightweight API that maps dynamically typed entities to a database and vice versa. It works against any database that has ADO.NET drivers.Enlightener: Deobfuscator target at Confuser. Child project of http://netdeob0.codeplex.com/Excel Adjacency List to Dot: Excel add-in to generate graphs in GraphViz dot file format from an adjacency list in Excel.FFXIV Job Bar: This is a little utility to help with Job changes in FFXIV. Gallery: A simple javascript/jquery based image gallery. Just include the Gallery.js and jquery in your html page.Grocery Droid: Transfer your P.C. designed shopping list to androidLOCOL: Locol is a internet medium to provide local information and services to district local residents.Meter: Log communal meters dataNthDownload: NthDownload is yet another attempt at a download manager.Paginacion de un objeto en un gridview: Como paginar un objeto con multiples resultados en un gridviewRunman game: "Runman" is port of "Pac-Man" game writing on C# and XNASB01: Project will be a startup for a warehouse management and easy to extend by any developer. Plug n play kind of setup.SC2Ranks API: A .NET 4.0 SC2Ranks APISharePoint 2010 Cookie Approval Control: If you need to comply with EU cookie law this control displays a message to each user that cookies are in use on the site and allows them to accept the messageSharePoint Advanced Visibility Options: Advanced Visibility Options - is an extension to SharePoint providing configurable List Field Iterator with PowerShell scripts.smtools2: Add-on tools for Service MonsterSparqube Picture Column Lite for SharePoint 2010: Sparqube Picture Column Lite is simple component for uploading and displaying images in SharePoint 2010 lists.SpudloFizzBuzz: This project is part of a job application process.SwiftMVVM: An extremely fast, easily refactorable implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged/ing, using dynamic proxy generation, as well as a robust change tracking engine.ZPL Converter: ZPL Converter converts Zune Playlists (.ZPL) easily and fast into other playlist formats, e.g. '.M3U' or '.PLS'.

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• Install NPM Packages Automatically for Node.js on Windows Azure Web Site

  - by Shaun

  In one of my previous post I described and demonstrated how to use NPM packages in Node.js and Windows Azure Web Site (WAWS). In that post I used NPM command to install packages, and then use Git for Windows to commit my changes and sync them to WAWS git repository. Then WAWS will trigger a new deployment to host my Node.js application. Someone may notice that, a NPM package may contains many files and could be a little bit huge. For example, the “azure” package, which is the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js, is about 6MB. Another popular package “express”, which is a rich MVC framework for Node.js, is about 1MB. When I firstly push my codes to Windows Azure, all of them must be uploaded to the cloud. Is that possible to let Windows Azure download and install these packages for us? In this post, I will introduce how to make WAWS install all required packages for us when deploying.   Let’s Start with Demo Demo is most straightforward. Let’s create a new WAWS and clone it to my local disk. Drag the folder into Git for Windows so that it can help us commit and push. Please refer to this post if you are not familiar with how to use Windows Azure Web Site, Git deployment, git clone and Git for Windows. And then open a command windows and install a package in our code folder. Let’s say I want to install “express”. And then created a new Node.js file named “server.js” and pasted the code as below. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7: 8: console.log("Web application opened."); 9: app.listen(process.env.PORT); If we switch to Git for Windows right now we will find that it detected the changes we made, which includes the “server.js” and all files under “node_modules” folder. What we need to upload should only be our source code, but the huge package files also have to be uploaded as well. Now I will show you how to exclude them and let Windows Azure install the package on the cloud. First we need to add a special file named “.gitignore”. It seems cannot be done directly from the file explorer since this file only contains extension name. So we need to do it from command line. Navigate to the local repository folder and execute the command below to create an empty file named “.gitignore”. If the command windows asked for input just press Enter. 1: echo > .gitignore Now open this file and copy the content below and save. 1: node_modules Now if we switch to Git for Windows we will found that the packages under the “node_modules” were not in the change list. So now if we commit and push, the “express” packages will not be uploaded to Windows Azure. Second, let’s tell Windows Azure which packages it needs to install when deploying. Create another file named “package.json” and copy the content below into that file and save. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*" 6: } 7: } Now back to Git for Windows, commit our changes and push it to WAWS. Then let’s open the WAWS in developer portal, we will see that there’s a new deployment finished. Click the arrow right side of this deployment we can see how WAWS handle this deployment. Especially we can find WAWS executed NPM. And if we opened the log we can review what command WAWS executed to install the packages and the installation output messages. As you can see WAWS installed “express” for me from the cloud side, so that I don’t need to upload the whole bunch of the package to Azure. Open this website and we can see the result, which proved the “express” had been installed successfully.   What’s Happened Under the Hood Now let’s explain a bit on what the “.gitignore” and “package.json” mean. The “.gitignore” is an ignore configuration file for git repository. All files and folders listed in the “.gitignore” will be skipped from git push. In the example below I copied “node_modules” into this file in my local repository. This means,  do not track and upload all files under the “node_modules” folder. So by using “.gitignore” I skipped all packages from uploading to Windows Azure. “.gitignore” can contain files, folders. It can also contain the files and folders that we do NOT want to ignore. In the next section we will see how to use the un-ignore syntax to make the SQL package included. The “package.json” file is the package definition file for Node.js application. We can define the application name, version, description, author, etc. information in it in JSON format. And we can also put the dependent packages as well, to indicate which packages this Node.js application is needed. In WAWS, name and version is necessary. And when a deployment happened, WAWS will look into this file, find the dependent packages, execute the NPM command to install them one by one. So in the demo above I copied “express” into this file so that WAWS will install it for me automatically. I updated the dependencies section of the “package.json” file manually. But this can be done partially automatically. If we have a valid “package.json” in our local repository, then when we are going to install some packages we can specify “--save” parameter in “npm install” command, so that NPM will help us upgrade the dependencies part. For example, when I wanted to install “azure” package I should execute the command as below. Note that I added “--save” with the command. 1: npm install azure --save Once it finished my “package.json” will be updated automatically. Each dependent packages will be presented here. The JSON key is the package name while the value is the version range. Below is a brief list of the version range format. For more information about the “package.json” please refer here. Format Description Example version Must match the version exactly. "azure": "0.6.7" >=version Must be equal or great than the version. "azure": ">0.6.0" 1.2.x The version number must start with the supplied digits, but any digit may be used in place of the x. "azure": "0.6.x" ~version The version must be at least as high as the range, and it must be less than the next major revision above the range. "azure": "~0.6.7" * Matches any version. "azure": "*" And WAWS will install the proper version of the packages based on what you defined here. The process of WAWS git deployment and NPM installation would be like this.   But Some Packages… As we know, when we specified the dependencies in “package.json” WAWS will download and install them on the cloud. For most of packages it works very well. But there are some special packages may not work. This means, if the package installation needs some special environment restraints it might be failed. For example, the SQL Server Driver for Node.js package needs “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 installed on the target machine during the NPM installation. If we just put the “msnodesql” in “package.json” file and push it to WAWS, the deployment will be failed since there’s no “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 in the WAWS virtual machine. For example, the “server.js” file. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: var sql = require("msnodesql"); 9: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:tqy4c0isfr.database.windows.net,1433;Database=msteched2012;Uid=shaunxu@tqy4c0isfr;Pwd=P@ssw0rd123;Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 10: app.get("/sql", function (req, res) { 11: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 12: if (err) { 13: console.log(err); 14: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 15: } 16: else { 17: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 18: if (err) { 19: console.log(err); 20: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 21: } 22: else { 23: res.json(results); 24: } 25: }); 26: } 27: }); 28: }); 29: 30: console.log("Web application opened."); 31: app.listen(process.env.PORT); The “package.json” file. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*", 6: "msnodesql": "*" 7: } 8: } And it failed to deploy to WAWS. From the NPM log we can see it’s because “msnodesql” cannot be installed on WAWS. The solution is, in “.gitignore” file we should ignore all packages except the “msnodesql”, and upload the package by ourselves. This can be done by use the content as below. We firstly un-ignored the “node_modules” folder. And then we ignored all sub folders but need git to check each sub folders. And then we un-ignore one of the sub folders named “msnodesql” which is the SQL Server Node.js Driver. 1: !node_modules/ 2:  3: node_modules/* 4: !node_modules/msnodesql For more information about the syntax of “.gitignore” please refer to this thread. Now if we go to Git for Windows we will find the “msnodesql” was included in the uncommitted set while “express” was not. I also need remove the dependency of “msnodesql” from “package.json”. Commit and push to WAWS. Now we can see the deployment successfully done. And then we can use the Windows Azure SQL Database from our Node.js application through the “msnodesql” package we uploaded.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to leverage the deployment process of Windows Azure Web Site to install NPM packages during the publish action. With the “.gitignore” and “package.json” file we can ignore the dependent packages from our Node.js and let Windows Azure Web Site download and install them while deployed. For some special packages that cannot be installed by Windows Azure Web Site, such as “msnodesql”, we can put them into the publish payload as well. With the combination of Windows Azure Web Site, Node.js and NPM it makes even more easy and quick for us to develop and deploy our Node.js application to the cloud.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 29, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 29, 2014Popular ReleasesArtezio SharePoint 2013 Workflow Activities: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions 1.0: SharePoint Designer 2013 custom workflow actions that work with permissions. Add Role Assignment Add Role Assignments Delete Role Assignments Get Role Definition Id Get Role Definition Id By Role Type Id Reset Role Inheritance Artezio SharePoint Consulting & DevelopmentVG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.32: changes NEW: Added Support for 'ImgMega.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgCandy.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgPit.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Img.yt' links FIXED: 'Radikal.ru' links FIXED: 'ImageTeam.org' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.com' links FIXED: 'Img.yt' linksAsp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with Todo List WebApplication: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo: Asp.Net MVC-4,Entity Framework and JQGrid Demo with simple Todo List WebApplication, Overview TodoList is a simple web application to create, store and modify Todo tasks to be maintained by the users, which comprises of following fields to the user (Task Name, Task Description, Severity, Target Date, Task Status). TodoList web application is created using MVC - 4 architecture, code-first Entity Framework (ORM) and Jqgrid for displaying the data.Waterfox: Waterfox 31.0 Portable: New features in Waterfox 31.0: Added support for Unicode 7.0 Experimental support for WebCL New features in Firefox 31.0:New Add the search field to the new tab page Support of Prefer:Safe http header for parental control mozilla::pkix as default certificate verifier Block malware from downloaded files Block malware from downloaded files audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox if no application specified Changed Removal of the CAPS infrastructure for specifying site-sp...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6.3: The changes below are included in this release: fixed an exception when collect a server's status but it has been stopped fixed a bug that can cause an exception in case of sending data when the connection dropped already fixed the log4net missing issue for a QuickStart project fixed a warning in a QuickStart projectYnote Classic: Ynote Classic 2.8.5 Beta: Several Changes - Multiple Carets and Multiple Selections - Improved Startup Time - Improved Syntax Highlighting - Search Improvements - Shell Command - Improved StabilityDatabase Schema Reader: v1.3.4.0: Contents DatabaseSchemaReader.dll - Class library (.net3.5) DatabaseSchemaViewer.exe - UI to read and view database schemas; options to generate SQL and code; option to compare another schema CopyToSQLite/CopyToSQLite.exe - UI to copy any database schema and data to SQLite or, if installed, SQL Server CE 4.0 net4/DatabaseSchemaReader.dll - .Net 4.0 class library This Release Schema Reading (MySQL)- reads UNSIGNED integers (available in the schema model's DatabaseColumn.DbDataType prope...TEBookConverter: 1.2: Fixed: Could not start convertion in some cases Fixed: Progress show during convertion was truncated Fixed: Stopping convertion didn't reset program titleQ2Cue \\: Q2Cue v. 0.85: Initial release.CS-Script Source: Release v3.8.4: CSScript.Evaluator is migrated to Mono v3.3.0 Added aggregating //css_ignore_ns from the imported scripts cs-script.7z - CS-Script Suite (binaries, documentation, samples) cs-script.ExtensionPack.7z - CS-Script Extension Pack (additional binaries and samples) cs-scriptDocs.7z - CS-Script DocumentationDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.7: DotSpatial.Full - includes all DotSpatial libraries, extensions and DemoMap application DotSpatial.Core - includes only DotSpatial core libraries Entire list of changes see in the issue tracker. Main changes: Improved common stability, optimized memory and speed when loading and rendering shapefiles, fixed some memory leaks in rasters and shape layers. Simplified plugin infrastructure. Now there are predefined implementations for all required components (IStatusControl, IDockManager, IHead...NRepository: NRepository 2.2: NuGetNRepository packages are available from NuGet.org: NRepository.Core: Install-Package NRepository.Core NRepository.EntityFramework: Install-Package NRepository.EntityFramework NRepository.TestKit: Install-Package NRepository.TestKit Contoso University Sample Projects Added 3 versions of Contoso University sample code added: ContosoUniversityOriginal - This is the original Microsoft sample project for Entity Framework. ContosoUniversityUsingNRepository - This version simply repl...InstagramSaver: 1.5: Added: An option to wait between downloads to prevent ban from server Improved: File downloading performance Improved: File checking performancePVReportDeployer: PVReportDeployer 1.0: PVReportDeployer 1.0AD4 Application Designer for flow based .NET applications: AD4.AppDesigner.23.20: AD4.Iteration.23.20(Advanced Rendering Features) Option to render name of flow pins within flow chart (AlarmClockSample.10.ad4 used to test this extension): MainWindow extended by adding FlowChartShowFlowPinCaptionsComboBox ConfigureUIControls customized ManageFlowChartShowFlowPinCaptionsOptionFlow customized Parameter FlowChartFlowPins replaced FlowChartFlowPinCaptions in AD4.AppDesigner.cfg RenderFlowPinsCaptions customized to use the parameter ToDo: Some tutorials are unfinished b...CRM 2013 One Click Navigation: CRM2013OneClickNavigation_1_0_0_3_managed.zip: Fixes on Security PrivilegesAutomatedLab: AutomatedLab 2.1.0.0: 2.1.0 Support for external virtual switches CaRoot is a new role for installing Root Certificate Authorities Root domain controllers are installed in parallel now 2.0.0 Now supports also Windows Server 2008 R2 and 7 No longer the limit of just having one client and one server operating system Rewrite of the code that handles VHDs Lots of bug fixing Changed that parameter definition of some cmdlets in AutomatedLabDefinition and also adapted the sample scripts Now the Forest...BizTalk Deployment Utilities: 1.0.0.0: Draft VersionGroupMe Software Development Kit: GroupMe .NET SDK v1.0.1: Small update concerning the /users/me endpoint to get the currently authenticated user info. Documentation is available here: http://dotnetcorner.ch/Projects/GroupMe-NET-SDK/DocumentationOneNote Tagging Kit: OneNoteTaggingKit Add-In 2.4.5316.33833: New Features in this ReleaseThe Find Pages dialog preserves search string and tag filter selection on search scope changes Other ChangesDialog windows restored when action button is pressed while windows is minimized Code cleanup and simplification Code documentation Created some reusable UI controls Tags styling made more pleasant (I hope) Tag tooltips improved on the Find Pages dialog : Added dedicated tooltips to the page count and selection indicator of tags Closing open dial...New ProjectsCognitum ASP.NET Providers for Cassandra: Cassandra Providers is a ASP.NET solution that uses the Cassandra Database data source for a custom Membership, Role, Profile, an Session-State providers.DG Mobile: Simples aplicação para inserção, visualização e emissão de relatório de atividades relacionadas ao DG.Dynamics AX Development tools: Several AX Development related tools combined into one configurable packages: TFS Workspace, DEV_Tools, and X++ Editor components.E Drawing Library for WinRT: E Drawing Library for WinRT lets you create graphic rich Windows Store Apps easily, giving you all the power of Direct2D with simple classes and methods.EFramework.DataAccess: Summary ????freetalkserver: This php server, user can register!gicon: gicon is a project to help you to generate avatar/icon by hash (MD5, SHA1) or random hex string (such as GUID)hOOt - Full text search: Full text search engine built from scratch using bitmap indexesMelodyUI - Library for HTML, CSS & JS Development: MelodyUI is a set of classes and helpers that let us to create Web Applications. MelodyUI is lightweight and don't have any dependency.nRF24L01Plus .NETMF driver: nRF24L01, .NET MFNyan: Beginning...Prince Game Xna: Prince of Persia Net Game in Xna Game StudioSmartsby: Combining several small business web app's information into a single dashboard.Super snippets: Super snippets para Visual StudioTCP/IP Adapter BizTalk 2013: BizTalk 2013 TCP/IP community adapter. This is an updated version of the TCP/IP adapter for BizTalk, for use with BizTalk 2013.testMercurial: summaryUnit OF Work With Sql Helper: This project is intended to provide a simple data access object for SQL Server with repository and Unit of Work pattern.VisualRegEx: Prototype. Experimenting regex parsing, graph layout, etc.WDK Hardware Development Boards Add-On: Scripts for working with windows compatible hardware development boards like the Sharks Cove?????? 2014????????: ???????????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。?????? 2014????????: ????????????,????,??????????? ???? ???? ?????????,???,??,?????!???? 2014????????: ?????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????!????? 2014???????: ????????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????????? 2014????????: ?????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????！??????? 2014???????: ??????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！??????? 2014????????: ?????????????????????,????????????????,????????????????,??????！????? 2014????????: ?????????????????????????,???????????,????????,??????????????????????????? 2014????????: ??????????????????????,????“???????,???????”?????,????????????！?????? 2014???????: ?????????????????,????,????,??????,????“????、????、????、????”????????,??????.?????? 2014????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。?????? 2014????????: ??????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????!???? 2014????????: ????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????！???? 2014?????????: ??????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????!?????? 2014??????: ??????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????!?????? 2014??????: ?????????????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????,?????????。????? 2014???????: ????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。????? 2014??????: ???????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????!????? 2014???????: ?????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????！?????? ????????: ??????????????300??,????????、???????、????、????????、?????,??????:????,????,???????！?????? ????????: ??????????????????,?????,???，???、???、?????,???,?????,??????????????????? ???????????: ??????????????????,?????????。????????????,??????,????,????,?????????！????? ???????: ????????????????????????，?????、???、????，????，???、???、???、???、???，????，?????！????? ???????: ????????????????????,????????,????????,????,????,??????，???????!????? ???????: ???????????????,??????????????????,????????,??????????????、????。?????? 2014????????: ????????????????????,????????:??、??、???,?????????????????????!?????? ????????: ????????????????6?,???????????????????????????,??????????????,?????????！?????? ??????: ????????????????8?，????????,????????,??????????,?????,????? ,????????!?????? ???????: ?????????????????????????????、????、????、???????????,????,????!????? 2014???????: ???????????、???、??、??????????????????????????????,????????????????!?????? 2014????????: ????????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????， ?????????，?????????????！?????? ????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。?????? ???????: ??????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。???? ????????: ??????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。???? ???????: ??????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????!?????? ????????: ?????????????????,?????????????。?????????,???????,???????,?????????????。?????? ????????: ????????????????、??????、??????、??????、??????、?????、??????、????、????、????????！????? ???????: ???????????????????,??????????????,???????????,??????,????,??????,??????。????? ???????: ?????????????!???????????,??????,????,?????????????,????????,??????,????,?????...?????? ???????: ????????????、??、???????????,??????,????????,??????????????????...?????????? ????????: ??????????????,??????????????,?????????,????,????,??????。???? ?????: ????????????、?????????,?????????,????,????????,????????????????!????? 2014??????????: ???????????????????,?????,???????,???????????,??????! ????? 2014?????????: ???????????????????,?????????????????????,?????,????,???????.

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• I thought everyone did it like this – Training Session Code Management

  - by Fatherjack

  One of an occasional series of blogs about things that I do that perhaps others don’t. From very early on in my dealings with SQL Server Management Studio I started using Solutions and Projects. This means that I started using them when writing sessions and it wasn’t until speaking with someone at PASS Summit 2013 that I found out that this was a process that was unheard of by some people. So, here we go, a run through how I create and manage code and other documents that I use in presentations. For people unsure what solutions and projects are; • Solution – a container for one or more projects. • Project – a container for files, .sql files are grouped as Queries, all other files are stored as Misc. How do I start? Open Management Studio as normal, and then click File | New and select Project This will bring up the New Project dialog box and you can select/add details as necessary in the places indicated. If this is the first project you are creating then be sure to select the Create directory for solution check box (4). If know in advance that you are going to have more than one project in the solution then you may want to edit the Solution name (3) as by default it will take the name of the project that you enter at (2). This will lead you to the following folder structure (depending on the location that you chose in 3) above. In SSMS you need to turn on the Solution Explorer, either via the View menu or pressing Ctrl + Alt + L                   This will bring up a dockable window that will let you quickly access the files that you choose to include in the Solution.                     Can we get to work and write some code yet please? Yes, we can. As with many Microsoft products there are several ways to go about this, let’s look at the easiest way when creating new code. When writing a presentation I usually start from the position we are currently in – a brand new solution and project with no code. Later on we will look at incorporating existing code files into the Project where we need it. Right-click on the Project name and choose Add New Query           As soon as you click this you will be prompted to select the sql server that you want to connect to and once you have done that you will have your new query open in the text editor and the Solution Explorer will now look like this, showing your server connection and your new query.               And the Project folder will look like this         Now once you have written your code don’t press save, choose Save As and give the code a better name than QueryX.sql. SSMS will interpret this as a request to rename Query1 and your Project and the Project folder will show that SQLQuery1.sql no longer exists but there is now a file named as you requested. If you happen to click save in error then right-click the query in the project and choose rename.               You can then alter the name as you like, even when open in the SSMS text editor, and the file will be renamed. When creating a set of scripts for a presentation I name files with a numeric prefix so that when they are sorted by name they are in the order that I need to use them during the session. I love this idea but I’ve got loads of existing scripts I want to put in Projects Excellent, adding existing files to a project is easy, let’s consider that you have query files in your My Documents folder and you want to bring them into the Project we have just created. Right-click on the Project and choose Add | Existing Item           Navigate to the location of your chosen file and select it. The file will open in SSMS text editor and the Project will be updated to show that the selected query is now part of your project. If you look in Windows Explorer you will see that the query file has been copied into the Project folder, the original file still remains in your My Documents (or wherever it existed). I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore creating further Projects within a solution but will happily answer questions if you get into difficulties. What other advantages do I get from this? Well, as all your code is neatly in one Solution folder and the folder contains only files that are pertinent to the session you are presenting then it makes it very easy to share this code, simply copy the whole folder onto a USB stick, Blog, FTP location, wherever you choose and it’s all there in one self-contained parcel. You don’t have to limit yourself to .sql query files, you can add any sort of document via the Add Existing Item method, just try it out. Right-click on the protect and choose Add | Existing Item           Change the file type filter.                       You can multi select items here using Ctrl as you click each item you want. When you are done, click the Add button and the items will be brought into your project.                 Again, using this process means the files are copied into the project folder, leaving you original files untouched in their original location. Once they are here you can double click them in the SSMS Solution Explorer to open them, for files with a specific file type then the appropriate application will be launched – ie Word, Excel etc. However, if the files are something that the SSMS Text editor can display then they will open in a tab in SSMS. Try it out with a text file or even a PS1 file … This sounds excellent but what do I need to watch out for? One big thing to consider when working like this is the version of SSMS that you are using. There is something fundamentally different between the different versions in the way that the project (.ssmssqlproj) and solution (.sqlsuo and .ssmssln) files are formatted. If you create a solution in an older version of SSMS and then open it in a newer version you will be given the option to upgrade it. Once you do this upgrade then the older version of SSMS will not be able to open the solution any more. Now this ranks as more of an annoyance than disaster as the files within the projects are not affected in any way, you would just have to delete the files mentioned and recreate the solution in the older version again. Summary So, here we have seen how using SSMS Projects and Solutions can help keep related code files (and other document types) together in a neat structure so that they can be quickly navigated during a presentation and it also makes it incredibly simple to distribute your code and share it with others. I hope this is of use to you and helps you bring more order into your sql files, whether you are a person that does technical presentations or not, having your code grouped and managed can make for a lot of advantages as your code library expands.  

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• Spooling in SQL execution plans

  - by Rob Farley

  Sewing has never been my thing. I barely even know the terminology, and when discussing this with American friends, I even found out that half the words that Americans use are different to the words that English and Australian people use. That said – let’s talk about spools! In particular, the Spool operators that you find in some SQL execution plans. This post is for T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by me! I’ve chosen to write about spools because they seem to get a bad rap (even in my song I used the line “There’s spooling from a CTE, they’ve got recursion needlessly”). I figured it was worth covering some of what spools are about, and hopefully explain why they are remarkably necessary, and generally very useful. If you have a look at the Books Online page about Plan Operators, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191158.aspx, and do a search for the word ‘spool’, you’ll notice it says there are 46 matches. 46! Yeah, that’s what I thought too... Spooling is mentioned in several operators: Eager Spool, Lazy Spool, Index Spool (sometimes called a Nonclustered Index Spool), Row Count Spool, Spool, Table Spool, and Window Spool (oh, and Cache, which is a special kind of spool for a single row, but as it isn’t used in SQL 2012, I won’t describe it any further here). Spool, Table Spool, Index Spool, Window Spool and Row Count Spool are all physical operators, whereas Eager Spool and Lazy Spool are logical operators, describing the way that the other spools work. For example, you might see a Table Spool which is either Eager or Lazy. A Window Spool can actually act as both, as I’ll mention in a moment. In sewing, cotton is put onto a spool to make it more useful. You might buy it in bulk on a cone, but if you’re going to be using a sewing machine, then you quite probably want to have it on a spool or bobbin, which allows it to be used in a more effective way. This is the picture that I want you to think about in relation to your data. I’m sure you use spools every time you use your sewing machine. I know I do. I can’t think of a time when I’ve got out my sewing machine to do some sewing and haven’t used a spool. However, I often run SQL queries that don’t use spools. You see, the data that is consumed by my query is typically in a useful state without a spool. It’s like I can just sew with my cotton despite it not being on a spool! Many of my favourite features in T-SQL do like to use spools though. This looks like a very similar query to before, but includes an OVER clause to return a column telling me the number of rows in my data set. I’ll describe what’s going on in a few paragraphs’ time. So what does a Spool operator actually do? The spool operator consumes a set of data, and stores it in a temporary structure, in the tempdb database. This structure is typically either a Table (ie, a heap), or an Index (ie, a b-tree). If no data is actually needed from it, then it could also be a Row Count spool, which only stores the number of rows that the spool operator consumes. A Window Spool is another option if the data being consumed is tightly linked to windows of data, such as when the ROWS/RANGE clause of the OVER clause is being used. You could maybe think about the type of spool being like whether the cotton is going onto a small bobbin to fit in the base of the sewing machine, or whether it’s a larger spool for the top. A Table or Index Spool is either Eager or Lazy in nature. Eager and Lazy are Logical operators, which talk more about the behaviour, rather than the physical operation. If I’m sewing, I can either be all enthusiastic and get all my cotton onto the spool before I start, or I can do it as I need it. “Lazy” might not the be the best word to describe a person – in the SQL world it describes the idea of either fetching all the rows to build up the whole spool when the operator is called (Eager), or populating the spool only as it’s needed (Lazy). Window Spools are both physical and logical. They’re eager on a per-window basis, but lazy between windows. And when is it needed? The way I see it, spools are needed for two reasons. 1 – When data is going to be needed AGAIN. 2 – When data needs to be kept away from the original source. If you’re someone that writes long stored procedures, you are probably quite aware of the second scenario. I see plenty of stored procedures being written this way – where the query writer populates a temporary table, so that they can make updates to it without risking the original table. SQL does this too. Imagine I’m updating my contact list, and some of my changes move data to later in the book. If I’m not careful, I might update the same row a second time (or even enter an infinite loop, updating it over and over). A spool can make sure that I don’t, by using a copy of the data. This problem is known as the Halloween Effect (not because it’s spooky, but because it was discovered in late October one year). As I’m sure you can imagine, the kind of spool you’d need to protect against the Halloween Effect would be eager, because if you’re only handling one row at a time, then you’re not providing the protection... An eager spool will block the flow of data, waiting until it has fetched all the data before serving it up to the operator that called it. In the query below I’m forcing the Query Optimizer to use an index which would be upset if the Name column values got changed, and we see that before any data is fetched, a spool is created to load the data into. This doesn’t stop the index being maintained, but it does mean that the index is protected from the changes that are being done. There are plenty of times, though, when you need data repeatedly. Consider the query I put above. A simple join, but then counting the number of rows that came through. The way that this has executed (be it ideal or not), is to ask that a Table Spool be populated. That’s the Table Spool operator on the top row. That spool can produce the same set of rows repeatedly. This is the behaviour that we see in the bottom half of the plan. In the bottom half of the plan, we see that the a join is being done between the rows that are being sourced from the spool – one being aggregated and one not – producing the columns that we need for the query. Table v Index When considering whether to use a Table Spool or an Index Spool, the question that the Query Optimizer needs to answer is whether there is sufficient benefit to storing the data in a b-tree. The idea of having data in indexes is great, but of course there is a cost to maintaining them. Here we’re creating a temporary structure for data, and there is a cost associated with populating each row into its correct position according to a b-tree, as opposed to simply adding it to the end of the list of rows in a heap. Using a b-tree could even result in page-splits as the b-tree is populated, so there had better be a reason to use that kind of structure. That all depends on how the data is going to be used in other parts of the plan. If you’ve ever thought that you could use a temporary index for a particular query, well this is it – and the Query Optimizer can do that if it thinks it’s worthwhile. It’s worth noting that just because a Spool is populated using an Index Spool, it can still be fetched using a Table Spool. The details about whether or not a Spool used as a source shows as a Table Spool or an Index Spool is more about whether a Seek predicate is used, rather than on the underlying structure. Recursive CTE I’ve already shown you an example of spooling when the OVER clause is used. You might see them being used whenever you have data that is needed multiple times, and CTEs are quite common here. With the definition of a set of data described in a CTE, if the query writer is leveraging this by referring to the CTE multiple times, and there’s no simplification to be leveraged, a spool could theoretically be used to avoid reapplying the CTE’s logic. Annoyingly, this doesn’t happen. Consider this query, which really looks like it’s using the same data twice. I’m creating a set of data (which is completely deterministic, by the way), and then joining it back to itself. There seems to be no reason why it shouldn’t use a spool for the set described by the CTE, but it doesn’t. On the other hand, if we don’t pull as many columns back, we might see a very different plan. You see, CTEs, like all sub-queries, are simplified out to figure out the best way of executing the whole query. My example is somewhat contrived, and although there are plenty of cases when it’s nice to give the Query Optimizer hints about how to execute queries, it usually doesn’t do a bad job, even without spooling (and you can always use a temporary table). When recursion is used, though, spooling should be expected. Consider what we’re asking for in a recursive CTE. We’re telling the system to construct a set of data using an initial query, and then use set as a source for another query, piping this back into the same set and back around. It’s very much a spool. The analogy of cotton is long gone here, as the idea of having a continual loop of cotton feeding onto a spool and off again doesn’t quite fit, but that’s what we have here. Data is being fed onto the spool, and getting pulled out a second time when the spool is used as a source. (This query is running on AdventureWorks, which has a ManagerID column in HumanResources.Employee, not AdventureWorks2012) The Index Spool operator is sucking rows into it – lazily. It has to be lazy, because at the start, there’s only one row to be had. However, as rows get populated onto the spool, the Table Spool operator on the right can return rows when asked, ending up with more rows (potentially) getting back onto the spool, ready for the next round. (The Assert operator is merely checking to see if we’ve reached the MAXRECURSION point – it vanishes if you use OPTION (MAXRECURSION 0), which you can try yourself if you like). Spools are useful. Don’t lose sight of that. Every time you use temporary tables or table variables in a stored procedure, you’re essentially doing the same – don’t get upset at the Query Optimizer for doing so, even if you think the spool looks like an expensive part of the query. I hope you’re enjoying this T-SQL Tuesday. Why not head over to my post that is hosting it this month to read about some other plan operators? At some point I’ll write a summary post – once I have you should find a comment below pointing at it. @rob_farley

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• A Closable jQuery Plug-in

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my client side development I deal a lot with content that pops over the main page. Be it data entry ‘windows’ or dialogs or simple pop up notes. In most cases this behavior goes with draggable windows, but sometimes it’s also useful to have closable behavior on static page content that the user can choose to hide or otherwise make invisible or fade out. Here’s a small jQuery plug-in that provides .closable() behavior to most elements by using either an image that is provided or – more appropriately by using a CSS class to define the picture box layout. /* * * Closable * * Makes selected DOM elements closable by making them * invisible when close icon is clicked * * Version 1.01 * @requires jQuery v1.3 or later * * Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Rick Strahl * http://www.west-wind.com/ * * Licensed under the MIT license: * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php Support CSS: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Options: * handle Element to place closebox into (like say a header). Use if main element and closebox container are two different elements. * closeHandler Function called when the close box is clicked. Return true to close the box return false to keep it visible. * cssClass The CSS class to apply to the close box DIV or IMG tag. * imageUrl Allows you to specify an explicit IMG url that displays the close icon. If used bypasses CSS image styling. * fadeOut Optional provide fadeOut speed. Default no fade out occurs */ (function ($) { $.fn.closable = function (options) { var opt = { handle: null, closeHandler: null, cssClass: "closebox", imageUrl: null, fadeOut: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.each(function (i) { var el = $(this); var pos = el.css("position"); if (!pos || pos == "static") el.css("position", "relative"); var h = opt.handle ? $(opt.handle).css({ position: "relative" }) : el; var div = opt.imageUrl ? $("<img>").attr("src", opt.imageUrl).css("cursor", "pointer") : $("<div>"); div.addClass(opt.cssClass) .click(function (e) { if (opt.closeHandler) if (!opt.closeHandler.call(this, e)) return; if (opt.fadeOut) $(el).fadeOut(opt.fadeOut); else $(el).hide(); }); if (opt.imageUrl) div.css("background-image", "none"); h.append(div); }); } })(jQuery); The plugin can be applied against any selector that is a container (typically a div tag). The close image or close box is provided typically by way of a CssClass - .closebox by default – which supplies the image as part of the CSS styling. The default styling for the box looks something like this: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Alternately you can also supply an image URL which overrides the background image in the style sheet. I use this plug-in mostly on pop up windows that can be closed, but it’s also quite handy for remove/delete behavior in list displays like this: you can find this sample here to look to play along: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/Samples/Ajax/AmazonBooks/BooksAdmin.aspx For closable windows it’s nice to have something reusable because in my client framework there are lots of different kinds of windows that can be created: Draggables, Modal Dialogs, HoverPanels etc. and they all use the client .closable plug-in to provide the closable operation in the same way with a few options. Plug-ins are great for this sort of thing because they can also be aggregated and so different components can pick and choose the behavior they want. The window here is a draggable, that’s closable and has shadow behavior and the server control can simply generate the appropriate plug-ins to apply to the main <div> tag: $().ready(function() { $('#ctl00_MainContent_panEditBook') .closable({ handle: $('#divEditBook_Header') }) .draggable({ dragDelay: 100, handle: '#divEditBook_Header' }) .shadow({ opacity: 0.25, offset: 6 }); }) The window is using the default .closebox style and has its handle set to the header bar (Book Information). The window is just closable to go away so no event handler is applied. Actually I cheated – the actual page’s .closable is a bit more ugly in the sample as it uses an image from a resources file: .closable({ imageUrl: '/WestWindWebToolkit/Samples/WebResource.axd?d=TooLongAndNastyToPrint', handle: $('#divEditBook_Header')}) so you can see how to apply a custom image, which in this case is generated by the server control wrapping the client DragPanel. More interesting maybe is to apply the .closable behavior to list scenarios. For example, each of the individual items in the list display also are .closable using this plug-in. Rather than having to define each item with Html for an image, event handler and link, when the client template is rendered the closable behavior is attached to the list. Here I’m using client-templating and the code that this is done with looks like this: function loadBooks() { showProgress(); // Clear the content $("#divBookListWrapper").empty(); var filter = $("#" + scriptVars.lstFiltersId).val(); Proxy.GetBooks(filter, function(books) { $(books).each(function(i) { updateBook(this); showProgress(true); }); }, onPageError); } function updateBook(book,highlight) { // try to retrieve the single item in the list by tag attribute id var item = $(".bookitem[tag=" +book.Pk +"]"); // grab and evaluate the template var html = parseTemplate(template, book); var newItem = $(html) .attr("tag", book.Pk.toString()) .click(function() { var pk = $(this).attr("tag"); editBook(this, parseInt(pk)); }) .closable({ closeHandler: function(e) { removeBook(this, e); }, imageUrl: "../../images/remove.gif" }); if (item.length > 0) item.after(newItem).remove(); else newItem.appendTo($("#divBookListWrapper")); if (highlight) { newItem .addClass("pulse") .effect("bounce", { distance: 15, times: 3 }, 400); setTimeout(function() { newItem.removeClass("pulse"); }, 1200); } } Here the closable behavior is applied to each of the items along with an event handler, which is nice and easy compared to having to embed the right HTML and click handling into each item in the list individually via markup. Ideally though (and these posts make me realize this often a little late) I probably should set up a custom cssClass to handle the rendering – maybe a CSS class called .removebox that only changes the image from the default box image. This example also hooks up an event handler that is fired in response to the close. In the list I need to know when the remove button is clicked so I can fire of a service call to the server to actually remove the item from the database. The handler code can also return false; to indicate that the window should not be closed optionally. Returning true will close the window. You can find more information about the .closable class behavior and options here: .closable Documentation Plug-ins make Server Control JavaScript much easier I find this plug-in immensely useful especial as part of server control code, because it simplifies the code that has to be generated server side tremendously. This is true of plug-ins in general which make it so much easier to create simple server code that only generates plug-in options, rather than full blocks of JavaScript code.  For example, here’s the relevant code from the DragPanel server control which generates the .closable() behavior: if (this.Closable && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(DragHandleID) ) { string imageUrl = this.CloseBoxImage; if (imageUrl == "WebResource" ) imageUrl = ScriptProxy.GetWebResourceUrl(this, this.GetType(), ControlResources.CLOSE_ICON_RESOURCE); StringBuilder closableOptions = new StringBuilder("imageUrl: '" + imageUrl + "'"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.DragHandleID)) closableOptions.Append(",handle: $('#" + this.DragHandleID + "')"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ClientDialogHandler)) closableOptions.Append(",handler: " + this.ClientDialogHandler); if (this.FadeOnClose) closableOptions.Append(",fadeOut: 'slow'"); startupScript.Append(@" .closable({ " + closableOptions + "})"); } The same sort of block is then used for .draggable and .shadow which simply sets options. Compared to the code I used to have in pre-jQuery versions of my JavaScript toolkit this is a walk in the park. In those days there was a bunch of JS generation which was ugly to say the least. I know a lot of folks frown on using server controls, especially the UI is client centric as the example is. However, I do feel that server controls can greatly simplify the process of getting the right behavior attached more easily and with the help of IntelliSense. Often the script markup is easier is especially if you are dealing with complex, multiple plug-in associations that often express more easily with property values on a control. Regardless of whether server controls are your thing or not this plug-in can be useful in many scenarios. Even in simple client-only scenarios using a plug-in with a few simple parameters is nicer and more consistent than creating the HTML markup over and over again. I hope some of you find this even a small bit as useful as I have. Related Links Download jquery.closable West Wind Web Toolkit jQuery Plug-ins © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery   ASP.NET  JavaScript  

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• Data Integration 12c Raising the Big Data Roof at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} Author: Dain Hansen, Director, Oracle It was an exciting OpenWorld 2013 for us in the Data Integration track. Our theme this year was all about ‘being future ready’ - previewing one of our biggest releases this year: Oracle Data Integration 12c. Just this week we followed up with this preview by announcing the general availability of 12c release for Oracle’s key data integration products: Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. The new release delivers extreme performance, increase IT productivity, and simplify deployment, while helping IT organizations to keep pace with new data-oriented technology trends including cloud computing, big data analytics, real-time business intelligence. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} Mark Hurd's keynote on day one set the tone for the Data Integration sessions. Mark focused on big data analytics and the changing consumer expectations. Especially real-time insight is a key theme for Oracle overall and data integration products. In Mark Hurd's keynote we heard from key customers, such as Airbus and Thomson Reuters, how real-time analysis of operational data including machine data creates value, in some cases even saves lives. Thomas Kurian gave a deeper look into Oracle's big data and fast data solutions. In the initial lead Data Integration track session - Brad Adelberg, VP of Development, presented Oracle’s Data Integration 12c product strategy based on key trends from the initial OpenWorld keynotes. Brad talked about how Oracle's data integration products address the new data integration requirements that evolved with cloud computing, big data, and changing consumer expectations and how they set the key themes in our products’ road map. Brad explained why and how fast-time to value, high-performance and future-ready solutions is the top focus areas for product development. If you were not able to attend OpenWorld or this session I recommend reading the white paper: Five New Data Integration Requirements and How to Meet them with Oracle Data Integration, which provides an in-depth look into how Oracle addresses the new trends in the DI market. Following Brad’s session, Nick Wagner provided in depth review of Oracle GoldenGate’s latest features and roadmap. Nick discussed how Oracle GoldenGate’s tight integration with Oracle Database sets the product apart from the competition. We also heard that heterogeneity of the product is still a major focus for GoldenGate’s development and there will be more news on that front when there is a major release. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho";} After GoldenGate’s product strategy session, Denis Gray from the PM team presented Oracle Data Integrator’s product strategy session, talking about the latest and greatest on ODI. Another good session was delivered by long-time GoldenGate users, Comcast.  Jason Hurd and Amit Patel of Comcast talked about the various use cases they deploy Oracle GoldenGate throughout their enterprise, from database upgrades, feeding reporting systems, to active-active database synchronization.  The Comcast team shared many good tips on how to use GoldenGate for both zero downtime upgrades and active-active replication with conflict management requirement. One of our other important goals we had this year for the Data Integration track at OpenWorld was hearing from our customers. We ended day 1 on just that, with a wonderful award ceremony for Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. The ceremony was held in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Congratulations to Royal Bank of Scotland and Yalumba Wine Company, the winners in the Data Integration category. You can find more information on the award and the winners in our previous blog post: 2013 Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware Innovation… Selected for their innovation use of Oracle’s Data Integration products; the winners for the Data Integration Category are Royal Bank of Scotland and The Yalumba Wine Company. Congratulations!!! Royal Bank of Scotland’s Market and International Banking division provides clients across the globe with seamless trading and competitive pricing, underpinned by a deep knowledge of risk management across the full spectrum of financial products. They handle millions of transactions daily to keep the lifeblood of their clients’ businesses flowing – whether through payment management solutions or through bespoke trade finance solutions. Royal Bank of Scotland is leveraging Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator along with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the Oracle Database for a variety of solutions. Mainly, Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator are used to feed their data warehouse – providing a real-time data integration solution that feeds transactional data to their analytics system in minutes to enable improved decision making with timely, accurate data for their business users. Oracle Data Integrator’s in-database transformation capabilities and its ability to integrate with Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data capture is the foundation of this implementation. This solution makes it such that changes happening in the analytics systems are available the same day they are deployed on the operational system with 100% data quality guaranteed. Additionally, the solution has helped to reduce their operational database size from 150GB to 10GB. Impressive! Now what if I told you this solution was built in 3 months and had a less than 6 month return on investment? That’s outstanding! The Yalumba Wine Company is situated in the Barossa Valley of Australia. It is the oldest family owned winery in Australia with a unique way of aging their wines in specially crafted 100 liter barrels. Did you know that “Yalumba” is Aboriginal for “all the land around”? The Yalumba Wine Company is growing rapidly, and was in need of introducing a more modern standard to the existing manufacturing processes to meet globalization demands, overall time-to-market, and better operational efficiency objectives of product development. The Yalumba Wine Company worked with a partner, Bristlecone to develop a unique solution whereby Oracle Data Integrator is leveraged to pull data from Salesforce.com and JD Edwards, in addition to their other pre-existing source systems, for consumption into their data warehouse. They have emphasized the overall ease of developing integration workflows with Oracle Data Integrator. The solution has brought better visibility for the business users, shorter data loading and transformation performance to their data warehouse with rapid incorporation of new data sources, and a solid future-proof foundation for their organization. Moving forward, they plan on leveraging more from Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio. Terrific! In addition to these two customers on Tuesday we featured many other important Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate customers. On Tuesday the GoldenGate panel included: Land O’Lakes, Smuckers, and Veolia Water. Besides giving us yummy nutrition and healthy water, these companies have another aspect in common. They all use GoldenGate to boost their ERP application. Please read the recap by Irem Radzik. On Wednesday, the ODI Panel included: Barry Ralston and Ryan Weber of Infinity Insurance, Paul Stracke of Paychex Inc., and Ian Wall of Vertex Pharmaceuticals for a session filled with interesting projects, use cases and approaches to leveraging Oracle Data Integrator. Please read the recap by Sandrine Riley for more. Thanks to everyone who joined with us and we hope to stay connected! To hear more about our Data Integration12c products join us in an upcoming webcast to learn more. Follow us www.twitter.com/ORCLGoldenGate or goto our website at www.oracle.com/goto/dataintegration

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• Windows Azure Mobile Services: New support for iOS apps, Facebook/Twitter/Google identity, Emails, SMS, Blobs, Service Bus and more

  - by ScottGu

  A few weeks ago I blogged about Windows Azure Mobile Services - a new capability in Windows Azure that makes it incredibly easy to connect your client and mobile applications to a scalable cloud backend. Earlier today we delivered a number of great improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services.  New features include: iOS support – enabling you to connect iPhone and iPad apps to Mobile Services Facebook, Twitter, and Google authentication support with Mobile Services Blob, Table, Queue, and Service Bus support from within your Mobile Service Sending emails from your Mobile Service (in partnership with SendGrid) Sending SMS messages from your Mobile Service (in partnership with Twilio) Ability to deploy mobile services in the West US region All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately. Below are more details on them: iOS Support This week we delivered initial support for connecting iOS based devices (including iPhones and iPads) to Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Like the rest of our Windows Azure SDK, we are delivering the native iOS libraries to enable this under an open source (Apache 2.0) license on GitHub.  We’re excited to get your feedback on this new library through our forum and GitHub issues list, and we welcome contributions to the SDK. To create a new iOS app or connect an existing iOS app to your Mobile Service, simply select the “iOS” tab within the Quick Start view of a Mobile Service within the Windows Azure Portal – and then follow either the “Create a new iOS app” or “Connect to an existing iOS app” link below it: Clicking either of these links will expand and display step-by-step instructions for how to build an iOS application that connects with your Mobile Service: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple iOS “Todo List” app that stores data in Windows Azure.  Then follow the below tutorials to explore how to use the iOS client libraries to store data and authenticate users. Get Started with data in Mobile Services for iOS Get Started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS Facebook, Twitter, and Google Authentication Support Our initial preview of Mobile Services supported the ability to authenticate users of mobile apps using Microsoft Accounts (formerly called Windows Live ID accounts).  This week we are adding the ability to also authenticate users using Facebook, Twitter, and Google credentials.  These are now supported with both Windows 8 apps as well as iOS apps (and a single app can support multiple forms of identity simultaneously – so you can offer your users a choice of how to login). The below tutorials walkthrough how to register your Mobile Service with an identity provider: How to register your app with Microsoft Account How to register your app with Facebook How to register your app with Twitter How to register your app with Google The tutorials above walkthrough how to obtain a client ID and a secret key from the identity provider. You can then click on the “Identity” tab of your Mobile Service (within the Windows Azure Portal) and save these values to enable server-side authentication with your Mobile Service: You can then write code within your client or mobile app to authenticate your users to the Mobile Service.  For example, below is the code you would write to have them login to the Mobile Service using their Facebook credentials: Windows Store App (using C#): var user = await App.MobileService                     .LoginAsync(MobileServiceAuthenticationProvider.Facebook); iOS app (using Objective C): UINavigationController *controller = [self.todoService.client     loginViewControllerWithProvider:@"facebook"     completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {        //... }]; Learn more about authenticating Mobile Services using Microsoft Account, Facebook, Twitter, and Google from these tutorials: Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (C#) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (JavaScript) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS Using Windows Azure Blob, Tables and ServiceBus with your Mobile Services Mobile Services provide a simple but powerful way to add server logic using server scripts. These scripts are associated with the individual CRUD operations on your mobile service’s tables. Server scripts are great for data validation, custom authorization logic (e.g. does this user participate in this game session), augmenting CRUD operations, sending push notifications, and other similar scenarios.   Server scripts are written in JavaScript and are executed in a secure server-side scripting environment built using Node.js.  You can edit these scripts and save them on the server directly within the Windows Azure Portal: In this week’s release we have added the ability to work with other Windows Azure services from your Mobile Service server scripts.  This is supported using the existing “azure” module within the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js.  For example, the below code could be used in a Mobile Service script to obtain a reference to a Windows Azure Table (after which you could query it or insert data into it):     var azure = require('azure');     var tableService = azure.createTableService("<< account name >>",                                                 "<< access key >>"); Follow the tutorials on the Windows Azure Node.js dev center to learn more about working with Blob, Tables, Queues and Service Bus using the azure module. Sending emails from your Mobile Service In this week’s release we have also added the ability to easily send emails from your Mobile Service, building on our partnership with SendGrid. Whether you want to add a welcome email upon successful user registration, or make your app alert you of certain usage activities, you can do this now by sending email from Mobile Services server scripts. To get started, sign up for SendGrid account at http://sendgrid.com . Windows Azure customers receive a special offer of 25,000 free emails per month from SendGrid. To sign-up for this offer, or get more information, please visit http://www.sendgrid.com/azure.html . One you signed up, you can add the following script to your Mobile Service server scripts to send email via SendGrid service:     var sendgrid = new SendGrid('<< account name >>', '<< password >>');       sendgrid.send({         to: '<< enter email address here >>',         from: '<< enter from address here >>',         subject: 'New to-do item',         text: 'A new to-do was added: ' + item.text     }, function (success, message) {         if (!success) {             console.error(message);         }     }); Follow the Send email from Mobile Services with SendGrid tutorial to learn more. Sending SMS messages from your Mobile Service SMS is a key communication medium for mobile apps - it comes in handy if you want your app to send users a confirmation code during registration, allow your users to invite their friends to install your app or reach out to mobile users without a smartphone. Using Mobile Service server scripts and Twilio’s REST API, you can now easily send SMS messages to your app.  To get started, sign up for Twilio account. Windows Azure customers receive 1000 free text messages when using Twilio and Windows Azure together. Once signed up, you can add the following to your Mobile Service server scripts to send SMS messages:     var httpRequest = require('request');     var account_sid = "<< account SID >>";     var auth_token = "<< auth token >>";       // Create the request body     var body = "From=" + from + "&To=" + to + "&Body=" + message;       // Make the HTTP request to Twilio     httpRequest.post({         url: "https://" + account_sid + ":" + auth_token +              "@api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/" + account_sid + "/SMS/Messages.json",         headers: { 'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },         body: body     }, function (err, resp, body) {         console.log(body);     }); I’m excited to be speaking at the TwilioCon conference this week, and will be showcasing some of the cool scenarios you can now enable with Twilio and Windows Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services availability in West US region Our initial preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services was only supported in the US East region of Windows Azure.  As with every Windows Azure service, overtime we will extend Mobile Services to all Windows Azure regions. With this week’s preview update we’ve added support so that you can now create your Mobile Service in the West US region as well: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this week – including .NET 4.5 support for Windows Azure Web Sites.  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Announcing: Great Improvements to Windows Azure Web Sites

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce some great improvements to the Windows Azure Web Sites capability we first introduced earlier this summer.  Today’s improvements include: a new low-cost shared mode scaling option, support for custom domains with shared and reserved mode web-sites using both CNAME and A-Records (the later enabling naked domains), continuous deployment support using both CodePlex and GitHub, and FastCGI extensibility.  All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately. New “Shared” Scaling Tier Windows Azure allows you to deploy and host up to 10 web-sites in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment. You can start out developing and testing web sites at no cost using this free shared mode, and it supports the ability to run web sites that serve up to 165MB/day of content (5GB/month).  All of the capabilities we introduced in June with this free tier remain the same with today’s update. Starting with today’s release, you can now elastically scale up your web-site beyond this capability using a new low-cost “shared” option (which we are introducing today) as well as using a “reserved instance” option (which we’ve supported since June).  Scaling to either of these modes is easy.  Simply click on the “scale” tab of your web-site within the Windows Azure Portal, choose the scaling option you want to use with it, and then click the “save” button.  Changes take only seconds to apply and do not require any code to be changed, nor the app to be redeployed: Below are some more details on the new “shared” option, as well as the existing “reserved” option: Shared Mode With today’s release we are introducing a new low-cost “shared” scaling mode for Windows Azure Web Sites.  A web-site running in shared mode is deployed in a shared/multi-tenant hosting environment.  Unlike the free tier, though, a web-site in shared mode has no quotas/upper-limit around the amount of bandwidth it can serve.  The first 5 GB/month of bandwidth you serve with a shared web-site is free, and then you pay the standard “pay as you go” Windows Azure outbound bandwidth rate for outbound bandwidth above 5 GB. A web-site running in shared mode also now supports the ability to map multiple custom DNS domain names, using both CNAMEs and A-records, to it.  The new A-record support we are introducing with today’s release provides the ability for you to support “naked domains” with your web-sites (e.g. http://microsoft.com in addition to http://www.microsoft.com).  We will also in the future enable SNI based SSL as a built-in feature with shared mode web-sites (this functionality isn’t supported with today’s release – but will be coming later this year to both the shared and reserved tiers). You pay for a shared mode web-site using the standard “pay as you go” model that we support with other features of Windows Azure (meaning no up-front costs, and you pay only for the hours that the feature is enabled).  A web-site running in shared mode costs only 1.3 cents/hr during the preview (so on average $9.36/month). Reserved Instance Mode In addition to running sites in shared mode, we also support scaling them to run within a reserved instance mode.  When running in reserved instance mode your sites are guaranteed to run isolated within your own Small, Medium or Large VM (meaning no other customers run within it).  You can run any number of web-sites within a VM, and there are no quotas on CPU or memory limits. You can run your sites using either a single reserved instance VM, or scale up to have multiple instances of them (e.g. 2 medium sized VMs, etc).  Scaling up or down is easy – just select the “reserved” instance VM within the “scale” tab of the Windows Azure Portal, choose the VM size you want, the number of instances of it you want to run, and then click save.  Changes take effect in seconds: Unlike shared mode, there is no per-site cost when running in reserved mode.  Instead you pay only for the reserved instance VMs you use – and you can run any number of web-sites you want within them at no extra cost (e.g. you could run a single site within a reserved instance VM or 100 web-sites within it for the same cost).  Reserved instance VMs start at 8 cents/hr for a small reserved VM.  Elastic Scale-up/down Windows Azure Web Sites allows you to scale-up or down your capacity within seconds.  This allows you to deploy a site using the shared mode option to begin with, and then dynamically scale up to the reserved mode option only when you need to – without you having to change any code or redeploy your application. If your site traffic starts to drop off, you can scale back down the number of reserved instances you are using, or scale down to the shared mode tier – all within seconds and without having to change code, redeploy, or adjust DNS mappings.  You can also use the “Dashboard” view within the Windows Azure Portal to easily monitor your site’s load in real-time (it shows not only requests/sec and bandwidth but also stats like CPU and memory usage). Because of Windows Azure’s “pay as you go” pricing model, you only pay for the compute capacity you use in a given hour.  So if your site is running most of the month in shared mode (at 1.3 cents/hr), but there is a weekend when it gets really popular and you decide to scale it up into reserved mode to have it run in your own dedicated VM (at 8 cents/hr), you only have to pay the additional pennies/hr for the hours it is running in the reserved mode.  There is no upfront cost you need to pay to enable this, and once you scale back down to shared mode you return to the 1.3 cents/hr rate.  This makes it super flexible and cost effective. Improved Custom Domain Support Web sites running in either “shared” or “reserved” mode support the ability to associate custom host names to them (e.g. www.mysitename.com).  You can associate multiple custom domains to each Windows Azure Web Site.  With today’s release we are introducing support for A-Records (a big ask by many users). With the A-Record support, you can now associate ‘naked’ domains to your Windows Azure Web Sites – meaning instead of having to use www.mysitename.com you can instead just have mysitename.com (with no sub-name prefix).  Because you can map multiple domains to a single site, you can optionally enable both a www and naked domain for a site (and then use a URL rewrite rule/redirect to avoid SEO problems). We’ve also enhanced the UI for managing custom domains within the Windows Azure Portal as part of today’s release.  Clicking the “Manage Domains” button in the tray at the bottom of the portal now brings up custom UI that makes it easy to manage/configure them: As part of this update we’ve also made it significantly smoother/easier to validate ownership of custom domains, and made it easier to switch existing sites/domains to Windows Azure Web Sites with no downtime. Continuous Deployment Support with Git and CodePlex or GitHub One of the more popular features we released earlier this summer was support for publishing web sites directly to Windows Azure using source control systems like TFS and Git.  This provides a really powerful way to manage your application deployments using source control.  It is really easy to enable this from a website’s dashboard page: The TFS option we shipped earlier this summer provides a very rich continuous deployment solution that enables you to automate builds and run unit tests every time you check in your web-site, and then if they are successful automatically publish to Azure. With today’s release we are expanding our Git support to also enable continuous deployment scenarios and integrate with projects hosted on CodePlex and GitHub.  This support is enabled with all web-sites (including those using the “free” scaling mode). Starting today, when you choose the “Set up Git publishing” link on a website’s “Dashboard” page you’ll see two additional options show up when Git based publishing is enabled for the web-site: You can click on either the “Deploy from my CodePlex project” link or “Deploy from my GitHub project” link to walkthrough a simple workflow to configure a connection between your website and a source repository you host on CodePlex or GitHub.  Once this connection is established, CodePlex or GitHub will automatically notify Windows Azure every time a checkin occurs.  This will then cause Windows Azure to pull the source and compile/deploy the new version of your app automatically.  The below two videos walkthrough how easy this is to enable this workflow and deploy both an initial app and then make a change to it: Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and CodePlex (2 minutes) Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and GitHub (2 minutes) This approach enables a really clean continuous deployment workflow, and makes it much easier to support a team development environment using Git: Note: today’s release supports establishing connections with public GitHub/CodePlex repositories.  Support for private repositories will be enabled in a few weeks. Support for multiple branches Previously, we only supported deploying from the git ‘master’ branch.  Often, though, developers want to deploy from alternate branches (e.g. a staging or future branch). This is now a supported scenario – both with standalone git based projects, as well as ones linked to CodePlex or GitHub.  This enables a variety of useful scenarios.  For example, you can now have two web-sites - a “live” and “staging” version – both linked to the same repository on CodePlex or GitHub.  You can configure one of the web-sites to always pull whatever is in the master branch, and the other to pull what is in the staging branch.  This enables a really clean way to enable final testing of your site before it goes live. This 1 minute video demonstrates how to configure which branch to use with a web-site. Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming in the weeks ahead – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 next month).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• New release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available for download - March 2011

  - by Jialiang

  A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on March 8th. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62267#DownloadId=215627 You can download individual code samples or browse code samples grouped by technology in the updated code sample index. If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please read this Microsoft News Center article http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jan11/01-13codeframework.mspx, or watch the introduction video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO5Li3APU58, or read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/. -------------- New Silverlight code samples CSSLTreeViewCRUDDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215808 The code sample was created by Amit Dey. It demonstrates a custom TreeView with added functionalities of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and drag-and-drop operations. Silverlight TreeView control with CRUD and drag & drop is a frequently asked programming question in Silverlight  forums. Many customers also requested this code sample in our code sample request service. We hope that this sample can reduce developers' efforts in handling this typical programming scenario. The following blog article introduces the sample in detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codefx/archive/2011/02/15/silverlight-treeview-control-with-crud-and-drag-amp-drop.aspx. CSSL4FileDragDrop and VBSL4FileDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215809 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215810 The code sample demonstrates the new drag&drop feature of Silverlight 4 to implement dragging picures from the local file system to a Silverlight application.   Sometimes we want to change SiteMapPath control's titles and paths according to Query String values. And sometimes we want to create the SiteMapPath dynamically. This code sample shows how to achieve these goals by handling SiteMap.SiteMapResolve event. CSASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration, VBASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215027 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215106 In this sample, we encrypt and decrypt some sensitive information in the config file of a web application by using the RSA asymmetric encryption. This project contains two snippets. The first one demonstrates how to use RSACryptoServiceProvider to generate public key and the corresponding private key and then encrypt/decrypt string value on page. The second part shows how to use RSA configuration provider to encrypt and decrypt configuration section in web.config of web application. connectionStrings section in plain text: Encrypted connectionString:  Note that if you store sensitive data in any of the following configuration sections, we cannot encrypt it by using a protected configuration provider <processModel> <runtime> <mscorlib> <startup> <system.runtime.remoting> <configProtectedData> <satelliteassemblies> <cryptographySettings> <cryptoNameMapping> CSASPNETFileUploadStatus Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215028 I believe ASP.NET programmers will like this sample, because in many cases we need customers know the current status of the uploading files, including the upload speed and completion percentage and so on. Under normal circumstances, we need to use COM components to accomplish this function, such as Flash, Silverlight, etc. The uploading data can be retrieved in two places, the client-side and the server-side. For the client, for the safety factors, the file upload status information cannot be got from JavaScript or server-side code, so we need COM component, like Flash and Silverlight to accomplish this, I do not like this approach because the customer need to install these components, but also we need to learn another programming framework. For the server side, we can get the information through coding, but the key question is how to tell the client results. In this case, We will combine custom HTTPModule and AJAX technology to illustrate how to analyze the HTTP protocol, how to break the file request packets, how to customize the location of the server-side file caching, how to return the file uploading status back to the client and so on . CSASPNETHighlightCodeInPage, VBASPNETHighlightCodeInPage Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215029 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215108 This sample imitates a system that needs display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page . As a matter of fact, sometimes we input code like C# or HTML in a web page and we need these codes to be highlighted for a better reading experience. It is convenient for us to keep the code in mind if it is highlighted. So in this case, the sample shows how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page. It is not difficult to highlight the code in a web page by using String.Replace method directly. This  method can return a new string in which all occurrences of a specified string in the current instance are replaced with another specified string. However, it may not be a good idea, because it's not extremely fast, in fact, it's pretty slow. In addition, it is hard to highlight multiple keywords by using String.Replace method directly. Sometimes we need to copy source code from visual studio to a web page, for readability purpose, highlight the code is important while set the different types of keywords to different colors in a web page by using String.Replace method directly is not available. To handle this issue, we need to use a hashtable variable to store the different languages of code and their related regular expressions with matching options. Furthermore, define the css styles which used to highlight the code in a web page. The sample project can auto add the style object to the matching string of code. A step-by-step guide illustrating how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page: 1. the HighlightCodePage.aspx page Choose a type of language in the dropdownlist control and paste the code in the textbox control, then click the HighLight button. 2.  Display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page After user clicks the HighLight button, the highlighted code will be displayed at right side of the page.        CSASPNETPreventMultipleWindows Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215032 This sample demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to detect and prevent multiple windows or tab usage in Web Applications. The sample imitates a system that need to prevent multiple windows or tabs to solve some problems like sharing sessions, protect duplicated login, data concurrency, etc. In fact, there are many methods achieving this goal. Here we give a solution of use JavaScript, Sample shows how to use window.name property check the correct links and throw other requests to invalid pages. This code-sample use two user controls to make a distinction between base page and target page, user only need drag different controls to appropriate web form pages. so user need not write repetitive code in every page, it will make coding work lightly and convenient for modify your code.  JSVirtualKeyboard Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215093 This article describes an All-In-One framework sample that demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to build a virtual keyboard in your HTML page. Sometimes we may need to offer a virtual keyboard to let users input something without their real keyboards. This scenario often occurs when users will enter their password to get access to our sites and we want to protect the password from some kinds of back-door software, a Key-logger for example, and we will find a virtual keyboard on the page will be a good choice here. To create a virtual keyboard, we firstly need to add some buttons to the page. And when users click on a certain button, the JavaScript function handling the onclick event will input an appropriated character to the textbox. That is the simple logic of this feature. However, if we indeed want a virtual keyboard to substitute for the real keyboard completely, we will need more advanced logic to handle keys like Caps-Lock and Shift etc. That will be a complex work to achieve. CSASPNETDataListImageGallery Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62261#DownloadId=215267 This code sample demonstrates how to create an Image Gallery application by using the DataList control in ASP.NET. You may find the Image Gallery is widely used in many social networking sites, personal websites and E-Business websites. For example, you may use the Image Gallery to show a library of personal uploaded images on a personal website. Slideshow is also a popular tool to display images on websites. This code sample demonstrates how to use the DataList and ImageButton controls in ASP.NET to create an Image Gallery with image navigation. You can click on a thumbnail image in the Datalist control to display a larger version of the image on the page. This sample code reads the image paths from a certain directory into a FileInfo array. Then, the FileInfo array is used to populate a custom DataTable object which is bound to the Datalist control. This code sample also implements a custom paging system that allows five images to be displayed horizontally on one page. The following link buttons are used to implement a custom paging system:   •     First •     Previous •     Next •     Last Note We recommend that you use this method to load no more than five images at a time. You can also set the SelectedIndex property for the DataList control to limit the number of the thumbnail images that can be selected. To indicate which image is selected, you can set the SelectedStyle property for the DataList control. VBASPNETSearchEngine Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215112 This sample shows how to implement a simple search engine in an ASP.NET web site. It uses LIKE condition in SQL statement to search database. Then it highlights keywords in search result by using Regular Expression and JavaScript. New Windows General code samples CSCheckEXEType, VBCheckEXEType Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215045 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215120 The sample demonstrates how to check an executable file type.  For a given executable file, we can get 1 whether it is a console application 2 whether it is a .Net application 3 whether it is a 32bit native application. 4 The full display name of a .NET application, e.g. System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089, processorArchitecture=MSIL New Internet Explorer code samples CSIEExplorerBar, VBIEExplorerBar Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215060 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215133 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy an IE Explorer Bar which could list all the images in a web page. CSBrowserHelperObject, VBBrowserHelperObject Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215044 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215119 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy a Browser Helper Object,  and the BHO in this sample is used to disable the context menu in IE. New Windows Workflow Foundation code samples CSWF4ActivitiesCorrelation Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215085 Consider that there are two such workflow instances:       start                                   start          |                                           | Receive activity      Receive activity         |                                           | Receive2 activity      Receive2 activity         |                                           | A WCF request comes to call the second Receive2 activity. Which one should take care of the request? The answer is Correlation. This sample will show you how to correlate two workflow service to work together. -------------- New ASP.NET code samples CSASPNETBreadcrumbWithQueryString Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215022

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• Clusterware 11gR2 &ndash; Setting up an Active/Passive failover configuration

  - by Gilles Haro

  Oracle is providing a large range of interesting solutions to ensure High Availability of the database. Dataguard, RAC or even both configurations (as recommended by Oracle for a Maximum Available Architecture - MAA) are the most frequently found and used solutions. But, when it comes to protecting a system with an Active/Passive architecture with failover capabilities, people often thinks to other expensive third party cluster systems. Oracle Clusterware technology, which comes along at no extra-cost with Oracle Database or Oracle Unbreakable Linux, is - in the knowing of most people - often linked to Oracle RAC and therefore, is seldom used to implement failover solutions. Oracle Clusterware 11gR2  (a part of Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure)  provides a comprehensive framework to setup automatic failover configurations. It is actually possible to make "failover-able'", and then to protect, almost any kind of application (from the simple xclock to the most complex Application Server). Quoting Oracle: “Oracle Clusterware is a portable cluster software that allows clustering of single servers so that they cooperate as a single system. Oracle Clusterware also provides the required infrastructure for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). In addition Oracle Clusterware enables the protection of any Oracle application or any other kind of application within a cluster.” In the next couple of lines, I will try to present the different steps to achieve this goal : Have a fully operational 11gR2 database protected by automatic failover capabilities. I assume you are fluent in installing Oracle Database 11gR2, Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11gR2 on a Linux system and that ASM is not a problem for you (as I am using it as a shared storage). If not, please have a look at Oracle Documentation. As often, I made my tests using an Oracle VirtualBox environment. The scripts are tested and functional on my system. Unfortunately, there can always be a typo or a mistake. This blog entry does not replace a course around the Clusterware Framework. I just hope it will let you see how powerful it is and that it will give you the whilst to go further with it...  Note : This entry has been revised (rev.2) following comments from Philip Newlan. Prerequisite 2 Linux boxes (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02) at the same OS level. I used OEL 5 Update 5 with an Enterprise Kernel. Shared Storage (SAN). On my VirtualBox system, I used Openfiler to simulate the SAN Oracle 11gR2 Database (11.2.0.1) Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure (11.2.0.1)   Step 1 - Install the software Using asmlib, create 3 ASM disks (ASM_CRS, ASM_DTA and ASM_FRA) Install Grid Infrastructure for a cluster (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02 are the 2 nodes of the cluster) Use ASM_CRS to store Voting Disk and OCR. Use SCAN. Install Oracle Database Standalone binaries on both nodes. Use asmca to check/mount the disk groups on 2 nodes Use dbca to create and configure a database on the primary node Let's name it DB11G. Copy the pfile, password file to the second node. Create adump directoty on the second node.   Step 2 - Setup the resource to be protected After its creation with dbca, the database is automatically protected by the Oracle Restart technology available with Grid Infrastructure. Consequently, it restarts automatically (if possible) after a crash (ex: kill -9 smon). A database resource has been created for that in the Cluster Registry. We can observe this with the command : crsctl status resource that shows and ora.dba11g.db entry. Let's save the definition of this resource, for future use : mkdir -p /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts chown oracle:oinstall /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts crsctl status resource ora.db11g.db -p > /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myResource.txt Although very interesting, Oracle Restart is not cluster aware and cannot restart the database on any other node of the cluster. So, let's remove it from the OCR definitions, we don't need it ! srvctl stop database -d DB11G srvctl remove database -d DB11G Instead of it, we need to create a new resource of a more general type : cluster_resource. Here are the steps to achieve this : Create an action script :  /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh #!/bin/bash export ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 export ORACLE_SID=DB11G case $1 in 'start')   $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF   connect / as sysdba   startup EOF   RET=0   ;; 'stop')   $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF   connect / as sysdba   shutdown immediate EOF   RET=0   ;; 'clean')   $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF   connect / as sysdba   shutdown abort    ##for i in `ps -ef | grep -i $ORACLE_SID | awk '{print $2}' ` ;do kill -9 $i; done EOF   RET=0   ;; 'check')    ok=`ps -ef | grep smon | grep $ORACLE_SID | wc -l`    if [ $ok = 0 ]; then      RET=1    else      RET=0    fi    ;; '*')      RET=0   ;; esac if [ $RET -eq 0 ]; then    exit 0 else    exit 1 fi   This script must provide, at least, methods to start, stop, clean and check the database. It is self-explaining and contains nothing special. Just be aware that it must be runnable (+x), it runs as Oracle user (because of the ACL property - see later) and needs to know about the environment. Also make sure it exists on every node of the cluster. Moreover, as of 11.2, the clean method is mandatory. It must provide the “last gasp clean up”, for example, a shutdown abort or a kill –9 of all the remaining processes. chmod +x /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh scp  /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh   oracle@OELCluster02:/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts Create a new resource file, based on the information we got from previous  myResource.txt . Name it myNewResource.txt. myResource.txt  is shown below. As we can see, it defines an ora.database.type resource, named ora.db11g.db. A lot of properties are related to this type of resource and do not need to be used for a cluster_resource. NAME=ora.db11g.db TYPE=ora.database.type ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_FAILURE_TEMPLATE= ACTION_SCRIPT= ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=1 AGENT_FILENAME=%CRS_HOME%/bin/oraagent%CRS_EXE_SUFFIX% AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=1 CHECK_TIMEOUT=600 CLUSTER_DATABASE=false DB_UNIQUE_NAME=DB11G DEFAULT_TEMPLATE=PROPERTY(RESOURCE_CLASS=database) PROPERTY(DB_UNIQUE_NAME= CONCAT(PARSE(%NAME%, ., 2), %USR_ORA_DOMAIN%, .)) ELEMENT(INSTANCE_NAME= %GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME%) DEGREE=1 DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ENABLED=1 FAILOVER_DELAY=0 FAILURE_INTERVAL=60 FAILURE_THRESHOLD=1 GEN_AUDIT_FILE_DEST=/oracle/admin/DB11G/adump GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME= GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(oelcluster01)=DB11G HOSTING_MEMBERS= INSTANCE_FAILOVER=0 LOAD=1 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 MANAGEMENT_POLICY=AUTOMATIC NLS_LANG= NOT_RESTARTING_TEMPLATE= OFFLINE_CHECK_INTERVAL=0 ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 PLACEMENT=restricted PROFILE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= RESTART_ATTEMPTS=2 ROLE=PRIMARY SCRIPT_TIMEOUT=60 SERVER_POOLS=ora.DB11G SPFILE=+DTA/DB11G/spfileDB11G.ora START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STATE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h USR_ORA_DB_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_DOMAIN=haroland USR_ORA_ENV= USR_ORA_FLAGS= USR_ORA_INST_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_OPEN_MODE=open USR_ORA_OPI=false USR_ORA_STOP_MODE=immediate VERSION=11.2.0.1.0 I removed database type related entries from myResource.txt and modified some other to produce the following myNewResource.txt. Notice the NAME property that should not have the ora. prefix Notice the TYPE property that is not ora.database.type but cluster_resource. Notice the definition of ACTION_SCRIPT. Notice the HOSTING_MEMBERS that enumerates the members of the cluster (as returned by the olsnodes command). NAME=DB11G.db TYPE=cluster_resource DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_SCRIPT=/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh PLACEMENT=restricted ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=0 AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=10 DEGREE=1 ENABLED=1 HOSTING_MEMBERS=oelcluster01 oelcluster02 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 RESTART_ATTEMPTS=1 START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h Register the resource. Take care of the resource type. It needs to be a cluster_resource and not a ora.database.type resource (Oracle recommendation) .   crsctl add resource DB11G.db  -type cluster_resource -file /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myNewResource.txt Step 3 - Start the resource crsctl start resource DB11G.db This command launches the ACTION_SCRIPT with a start and a check parameter on the primary node of the cluster. Step 4 - Test this We will test the setup using 2 methods. crsctl relocate resource DB11G.db This command calls the ACTION_SCRIPT  (on the two nodes)  to stop the database on the active node and start it on the other node. Once done, we can revert back to the original node, but, this time we can use a more "MS$ like" method :Turn off the server on which the database is running. After short delay, you should observe that the database is relocated on node 1. Conclusion Once the software installed and the standalone database created (which is a rather common and usual task), the steps to reach the objective are quite easy : Create an executable action script on every node of the cluster. Create a resource file. Create/Register the resource with OCR using the resource file. Start the resource. This solution is a very interesting alternative to licensable third party solutions. References Clusterware 11gR2 documentation Oracle Clusterware Resource Reference Clusterware for Unbreakable Linux Using Oracle Clusterware to Protect A Single Instance Oracle Database 11gR1 (to have an idea of complexity) Oracle Clusterware on OTN   Gilles Haro Technical Expert - Core Technology, Oracle Consulting   

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• Software center is broken

  - by Colin

  When I started installing the Humble Indie Bundle 5 games the software center stopped working and now I get this error. Packages cannot be installed or removed, click here to repair. Which fails and gives these results. installArchives() failed: (Reading database ... (Reading database ... 5% (Reading database ... 10% (Reading database ... 15% (Reading database ... 20% (Reading database ... 25% (Reading database ... 30% (Reading database ... 35% (Reading database ... 40% (Reading database ... 45% (Reading database ... 50% (Reading database ... 55% (Reading database ... 60% (Reading database ... 65% (Reading database ... 70% (Reading database ... 75% (Reading database ... 80% (Reading database ... 85% (Reading database ... 90% (Reading database ... 95% (Reading database ... 100% (Reading database ... 255502 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libqtcore4:i386 (from .../libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb) ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb (--unpack): conffile './etc/xdg/Trolltech.conf' is not in sync with other instances of the same package No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb Error in function: dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqtgui4:i386: libqtgui4:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqtgui4:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-sql:i386: libqt4-sql:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-sql:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ia32-libs-multiarch:i386: ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 depends on libqt4-sql; however: Package libqt4-sql:i386 is not configured yet. ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 depends on libqtcore4; however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 depends on libqtgui4; however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-declarative:i386: libqt4-declarative:i386 depends on libqt4-sql (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-sql:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-declarative:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-declarative:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-declarative:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-svg:i386: libqt4-svg:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-svg:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-svg:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-network:i386: libqt4-network:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-network:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-sql-mysql:i386: libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 depends on libqt4-sql (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-sql:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-script:i386: libqt4-script:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-script:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-dbus:i386: libqt4-dbus:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-dbus:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-opengl:i386: libqt4-opengl:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-opengl:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-opengl:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqtwebkit4:i386: libqtwebkit4:i386 depends on libqt4-network (>= 4:4.8.0~); however: Package libqt4-network:i386 is not configured yet. libqtwebkit4:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (>= 4:4.8.0~); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqtwebkit4:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (>= 4:4.8.0); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqtwebkit4:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-designer:i386: libqt4-designer:i386 depends on libqt4-script (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-script:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-designer:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-designer:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-designer:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of lonesurvivor-bin:i386: lonesurvivor-bin:i386 depends on ia32-libs-multiarch; however: Package ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing lonesurvivor-bin:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of lonesurvivor: lonesurvivor depends on lonesurvivor-bin (= 1.11d-0ubuntu5); however: Package lonesurvivor-bin is not installed. Package lonesurvivor-bin:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing lonesurvivor (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-scripttools:i386: libqt4-scripttools:i386 depends on libqt4-script (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-script:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-scripttools:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-scripttools:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-scripttools:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-qt3support:i386: libqt4-qt3support:i386 depends on libqt4-designer (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-designer:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-qt3support:i386 depends on libqt4-network (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-network:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-qt3support:i386 depends on libqt4-sql (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-sql:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-qt3support:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. libqt4-qt3support:i386 depends on libqtgui4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtgui4:i386 is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libqt4-qt3support:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-xml:i386: libqt4-xml:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-xml:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-test:i386: libqt4-test:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-test:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386: libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 depends on libqt4-network (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqt4-network:i386 is not configured yet. libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 depends on libqtcore4 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1); however: Package libqtcore4:i386 is not installed. dpkg: error processing libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured I couldn't get the apt-get update or upgrade to work either so I shut off the repositories and updated / upgraded one at a time without any problems. But that didn't fix the Software Center. Help would be greatly appreciated. ADDED UPDATE I've tried to install aptitude using dpkg but can't. I have also tried sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get autoremove sudo dpkg --configure -a --force-all and the -f options. Though I believe this is where my problem is originating: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libqtcore4:i386 The following NEW packages will be installed: libqtcore4:i386 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/2,061 kB of archives. After this operation, 9,041 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y (Reading database ... 255526 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libqtcore4:i386 (from .../libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb) ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb (--unpack): conffile './etc/xdg/Trolltech.conf' is not in sync with other instances of the same package Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libqtcore4_4%3a4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1_i386.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I hope this helps narrow it down some. SECOND UPDATE sudo apt-get --reinstall install software-center -f The following packages have unmet dependencies: ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 but it is not going to be installed libqt4-dbus:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-declarative:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-designer:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-network:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-opengl:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-qt3support:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-script:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-scripttools:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-sql:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-svg:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-test:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-xml:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqtgui4:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (= 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.1) but it is not going to be installed libqtwebkit4:i386 : Depends: libqtcore4:i386 (>= 4:4.8.0~) but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). sudo apt-get -f install doesn't work either. Complete output of terminal for step 5 can be found here, http://paste.ubuntu.com/1066192/

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• Adding and accessing custom sections in your C# App.config

  - by deadlydog

  So I recently thought I’d try using the app.config file to specify some data for my application (such as URLs) rather than hard-coding it into my app, which would require a recompile and redeploy of my app if one of our URLs changed.  By using the app.config it allows a user to just open up the .config file that sits beside their .exe file and edit the URLs right there and then re-run the app; no recompiling, no redeployment necessary. I spent a good few hours fighting with the app.config and looking at examples on Google before I was able to get things to work properly.  Most of the examples I found showed you how to pull a value from the app.config if you knew the specific key of the element you wanted to retrieve, but it took me a while to find a way to simply loop through all elements in a section, so I thought I would share my solutions here.   Simple and Easy The easiest way to use the app.config is to use the built-in types, such as NameValueSectionHandler.  For example, if we just wanted to add a list of database server urls to use in my app, we could do this in the app.config file like so: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 10: <add key="localhost" value="localhost" /> 11: <add key="Dev" value="Dev.MyDomain.local" /> 12: <add key="Test" value="Test.MyDomain.local" /> 13: <add key="Live" value="Prod.MyDomain.com" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 15: </configuration>   And then you can access these values in code like so: 1: string devUrl = string.Empty; 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: devUrl = connectionManagerDatabaseServers["Dev"].ToString(); 6: }   Sometimes though you don’t know what the keys are going to be and you just want to grab all of the values in that ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers section.  In that case you can get them all like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: foreach (var serverKey in connectionManagerDatabaseServers.AllKeys) 6: { 7: string serverValue = connectionManagerDatabaseServers.GetValues(serverKey).FirstOrDefault(); 8: AddDatabaseServer(serverValue); 9: } 10: }   And here we just assume that the AddDatabaseServer() function adds the given string to some list of strings.  So this works great, but what about when we want to bring in more values than just a single string (or technically you could use this to bring in 2 strings, where the “key” could be the other string you want to store; for example, we could have stored the value of the Key as the user-friendly name of the url).   More Advanced (and more complicated) So if you want to bring in more information than a string or two per object in the section, then you can no longer simply use the built-in System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler type provided for us.  Instead you have to build your own types.  Here let’s assume that we again want to configure a set of addresses (i.e. urls), but we want to specify some extra info with them, such as the user-friendly name, if they require SSL or not, and a list of security groups that are allowed to save changes made to these endpoints. So let’s start by looking at the app.config: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDataSection" type="ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection, ConnectionManagerUpdater" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDataSection> 10: <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 11: <add name="Development" address="Dev.MyDomain.local" useSSL="false" /> 12: <add name="Test" address="Test.MyDomain.local" useSSL="true" /> 13: <add name="Live" address="Prod.MyDomain.com" useSSL="true" securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges="ConnectionManagerUsers" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 15: </ConnectionManagerDataSection> 16: </configuration>   The first thing to notice here is that my section is now using the type “ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection” (the fully qualified path to my new class I created) “, ConnectionManagerUpdater” (the name of the assembly my new class is in).  Next, you will also notice an extra layer down in the <ConnectionManagerDataSection> which is the <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> element.  This is a new collection class that I created to hold each of the Endpoint entries that are defined.  Let’s look at that code now: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Configuration; 4: using System.Linq; 5: using System.Text; 6: using System.Threading.Tasks; 7:  8: namespace ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration 9: { 10: public class ConnectionManagerDataSection : ConfigurationSection 11: { 12: /// <summary> 13: /// The name of this section in the app.config. 14: /// </summary> 15: public const string SectionName = "ConnectionManagerDataSection"; 16: 17: private const string EndpointCollectionName = "ConnectionManagerEndpoints"; 18:  19: [ConfigurationProperty(EndpointCollectionName)] 20: [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection), AddItemName = "add")] 21: public ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection ConnectionManagerEndpoints { get { return (ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection)base[EndpointCollectionName]; } } 22: } 23:  24: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection 25: { 26: protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() 27: { 28: return new ConnectionManagerEndpointElement(); 29: } 30: 31: protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) 32: { 33: return ((ConnectionManagerEndpointElement)element).Name; 34: } 35: } 36: 37: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointElement : ConfigurationElement 38: { 39: [ConfigurationProperty("name", IsRequired = true)] 40: public string Name 41: { 42: get { return (string)this["name"]; } 43: set { this["name"] = value; } 44: } 45: 46: [ConfigurationProperty("address", IsRequired = true)] 47: public string Address 48: { 49: get { return (string)this["address"]; } 50: set { this["address"] = value; } 51: } 52: 53: [ConfigurationProperty("useSSL", IsRequired = false, DefaultValue = false)] 54: public bool UseSSL 55: { 56: get { return (bool)this["useSSL"]; } 57: set { this["useSSL"] = value; } 58: } 59: 60: [ConfigurationProperty("securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges", IsRequired = false)] 61: public string SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges 62: { 63: get { return (string)this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"]; } 64: set { this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"] = value; } 65: } 66: } 67: }   So here the first class we declare is the one that appears in the <configSections> element of the app.config.  It is ConnectionManagerDataSection and it inherits from the necessary System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection class.  This class just has one property (other than the expected section name), that basically just says I have a Collection property, which is actually a ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection, which is the next class defined.  The ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection class inherits from ConfigurationElementCollection and overrides the requied fields.  The first tells it what type of Element to create when adding a new one (in our case a ConnectionManagerEndpointElement), and a function specifying what property on our ConnectionManagerEndpointElement class is the unique key, which I’ve specified to be the Name field. The last class defined is the actual meat of our elements.  It inherits from ConfigurationElement and specifies the properties of the element (which can then be set in the xml of the App.config).  The “ConfigurationProperty” attribute on each of the properties tells what we expect the name of the property to correspond to in each element in the app.config, as well as some additional information such as if that property is required and what it’s default value should be. Finally, the code to actually access these values would look like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDataSection = ConfigurationManager.GetSection(ConnectionManagerDataSection.SectionName) as ConnectionManagerDataSection; 3: if (connectionManagerDataSection != null) 4: { 5: foreach (ConnectionManagerEndpointElement endpointElement in connectionManagerDataSection.ConnectionManagerEndpoints) 6: { 7: var endpoint = new ConnectionManagerEndpoint() { Name = endpointElement.Name, ServerInfo = new ConnectionManagerServerInfo() { Address = endpointElement.Address, UseSSL = endpointElement.UseSSL, SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges = endpointElement.SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges.Split(',').Where(e => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(e)).ToList() } }; 8: AddEndpoint(endpoint); 9: } 10: } This looks very similar to what we had before in the “simple” example.  The main points of interest are that we cast the section as ConnectionManagerDataSection (which is the class we defined for our section) and then iterate over the endpoints collection using the ConnectionManagerEndpoints property we created in the ConnectionManagerDataSection class.   Also, some other helpful resources around using app.config that I found (and for parts that I didn’t really explain in this article) are: How do you use sections in C# 4.0 app.config? (Stack Overflow) <== Shows how to use Section Groups as well, which is something that I did not cover here, but might be of interest to you. How to: Create Custom Configuration Sections Using Configuration Section (MSDN) ConfigurationSection Class (MSDN) ConfigurationCollectionAttribute Class (MSDN) ConfigurationElementCollection Class (MSDN)   I hope you find this helpful.  Feel free to leave a comment.  Happy Coding!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 21, 2011Popular ReleasesCodekicker.BBCode: CodeKicker.BBCode-Parser-5.0: This is the best and newest version.Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9 for Entity Framework 4.0Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.0 CMS Alpha 3: Umbraco 5 Alpha 3Umbraco 5 (aka Jupiter) will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out the Alpha of v5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video. What's Alpha 3?This is our third Alpha release. It's intended for developers looking to become familiar with the codebase & architecture, or for thos...thinktecture IdentityServer: IdentityServer RC: This is the RC of Thinktecture.IdentityServerWebForms.ControlExtender: WebForms.ControlExtender 1.0.0.0 (binary): Initial release.Windows Phone 7 Skydrive Library: Skydrive WP7 rel. 1: Till the Rest Api gets out of beta you can use this release You can: - browse the folders -download files It uses WebDAVVkontakte WP: Vkontakte: source codeDotNet.Framework.Common: DotNetFramework.Common?????: DotNetFramework.Common?????Way2Sms Applications for Android, Desktop/Laptop & Java enabled phones: Way2SMS Desktop App v2.0: 1. Fixed issue with sending messages due to changes to Way2Sms site 2. Updated the character limit to 160 from 140GART - Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit: 1.0.1: About Release 1.0.1 Release 1.0.1 is a service release that addresses several issues and improves performance. As always, check the Documentation tab for instructions on how to get started. If you don't have the Windows Phone SDK yet, grab it here. Breaking Change Please note: There is a breaking change in this release. As noted below, the WorldCalculationMode property of ARItem has been replaced by a user-definable function. ARItem is now automatically wired up with a function that perform...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.32: Fix for issue #16710 - string literals in "constant literal operations" which contain ASP.NET substitutions should not be considered "constant." Move the JS1284 error (Misplaced Function Declaration) so it only fires when in strict mode. I got a couple complaints that people didn't like that error popping up in their existing code when they could verify that the location of that function, although not strict JS, still functions as expected cross-browser.Naked Objects: Naked Objects Release 4.0.110.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 4.0.110.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Documentation Please note that after ...myCollections: Version 1.5: New in this version : Added edit type for selected elements Added clean for selected elements Added Amazon Italia Added Amazon China Added TVDB Italia Added TVDB China Added Turkish language You can now manually add artist Added Order by Rating Improved Add by Media Improved Artist Detail Upgrade Sqlite engine View, Zoom, Grouping, Filter are now saved by category Added group by Artist Added CubeCover View BugFixingFacebook C# SDK: 5.3: This is a BETA release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added new CS-WinForms-AsyncAwait.sln sample demonstrating the use of async/await, upload progress report using IProgress<T> and cancellation support Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead...IronPython: 2.7.1 RC: This is the first release candidate of IronPython 2.7.1. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. If there are no showstopping issues, this will be the only release candidate for 2.7.1, so please speak up if you run into any roadblocks. The highlights of 2.7.1 are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython To...Rawr: Rawr 4.2.6: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...Home Access Plus+: v7.5: Change Log: New Booking System (out of Beta) New Help Desk (out of Beta) New My Files (Developer Preview) Token now saved into Cookie so the system doesn't TIMEOUT as much File Changes: ~/bin/hap.ad.dll ~/bin/hap.web.dll ~/bin/hap.data.dll ~/bin/hap.web.configuration.dll ~/bookingsystem/admin/default.aspx ~/bookingsystem/default.aspx REMOVED ~/bookingsystem/bookingpopup.ascx REMOVED ~/bookingsystem/daylist.ascx REMOVED ~/bookingsystem/new.aspx ~/helpdesk/default.aspx ...Visual Micro - Arduino for Visual Studio: Arduino for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010: Arduino for Visual Studio 2010 has been extended to support Visual Studio 2008. The same functionality and configuration exists between the two versions. The 2010 addin runs .NET4 and the 2008 addin runs .NET3.5, both are installed using a single msi and both share the same configuration settings. The only known issue in 2008 is that the button and menu icons are missing. Please logon to the visual micro forum and let us know if things are working or not. Read more about this Visual Studio ...DotSpatial: Release: Moved IExtension to a separate assembly.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.1 (October 2011) for .NET 4.0: October 2011 release of Phalanger - the PHP compiler for .NET 4.0 - introduces following: Performance enhancements several duplicitous runtime checks omitted New functionality 31586 __toString() magic method compile time check hash_update_stream() supports second argument Issue fixes 31455 PCRE named groups addcslashes() with second argument fix 31577 31575, 31567 31566 31484 Note if you need Phalanger running on .NET 2.0, please use Phalanger 2.0. For the full list of cha...New Projects#foo SqlServer: Useful Sql Server extensionsBaufQuery: Material de la presentación que voy a realizar en Baufest sobre jQueryBoringColorPicker: A simple color picker i created on a busy Saturday morning, and i couldn't stress myself calculating color codes. I hope someone finds it useful. Developed in c#, for desktop use.Charity Social Network1: ????? ??? ?????? ??? ?????2 devianARTGallery: <devianART Gallery> makes it easier for <artist, graphic designer, art, web designer, interface design> to<following news images, graphics, vectors and new resouces for your needs at this application in your hands>. It's developing in<C# windows phone 7>Diving: MVC Application for testingDotNet.Framework.Common: .NET ??????????Drama-AddictFeed: Retrieve feed a top siteDuckWorld: Logica architect courseEasy Monitor: ??ASP.NET_MVC4???????????????，????。 Server, Monitoring, ASP.net, mvc, mvc4, svg, vml, KVDB, WebsiteEvent_Manager: Event Manager V 2FETCH! Go Fetch that remote task. Good task doogie!: Email sent, task accomplished. This little task execution agent can be a remote domain support's best friend. Save time on late night and off hours administration tasks. When there is no time to RDP, send Fetch an email and he'll take care of it quick. Secure, reliable. InQuestaRed UTN: Proyecto de UTNInsert from Windows Live Image Search: Allows you to do an image search using Windows Live Search and put the resulting image into a blog entry.ioak: iOakLibertyJournal free diary journal software: LibertyJournal - A freeware personal diary software/journal software/program, could become your personal digital diary and journal software to record your daily events and memories, in your creative words. 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It supports extensions to allow for new genotypes, operators, and algorithms.Oil Prices: Application about Thailand's oil pricesOnline Ontology Editor: Online Ontology BuilderOrchard Documentation: Orchard Documentation repository.QuipuxConnector: QuipuxConnector es el primer Addins para word que permite enviar documentos a QuipuxSignature Recognition: An application that authenticates scanned signature images.SmartFramework: SmartFramework là n?n t?ng xây d?ng các h? th?ng l?n connect t?i các ngu?n CSDL khác nhau, d?c bi?t là các h? th?ng online, real-time.smartKin: Studienarbeit TIT 09 - Kinect / Robotik Zum räumlichen Sehen von Robotern mit Kinect: Initiale Experimente für 3D-Szenen Rekonstruktion, Steuerung durch natürliche GestenTAudioPlayer: TAudioPlayer would take more facility in your aural comprehension exercise. It most conspicuous function is comfortably add time-tags to an audio file which is playing and you can jump to the position you defined easily. It also provides various hotkey setting and you can define most of the operation hotkey by yourself. The project is developed in C# with Visual Studio 2010.Watin - TestEasy: WatiN - TestEasy is the idea to make WatiN based test generation and excution easier. Mainly it will provide interface to data driven automation using WatiN.WebForms.ControlExtender: WebForms.ControlExtender simplify the creation of components which extend (or adds) their own properties to other controls or components in the Visual Studio ASP.NET designer.Windows Phone 7 Skydrive Library: Use this library if you need to access Skydrive from Windows PhonezDBA: SQL Server 2008 tookit!

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• Windows Azure ASP.NET MVC 2 Role with Silverlight

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  I was working through some scenarios recently with Azure and Silverlight.  I immediately decided a quick walk through for setting up a Silverlight Application running in an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application would be a cool project. This walk through I have Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, and the Azure SDK all installed.  If you need to download any of those go get em? now. Launch Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project.  Click on the section for cloud templates as shown below. After you name the project, the dialog for what type of Windows Azure Cloud Service Role will display.  I selected ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role, which adds the MvcWebRole1 Project to the Cloud Service Solution. Since I selected the ASP.NET MVC 2 Project type, it immediately prompts for a unit test project.  Because I just want to get everything running first, I will probably be unit testing the Silverlight and just using the MVC Project as a host for the Silverlight for now, and because I would prefer to just add the unit test project later, I am going to select no here. Once you've created the ASP.NET MVC 2 project to host the Silverlight, then create another new project.  Select the Silverlight section under the Installed Templates in the Add New Project dialog.  Then select Silverlight Application. The next dialog that comes up will inquire about using the existing ASP.NET MVC Application I just created, which I do want it to use that so I leave it checked.  The options section however I do not want to check RIA Web Services, do not want a test page added to the project, and I want Silverlight debugging enabled so I leave that checked.  Once those options are appropriately set, just click on OK and the Silverlight Project will be added to the overall solution. The next steps now are to get the Silverlight object appropriately embedded in the web page.  First open up the Site.Master file in the ASP.NET MVC 2 Project located under the Veiws/Shared/ location.  After you open the file review the content of the <header></header> section.  In that section add another <contentplaceholder></contentplaceholder> tag as shown in the code snippet below. <head runat="server"> <title> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /> </title> <link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" /> </head> I usually put it toward the bottom of the header section.  It just seems the <title></title> should be on the top of the section and I like to keep it that way. Now open up the Index.aspx page under the ASP.NET MVC 2 Project located in the Views/Home/ directory.  When you open up that file add a <asp:Content><asp:Content> tag as shown in the next snippet. <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Home Page </asp:Content>   <asp:Content ID=headerContent ContentPlaceHolderID=HeaderContent runat=server>   </asp:Content>   <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"]) %></h2> <p> To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. </p> </asp:Content> In that center tag, I am now going to add what is needed to appropriately embed the Silverlight object into the page.  The first thing I needed is a reference to the Silverlight.js file. <script type="text/javascript" src="Silverlight.js"></script> After that comes a bit of nitty gritty Javascript.  I create another tag (and for those in the know, this is exactly like the generated code that is dumped into the *.html page generated with any Silverlight Project if you select to "add a test page that references the application".  The complete Javascript is below. function onSilverlightError(sender, args) { var appSource = ""; if (sender != null && sender != 0) { appSource = sender.getHost().Source; }   var errorType = args.ErrorType; var iErrorCode = args.ErrorCode;   if (errorType == "ImageError" || errorType == "MediaError") { return; }   var errMsg = "Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application " + appSource + "\n";   errMsg += "Code: " + iErrorCode + " \n"; errMsg += "Category: " + errorType + " \n"; errMsg += "Message: " + args.ErrorMessage + " \n";   if (errorType == "ParserError") { errMsg += "File: " + args.xamlFile + " \n"; errMsg += "Line: " + args.lineNumber + " \n"; errMsg += "Position: " + args.charPosition + " \n"; } else if (errorType == "RuntimeError") { if (args.lineNumber != 0) { errMsg += "Line: " + args.lineNumber + " \n"; errMsg += "Position: " + args.charPosition + " \n"; } errMsg += "MethodName: " + args.methodName + " \n"; }   throw new Error(errMsg); } I literally, since it seems to work fine, just use what is populated in the automatically generated page.  After getting the appropriate Javascript into place I put the actual Silverlight Object Embed code into the HTML itself.  Just so I know the positioning and for final verification when running the application I insert the embed code just below the Index.aspx page message.  As shown below. <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2> <%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"]) %></h2> <p> To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website"> http://asp.net/mvc</a>. </p> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/CloudySilverlight.xap" /> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration: none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style: none" /> </a> </object> <iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility: hidden; height: 0px; width: 0px; border: 0px"></iframe> </div> </asp:Content> I then open up the Silverlight Project MainPage.xaml.  Just to make it visibly obvious that the Silverlight Application is running in the page, I added a button as shown below. <UserControl x:Class="CloudySilverlight.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Button Content="Button" Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="48,40,0,0" Name="button1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="75" Click="button1_Click" /> </Grid> </UserControl> Just for kicks, I added a message box that would popup, just to show executing functionality also. private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { MessageBox.Show("It runs in the cloud!"); } I then executed the ASP.NET MVC 2 and could see the Silverlight Application in page.  With a quick click of the button, I got a message box.  Success! Now the next step is getting the ASP.NET MVC 2 Project and Silverlight published to the cloud.  As of Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, and the latest Azure SDK, this is actually a ridiculously easy process. Navigate to the Azure Cloud Services web site. Once that is open go back in Visual Studio and right click on the cloud project and select publish. This will publish two files into a directory.  Copy that directory so you can easily paste it into the Azure Cloud Services web site.  You'll have to click on the application role in the cloud (I will have another blog entry soon about where, how, and best practices in the cloud). In the text boxes shown, select the application package file and the configuration file and place them in the appropriate text boxes.  This is the part were it comes in handy to have copied the directory path of the file location.  That way when you click on browser you can just paste that in, then hit enter.  The two files will be listed and you can select the appropriate file. Once that is done, name the service deployment.  Then click on publish.  After a minute or so you will see the following screen. Now click on run.  Once the MvcWebRole1 goes green (the little light symbol to the left of the status) click on the Web Site URL.  Be patient during this process too, it could take a minute or two.  The Silverlight application should again come up just like you ran it on your local machine. Once staging is up and running, click on the circular icon with two arrows to move staging to production.  Once you are done make sure the green light is again go for the production deploy, then click on the Web Site URL to verify the site is working.  At this point I had a successful development, staging, and production deployment. Thanks for reading, hope this was helpful.  I have more Windows Azure and other cloud related material coming, so stay tuned. Original Entry

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• Ubuntu 12.04 does not see windows already install on my computer (dual installation)

  - by jacinta

  I was trying to install the ubuntu 12.4 along side windows 7 on my new HP Pavilion 64k desktop with windows 7 computer but Ubuntu said that ( This computer has no detected operating system) and some one said (I suggest you chkdsk your Windows partition. I also suggest you resize the NTFS in WIndows then install Ubuntu to the free space.) Therefore I did (To shrink a simple or spanned volume using the Windows interface In Disk Management, right-click the simple or spanned volume you want to shrink. Click Shrink Volume…. Follow the instructions on your screen.) Then When I try to install ubuntu 12.4 after doing this, I received the same error. I was going to undo what I did but I see that I lose 1g when I do that so now what do I do? it says I can do a new simple volume and maybe then the space will no longer be unallocated. Please help me. I think I have a bad cd (ubuntu 12.4) cause from my research I see that I am not suppose to get a screen saying that (The computer has no detected operating system) I think this is a bad cd and I hope I did not mess up my computer. Please help. .................................................................................... O k I think I am following what you said about how to edit my question irrational john. I did chkdsk as you and actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) told me to AND ALSO did a lot of other things before I found out how to chkdsk. No problems. Thank you. Then I put back the space (extended) I took from system. I still was only able to put back 15 and not 16 so it is up to 99mb not back to 100mb. Then I shrank HP (C) as you told me, to 10 13,240 mb which is (12.93gb Unallocated). I did not change it into NTSF by doing the (New Simple Volume Action) I just left it. Then I tried to install UBUNTU 12.04 live CD amd64 and it gave me the results it was sometimes giving me before which is result (THAT Ubuntu) does not tell me weather I have or have not an already installed windows7. It just goes to a window that would have showed me information on what I have and on the bottom (DEVICE FOR BOOT LOADER INSTALLATION /dev/sda ) and the option to go BACK, QUIT, or INSTALL. (I think it is the INSTALLATION TYPE window). Therefore I do what I have been doing and I QUIT. What do I do now? Sorry that it seems like I cannot do anything on my own. On the Youtube video how to install ubuntu dual-boot alongside windows UBUNTU is installed so easy. The installation option page gives 3 options including dual instillation and the disk even lets you use a slider to slide to the size of the partition size you want. Yet my UBUNTU live cd is a mess and I checked it as one of you guys told me and got back information that it is good. Oh well this guy says you should press a control key to tell which device you are using to install ubuntu before the screen comes up. I guess cause it is old. This page also shows you easy stuff that do not show up on my cd. how to dual-boot UBUNTU and windows 7 P.S.. I saw this on the windows 7 website windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Formatting-disks-and-drives-frequently-asked-questions CREATE A BOOT PARTITION I HAD TO LEAVE OUT THE HTTP STUFF CAUSE I AM ONLY ALLOWED 2 ON A PAGE IT SAID To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. AND THIS ON ANOTHER PAGE. Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions Hard disks, the primary storage devices on your computer, need to be formatted before you can use them. When you format a disk, you configure it with a file system so that Windows can store information on the disk. Hard disks in new computers running Windows are already formatted. If you buy an additional hard disk to expand the storage of your computer, you might need to format it. Storage devices such as USB flash drives and flash memory cards usually come preformatted by the manufacturer, so you probably won't need to format them. CDs and DVDs, on the other hand, use different formats from hard disks and removable storage devices. For information about formatting CDs and DVDs, see Which CD or DVD format should I use? Warning Warning Formatting erases any existing files on a hard disk. If you format a hard disk that has files on it, the files will be deleted. WHAT I DID WAS I GOT TO COMPUTER MANAGEMENT SECTION THEN I CLICKED ON DRIVE HP(C) (it put stripes on to show it is selected) Then I click on ACTION selected ALL TASKS AND THEN selected SHRINK VOLUME and then chose how much space from what it was giving me that I wanted. (12.93gb) AND THAT WAS ALL I DID. THEN I TRIED TO INSTALL UBUNTU i NEVER GOT THE 3RD SCREEN THAT IS IN THE VIDEO I INCLUDED (THE YOUTUBE WITH THE ENGLISH GUY) INSTALLATION TYPE I ALSO DID NOT GET THE 4TH SCREEN THAT ALLOWS YOU TO SELECT PARTITION SIZE what i got next was the 2nd INSTILLATION TYPE window shown on the (LINUX BS DOS.COM) PAGE THAT I INCLUDED and it showed no information about any drives (no drives /partition or stuff was shown) only the Boot Loader statement and the dev/sda bar and that's why i did not press install but chose to QUIT. SORRY I JUST NOW SAW YOUR ANSWER IRRATIONAL JOHN. I SHRANK HP(C) BY 12.93GB MY UNALLOCATED SPACE IS NOW 12.93GB HP(C) = 907.17gb NTSF...YOU ARE CORRECT WITH EVERYTHING YOU SAID This is what i read on (http://)windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-boot-partition I am only allowed 2 links Create a boot partition You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps. A boot partition is a partition that contains the files for the Windows operating system. If you want to install a second operating system on your computer (called a dual-boot or multiboot configuration), you need to create another partition on the hard disk, and then install the additional operating system on the new partition. Your hard disk would then have one system partition and two boot partitions. (A system partition is the partition that contains the hardware-related files. These tell the computer where to look to start Windows.) To create a partition on a basic disk, there must be unallocated disk space on your hard disk. With Disk Management, you can create a maximum of three primary partitions on a hard disk. You can create extended partitions, which include logical drives within them, if you need more partitions on the disk. Picture of disk space in Computer ManagementUnallocated disk space If there is no unallocated space, you will either need to create space by shrinking or deleting an existing partition or by using a third-party partitioning tool to repartition your hard disk. For more information, see Can I repartition my hard disk? To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. I did what you told me @irrational john and this is the screen shot. I ENTERED ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober computer did not respond so I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get -y remove dmraid computer responded with Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: dmraid 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 141 kB disk space will be freed. (Reading database ... 147515 files and directories currently installed.) Removing dmraid ... update-initramfs is disabled since running on read-only media Processing triggers for man-db ... I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober Computer Responded with /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain /dev/sda3:Windows Recovery Environment (loader):Windows1:chain ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ............... @obsessiveFOSS I don't know what is a Grub menu and I do not know what is the Ubuntu boot option The answer you gave to me was correct. This one {This apparently removes the dmraid metadata. After doing that, you can use the desktop icon Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to start the Ubuntu installer. This time the Installation Type window should contain the option to Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.} This is what I decided to do. I did not see the rest of your help 'till now. Never the less. I think the best thing for me to do now is to get a cheap used laptop and either do a dual installation or just install Ubuntu on to it. This way if I have any issues that I cannot solve like the one I had here, at least I will still have a usable computer to work on and to use to get answers with because I am not an expert like the people on this forum. Thanks a lot I will try to keep learning and do research enough to some day help someone else.

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• Getting Started with TypeScript – Classes, Static Types and Interfaces

  - by dwahlin

  I had the opportunity to speak on different JavaScript topics at DevConnections in Las Vegas this fall and heard a lot of interesting comments about JavaScript as I talked with people. The most frequent comment I heard from people was, “I guess it’s time to start learning JavaScript”. Yep – if you don’t already know JavaScript then it’s time to learn it. As HTML5 becomes more and more popular the amount of JavaScript code written will definitely increase. After all, many of the HTML5 features available in browsers have little to do with “tags” and more to do with JavaScript (web workers, web sockets, canvas, local storage, etc.). As the amount of JavaScript code being used in applications increases, it’s more important than ever to structure the code in a way that’s maintainable and easy to debug. While JavaScript patterns can certainly be used (check out my previous posts on the subject or my course on Pluralsight.com), several alternatives have come onto the scene such as CoffeeScript, Dart and TypeScript. In this post I’ll describe some of the features TypeScript offers and the benefits that they can potentially offer enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. It’s important to note that while TypeScript has several great features, it’s definitely not for everyone or every project especially given how new it is. The goal of this post isn’t to convince you to use TypeScript instead of standard JavaScript….I’m a big fan of JavaScript. Instead, I’ll present several TypeScript features and let you make the decision as to whether TypeScript is a good fit for your applications. TypeScript Overview Here’s the official definition of TypeScript from the http://typescriptlang.org site: “TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. Any browser. Any host. Any OS. Open Source.” TypeScript was created by Anders Hejlsberg (the creator of the C# language) and his team at Microsoft. To sum it up, TypeScript is a new language that can be compiled to JavaScript much like alternatives such as CoffeeScript or Dart. It isn’t a stand-alone language that’s completely separate from JavaScript’s roots though. It’s a superset of JavaScript which means that standard JavaScript code can be placed in a TypeScript file (a file with a .ts extension) and used directly. That’s a very important point/feature of the language since it means you can use existing code and frameworks with TypeScript without having to do major code conversions to make it all work. Once a TypeScript file is saved it can be compiled to JavaScript using TypeScript’s tsc.exe compiler tool or by using a variety of editors/tools. TypeScript offers several key features. First, it provides built-in type support meaning that you define variables and function parameters as being “string”, “number”, “bool”, and more to avoid incorrect types being assigned to variables or passed to functions. Second, TypeScript provides a way to write modular code by directly supporting class and module definitions and it even provides support for custom interfaces that can be used to drive consistency. Finally, TypeScript integrates with several different tools such as Visual Studio, Sublime Text, Emacs, and Vi to provide syntax highlighting, code help, build support, and more depending on the editor. Find out more about editor support at http://www.typescriptlang.org/#Download. TypeScript can also be used with existing JavaScript frameworks such as Node.js, jQuery, and others and even catch type issues and provide enhanced code help. Special “declaration” files that have a d.ts extension are available for Node.js, jQuery, and other libraries out-of-the-box. Visit http://typescript.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/fe3bc0bfce1f#samples%2fjquery%2fjquery.d.ts for an example of a jQuery TypeScript declaration file that can be used with tools such as Visual Studio 2012 to provide additional code help and ensure that a string isn’t passed to a parameter that expects a number. Although declaration files certainly aren’t required, TypeScript’s support for declaration files makes it easier to catch issues upfront while working with existing libraries such as jQuery. In the future I expect TypeScript declaration files will be released for different HTML5 APIs such as canvas, local storage, and others as well as some of the more popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks. Getting Started with TypeScript To get started learning TypeScript visit the TypeScript Playground available at http://www.typescriptlang.org. Using the playground editor you can experiment with TypeScript code, get code help as you type, and see the JavaScript that TypeScript generates once it’s compiled. Here’s an example of the TypeScript playground in action:   One of the first things that may stand out to you about the code shown above is that classes can be defined in TypeScript. This makes it easy to group related variables and functions into a container which helps tremendously with re-use and maintainability especially in enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. While you can certainly simulate classes using JavaScript patterns (note that ECMAScript 6 will support classes directly), TypeScript makes it quite easy especially if you come from an object-oriented programming background. An example of the Greeter class shown in the TypeScript Playground is shown next: class Greeter { greeting: string; constructor (message: string) { this.greeting = message; } greet() { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; } } Looking through the code you’ll notice that static types can be defined on variables and parameters such as greeting: string, that constructors can be defined, and that functions can be defined such as greet(). The ability to define static types is a key feature of TypeScript (and where its name comes from) that can help identify bugs upfront before even running the code. Many types are supported including primitive types like string, number, bool, undefined, and null as well as object literals and more complex types such as HTMLInputElement (for an <input> tag). Custom types can be defined as well. The JavaScript output by compiling the TypeScript Greeter class (using an editor like Visual Studio, Sublime Text, or the tsc.exe compiler) is shown next: var Greeter = (function () { function Greeter(message) { this.greeting = message; } Greeter.prototype.greet = function () { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; }; return Greeter; })(); Notice that the code is using JavaScript prototyping and closures to simulate a Greeter class in JavaScript. The body of the code is wrapped with a self-invoking function to take the variables and functions out of the global JavaScript scope. This is important feature that helps avoid naming collisions between variables and functions. In cases where you’d like to wrap a class in a naming container (similar to a namespace in C# or a package in Java) you can use TypeScript’s module keyword. The following code shows an example of wrapping an AcmeCorp module around the Greeter class. In order to create a new instance of Greeter the module name must now be used. This can help avoid naming collisions that may occur with the Greeter class.   module AcmeCorp { export class Greeter { greeting: string; constructor (message: string) { this.greeting = message; } greet() { return "Hello, " + this.greeting; } } } var greeter = new AcmeCorp.Greeter("world"); In addition to being able to define custom classes and modules in TypeScript, you can also take advantage of inheritance by using TypeScript’s extends keyword. The following code shows an example of using inheritance to define two report objects:   class Report { name: string; constructor (name: string) { this.name = name; } print() { alert("Report: " + this.name); } } class FinanceReport extends Report { constructor (name: string) { super(name); } print() { alert("Finance Report: " + this.name); } getLineItems() { alert("5 line items"); } } var report = new FinanceReport("Month's Sales"); report.print(); report.getLineItems();   In this example a base Report class is defined that has a variable (name), a constructor that accepts a name parameter of type string, and a function named print(). The FinanceReport class inherits from Report by using TypeScript’s extends keyword. As a result, it automatically has access to the print() function in the base class. In this example the FinanceReport overrides the base class’s print() method and adds its own. The FinanceReport class also forwards the name value it receives in the constructor to the base class using the super() call. TypeScript also supports the creation of custom interfaces when you need to provide consistency across a set of objects. The following code shows an example of an interface named Thing (from the TypeScript samples) and a class named Plane that implements the interface to drive consistency across the app. Notice that the Plane class includes intersect and normal as a result of implementing the interface.   interface Thing { intersect: (ray: Ray) => Intersection; normal: (pos: Vector) => Vector; surface: Surface; } class Plane implements Thing { normal: (pos: Vector) =>Vector; intersect: (ray: Ray) =>Intersection; constructor (norm: Vector, offset: number, public surface: Surface) { this.normal = function (pos: Vector) { return norm; } this.intersect = function (ray: Ray): Intersection { var denom = Vector.dot(norm, ray.dir); if (denom > 0) { return null; } else { var dist = (Vector.dot(norm, ray.start) + offset) / (-denom); return { thing: this, ray: ray, dist: dist }; } } } }   At first glance it doesn’t appear that the surface member is implemented in Plane but it’s actually included automatically due to the public surface: Surface parameter in the constructor. Adding public varName: Type to a constructor automatically adds a typed variable into the class without having to explicitly write the code as with normal and intersect. TypeScript has additional language features but defining static types and creating classes, modules, and interfaces are some of the key features it offers. So is TypeScript right for you and your applications? That’s a not a question that I or anyone else can answer for you. You’ll need to give it a spin to see what you think. In future posts I’ll discuss additional details about TypeScript and how it can be used with enterprise-scale JavaScript applications. In the meantime, I’m in the process of working with John Papa on a new Typescript course for Pluralsight that we hope to have out in December of 2012.

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