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• Eclipse Check for Updates issue

  - by Nicholas Ryan Bowers

  I install Eclipse from the Software Center so it links up and will be updated with the rest of my software. Because I am developing for Android, however, I have to install the ADT Plugin within Eclipse by going to Help Install new software (or something to that effect). Now, I do understand that I can update Eclipse through the actual Ubuntu software center/system, but in order to update plugins and extensions within Eclipse, I have to go to Help Check for Updates (which then scans all plugins for updates). The only issue, is that when I installed through the software center, the owner became root, and whenever I run it without root, I'm not able to update - I get the error message "Insufficient access privileges to apply this update." When I run it as root, all of my plugins disappear, because I guess I installed them as myself, not as root. I tried to install the plugins as root, but the Install New Software choice would not work. Ubuntu 12.04 and Eclipse 3.7.2-1

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SQL SERVER – Server Side Paging in SQL Server 2011 – A Better Alternative

  - by pinaldave

  Ranking has improvement considerably from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005/2008 to SQL Server 2011. Here is the blog article where I wrote about SQL Server 2005/2008 paging method SQL SERVER – 2005 T-SQL Paging Query Technique Comparison (OVER and ROW_NUMBER()) – CTE vs. Derived Table. One can achieve this using OVER clause and ROW_NUMBER() function. Now SQL Server 2011 has come up with the new Syntax for paging. Here is how one can easily achieve it. USE AdventureWorks2008R2 GO DECLARE @RowsPerPage INT = 10, @PageNumber INT = 5 SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID OFFSET @PageNumber*@RowsPerPage ROWS FETCH NEXT 10 ROWS ONLY GO I consider it good enhancement in terms of T-SQL. I am sure many developers are waiting for this feature for long time. We will consider performance different in future posts. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• How To Delete Top 100 Rows From SQL Server Tables

  - by Gopinath

  If you want to delete top 100/n records from an SQL Server table, it is very easy with the following query: DELETE FROM MyTable WHERE PK_Column IN(     SELECT TOP 100 PK_Column     FROM MyTable     ORDER BY creation    ) Why Would You Require To Delete Top 100 Records? I often delete a top n records of a table when number of rows in the are too huge. Lets say if I’ve 1000000000 records in a table, deleting 10000 rows at a time in a loop is faster than trying to delete all the 1000000000  at a time. What ever may be reason, if you ever come across a requirement of deleting a bunch of rows at a time, this query will be helpful to you. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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• West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• MEF CompositionInitializer for WPF

  - by Reed

  The Managed Extensibility Framework is an amazingly useful addition to the .NET Framework.  I was very excited to see System.ComponentModel.Composition added to the core framework.  Personally, I feel that MEF is one tool I’ve always been missing in my .NET development. Unfortunately, one perfect scenario for MEF tends to fall short of it’s full potential is in Windows Presentation Foundation development.  In particular, there are many times when the XAML parser constructs objects in WPF development, which makes composition of those parts difficult.  The current release of MEF (Preview Release 9) addresses this for Silverlight developers via System.ComponentModel.Composition.CompositionInitializer.  However, there is no equivalent class for WPF developers. The CompositionInitializer class provides the means for an object to compose itself.  This is very useful with WPF and Silverlight development, since it allows a View, such as a UserControl, to be generated via the standard XAML parser, and still automatically pull in the appropriate ViewModel in an extensible manner.  Glenn Block has demonstrated the usage for Silverlight in detail, but the same issues apply in WPF. As an example, let’s take a look at a very simple case.  Take the following XAML for a Window: <Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="MainWindow" Height="220" Width="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock Text="{Binding TheText}" /> </Grid> </Window> This does nothing but create a Window, add a simple TextBlock control, and use it to display the value of our “TheText” property in our DataContext class.  Since this is our main window, WPF will automatically construct and display this Window, so we need to handle constructing the DataContext and setting it ourselves. We could do this in code or in XAML, but in order to do it directly, we would need to hard code the ViewModel type directly into our XAML code, or we would need to construct the ViewModel class and set it in the code behind.  Both have disadvantages, and the disadvantages grow if we’re using MEF to compose our ViewModel. Ideally, we’d like to be able to have MEF construct our ViewModel for us.  This way, it can provide any construction requirements for our ViewModel via [ImportingConstructor], and it can handle fully composing the imported properties on our ViewModel.  CompositionInitializer allows this to occur. We use CompositionInitializer within our View’s constructor, and use it for self-composition of our View.  Using CompositionInitializer, we can modify our code behind to: public partial class MainView : Window { public MainView() { InitializeComponent(); CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); } [Import("MainViewModel")] public object ViewModel { get { return this.DataContext; } set { this.DataContext = value; } } } We then can add an Export on our ViewModel class like so: [Export("MainViewModel")] public class MainViewModel { public string TheText { get { return "Hello World!"; } } } MEF will automatically compose our application, decoupling our ViewModel injection to the DataContext of our View until runtime.  When we run this, we’ll see: There are many other approaches for using MEF to wire up the extensible parts within your application, of course.  However, any time an object is going to be constructed by code outside of your control, CompositionInitializer allows us to continue to use MEF to satisfy the import requirements of that object. In order to use this from WPF, I’ve ported the code from MEF Preview 9 and Glenn Block’s (now obsolete) PartInitializer port to Windows Presentation Foundation.  There are some subtle changes from the Silverlight port, mainly to handle running in a desktop application context.  The default behavior of my port is to construct an AggregateCatalog containing a DirectoryCatalog set to the location of the entry assembly of the application.  In addition, if an “Extensions” folder exists under the entry assembly’s directory, a second DirectoryCatalog for that folder will be included.  This behavior can be overridden by specifying a CompositionContainer or one or more ComposablePartCatalogs to the System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.CompositionHost static class prior to the first use of CompositionInitializer. Please download CompositionInitializer and CompositionHost for VS 2010 RC, and contact me with any feedback. Composition.Initialization.Desktop.zip Edit on 3/29: Glenn Block has since updated his version of CompositionInitializer (and ExportFactory<T>!), and made it available here: http://cid-f8b2fd72406fb218.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/blog/Composition.Initialization.Desktop.zip This is a .NET 3.5 solution, and should soon be pushed to CodePlex, and made available on the main MEF site.

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• Cloning A Database On The Same Server Using Rman Duplicate From Active Database

  - by alejandro.vargas

  To clone a database using Rman we used to require an existing Rman backup, on 11g we can clone databases using the "from active" database option. In this case we do not require an existing backup, the active datafiles will be used as the source for the clone. In order to clone with the source database open it must be on archivelog mode. Otherwise we can make the clone mounting the source database, as shown in this example. These are the steps required to complete the clone: Configure The Network Create A Password File For The New Database Create An Init.Ora For The New Database Create The Admin Directory For The New Database Shutdown And Startup Mount The Source Database Startup Nomount The New Database Connect To The Target (Source) And Auxiliary (New Clone) Databases Using Rman Execute The Duplicate Command Remove The Old Pfile Check The New Database A step by step example is provided on this file: rman-duplicate-from-active-database.pdf

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• How to Animate Text and Objects in PowerPoint 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for an eye catching way to keep your audience interested in your PowerPoint presentations? Today we’ll take a look at how to add animation effects to objects in PowerPoint 2010. Select the object you wish to animate and then click the More button in the Animation group of the Animation tab.   Animations are grouped into four categories. Entrance effects, Exit effects, Emphasis effects, and Motion Paths. You can get a Live Preview of how the animation will look by hovering your mouse over an animation effect.   When you select a Motion Path, your object will move along the dashed path line as shown on the screen. (This path is not displayed in the final output) Certain aspects of the Motion Path effects are editable. When you apply a Motion Path animation to an object, you can select the path and drag the end to change the length or size of the path. The green marker along the motion path marks the beginning of the  path and the red marks the end. The effects can be rotated by clicking and the bar near the center of the effect.   You can display additional effects by choosing one of the options at the bottom. This will pop up a Change Effect window. If you have Preview Effect checked at the lower left you can preview the effects by single clicking.   Apply Multiple Animations to an Object Select the object and then click the Add Animation button to display the animation effects. Just as we did with the first effect, you can hover over to get a live preview. Click to apply the effect. The animation effects will happen in the order they are applied. Animation Pane You can view a list of the animations applied to a slide by opening the Animation Pane. Select the Animation Pane button from the Advanced Animation group to display the Animation Pane on the right. You’ll see that each animation effect in the animation pane has an assigned number to the left.    Timing Animation Effects You can change when your animation starts to play. By default it is On Click. To change it, select the effect in the Animation Pane and then choose one of the options from the Start dropdown list. With Previous starts at the same time as the previous animation and After Previous starts after the last animation. You can also edit the duration that the animations plays and also set a delay.   You can change the order in which the animation effects are applied by selecting the effect in the animation pane and clicking Move Earlier or Move Later from the Timing group on the Animation tab. Effect Options If the Effect Options button is available when your animation is selected, then that particular animation has some additional effect settings that can be configured. You can access the Effect Option by right-clicking on the the animation in the Animation Pane, or by selecting Effect Options on the ribbon.   The available options will vary by effect and not all animation effects will have Effect Options settings. In the example below, you can change the amount of spinning and whether the object will spin clockwise or counterclockwise.   Under Enhancements, you can add sound effects to your animation. When you’re finished click OK.   Animating Text Animating Text works the same as animating an object. Simply select your text box and choose an animation. Text does have some different Effect Options. By selecting a sequence, you decide whether the text appears as one object, all at once, or by paragraph. As is the case with objects, there will be different available Effect Options depending on the animation you choose. Some animations, such as the Fly In animation, will have directional options.   Testing Your Animations Click on the Preview button at any time to test how your animations look. You can also select the Play button on the Animation Pane. Conclusion Animation effects are a great way to focus audience attention on important points and hold viewers interest in your PowerPoint presentations. Another cool way to spice up your PPT 2010 presentations is to add video from the web. What tips do you guys have for making your PowerPoint presentations more interesting? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Preview Before You Paste with Live Preview in Office 2010Embed True Type Fonts in Word and PowerPoint 2007 DocumentsHow to Add Video from the Web in PowerPoint 2010Add Artistic Effects to Your Pictures in Office 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials

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• Creating Custom Ajax Control Toolkit Controls

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can extend the Ajax Control Toolkit with custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. I describe how you can create the two halves of an Ajax Control Toolkit control: the server-side control extender and the client-side control behavior. Finally, I explain how you can use the new Ajax Control Toolkit control in a Web Forms page. At the end of this blog entry, there is a link to download a Visual Studio 2010 solution which contains the code for two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: SampleExtender and PopupHelpExtender. The SampleExtender contains the minimum skeleton for creating a new Ajax Control Toolkit control. You can use the SampleExtender as a starting point for your custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The PopupHelpExtender control is a super simple custom Ajax Control Toolkit control. This control extender displays a help message when you start typing into a TextBox control. The animated GIF below demonstrates what happens when you click into a TextBox which has been extended with the PopupHelp extender. Here’s a sample of a Web Forms page which uses the control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ShowPopupHelp.aspx.cs" Inherits="MyACTControls.Web.Default" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>Show Popup Help</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblSSN" Text="SSN:" AssociatedControlID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblPhone" Text="Phone Number:" AssociatedControlID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph2" TargetControlID="txtPhone" HelpText="Please enter your phone number." runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> In the page above, the PopupHelp extender is used to extend the functionality of the two TextBox controls. When focus is given to a TextBox control, the popup help message is displayed. An Ajax Control Toolkit control extender consists of two parts: a server-side control extender and a client-side behavior. For example, the PopupHelp extender consists of a server-side PopupHelpExtender control (PopupHelpExtender.cs) and a client-side PopupHelp behavior JavaScript script (PopupHelpBehavior.js). Over the course of this blog entry, I describe how you can create both the server-side extender and the client-side behavior. Writing the Server-Side Code Creating a Control Extender You create a control extender by creating a class that inherits from the abstract ExtenderControlBase class. For example, the PopupHelpExtender control is declared like this: public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The ExtenderControlBase class is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This base class contains all of the common server properties and methods of every Ajax Control Toolkit extender control. The ExtenderControlBase class inherits from the ExtenderControl class. The ExtenderControl class is a standard class in the ASP.NET framework located in the System.Web.UI namespace. This class is responsible for generating a client-side behavior. The class generates a call to the Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method which looks like this: <script type="text/javascript"> $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); }); </script> The JavaScript $create() method is part of the Microsoft Ajax Library. The reference for this method can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397487.aspx This method accepts the following parameters: type – The type of client behavior to create. The $create() method above creates a client PopupHelpBehavior. Properties – Enables you to pass initial values for the properties of the client behavior. For example, the initial value of the HelpText property. This is how server property values are passed to the client. Events – Enables you to pass client-side event handlers to the client behavior. References – Enables you to pass references to other client components. Element – The DOM element associated with the client behavior. This will be the DOM element associated with the control being extended such as the txtSSN TextBox. The $create() method is generated for you automatically. You just need to focus on writing the server-side control extender class. Specifying the Target Control All Ajax Control Toolkit extenders inherit a TargetControlID property from the ExtenderControlBase class. This property, the TargetControlID property, points at the control that the extender control extends. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit TextBoxWatermark control extends a TextBox, the ConfirmButton control extends a Button, and the Calendar control extends a TextBox. You must indicate the type of control which your extender is extending. You indicate the type of control by adding a [TargetControlType] attribute to your control. For example, the PopupHelp extender is declared like this: [TargetControlType(typeof(TextBox))] public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The PopupHelp extender can be used to extend a TextBox control. If you try to use the PopupHelp extender with another type of control then an exception is thrown. If you want to create an extender control which can be used with any type of ASP.NET control (Button, DataView, TextBox or whatever) then use the following attribute: [TargetControlType(typeof(Control))] Decorating Properties with Attributes If you decorate a server-side property with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute then the value of the property gets passed to the control’s client-side behavior. The value of the property gets passed to the client through the $create() method discussed above. The PopupHelp control contains the following HelpText property: [ExtenderControlProperty] [RequiredProperty] public string HelpText { get { return GetPropertyValue("HelpText", "Help Text"); } set { SetPropertyValue("HelpText", value); } } The HelpText property determines the help text which pops up when you start typing into a TextBox control. Because the HelpText property is decorated with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute, any value assigned to this property on the server is passed to the client automatically. For example, if you declare the PopupHelp extender in a Web Form page like this: <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" />   Then the PopupHelpExtender renders the call to the the following Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method: $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); You can see this call to the JavaScript $create() method by selecting View Source in your browser. This call to the $create() method calls a method named set_HelpText() automatically and passes the value “Please enter your social security number”. There are several attributes which you can use to decorate server-side properties including: ExtenderControlProperty – When a property is marked with this attribute, the value of the property is passed to the client automatically. ExtenderControlEvent – When a property is marked with this attribute, the property represents a client event handler. Required – When a value is not assigned to this property on the server, an error is displayed. DefaultValue – The default value of the property passed to the client. ClientPropertyName – The name of the corresponding property in the JavaScript behavior. For example, the server-side property is named ID (uppercase) and the client-side property is named id (lower-case). IDReferenceProperty – Applied to properties which refer to the IDs of other controls. URLProperty – Calls ResolveClientURL() to convert from a server-side URL to a URL which can be used on the client. ElementReference – Returns a reference to a DOM element by performing a client $get(). The WebResource, ClientResource, and the RequiredScript Attributes The PopupHelp extender uses three embedded resources named PopupHelpBehavior.js, PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js, and PopupHelpBehavior.css. The first two files are JavaScript files and the final file is a Cascading Style sheet file. These files are compiled as embedded resources. You don’t need to mark them as embedded resources in your Visual Studio solution because they get added to the assembly when the assembly is compiled by a build task. You can see that these files get embedded into the MyACTControls assembly by using Red Gate’s .NET Reflector tool: In order to use these files with the PopupHelp extender, you need to work with both the WebResource and the ClientScriptResource attributes. The PopupHelp extender includes the following three WebResource attributes. [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css", "text/css", PerformSubstitution = true)] These WebResource attributes expose the embedded resource from the assembly so that they can be accessed by using the ScriptResource.axd or WebResource.axd handlers. The first parameter passed to the WebResource attribute is the name of the embedded resource and the second parameter is the content type of the embedded resource. The PopupHelp extender also includes the following ClientScriptResource and ClientCssResource attributes: [ClientScriptResource("MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior", "PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js")] [ClientCssResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css")] Including these attributes causes the PopupHelp extender to request these resources when you add the PopupHelp extender to a page. If you open View Source in a browser which uses the PopupHelp extender then you will see the following link for the Cascading Style Sheet file: <link href="/WebResource.axd?d=0uONMsWXUuEDG-pbJHAC1kuKiIMteQFkYLmZdkgv7X54TObqYoqVzU4mxvaa4zpn5H9ch0RDwRYKwtO8zM5mKgO6C4WbrbkWWidKR07LD1d4n4i_uNB1mHEvXdZu2Ae5mDdVNDV53znnBojzCzwvSw2&amp;t=634417392021676003" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> You also will see the following script include for the JavaScript file: <script src="/ScriptResource.axd?d=pIS7xcGaqvNLFBvExMBQSp_0xR3mpDfS0QVmmyu1aqDUjF06TrW1jVDyXNDMtBHxpRggLYDvgFTWOsrszflZEDqAcQCg-hDXjun7ON0Ol7EXPQIdOe1GLMceIDv3OeX658-tTq2LGdwXhC1-dE7_6g2&amp;t=ffffffff88a33b59" type="text/javascript"></script> The JavaScrpt file returned by this request to ScriptResource.axd contains the combined scripts for any and all Ajax Control Toolkit controls in a page. By default, the Ajax Control Toolkit combines all of the JavaScript files required by a page into a single JavaScript file. Combining files in this way really speeds up how quickly all of the JavaScript files get delivered from the web server to the browser. So, by default, there will be only one ScriptResource.axd include for all of the JavaScript files required by a page. If you want to disable Script Combining, and create separate links, then disable Script Combining like this: <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" CombineScripts="false" /> There is one more important attribute used by Ajax Control Toolkit extenders. The PopupHelp behavior uses the following two RequirdScript attributes to load the JavaScript files which are required by the PopupHelp behavior: [RequiredScript(typeof(CommonToolkitScripts), 0)] [RequiredScript(typeof(PopupExtender), 1)] The first parameter of the RequiredScript attribute represents either the string name of a JavaScript file or the type of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. The second parameter represents the order in which the JavaScript files are loaded (This second parameter is needed because .NET attributes are intrinsically unordered). In this case, the RequiredScript attribute will load the JavaScript files associated with the CommonToolkitScripts type and the JavaScript files associated with the PopupExtender in that order. The PopupHelp behavior depends on these JavaScript files. Writing the Client-Side Code The PopupHelp extender uses a client-side behavior written with the Microsoft Ajax Library. Here is the complete code for the client-side behavior: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); Sys.registerComponent(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, { name: "popupHelp" }); } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })();   In the following sections, we’ll discuss how this client-side behavior works. Wrapping the Behavior for the Script Loader The behavior is wrapped with the following script: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { // Behavior Content } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); This code is required by the Microsoft Ajax Library Script Loader. You need this code if you plan to use a behavior directly from client-side code and you want to use the Script Loader. If you plan to only use your code in the context of the Ajax Control Toolkit then you can leave out this code. Registering a JavaScript Namespace The PopupHelp behavior is declared within a namespace named MyACTControls. In the code above, this namespace is created with the following registerNamespace() method: Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); JavaScript does not have any built-in way of creating namespaces to prevent naming conflicts. The Microsoft Ajax Library extends JavaScript with support for namespaces. You can learn more about the registerNamespace() method here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397723.aspx Creating the Behavior The actual Popup behavior is created with the following code. MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; The code above has two parts. The first part of the code is used to define the constructor function for the PopupHelp behavior. This is a factory method which returns an instance of a PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { } The second part of the code modified the prototype for the PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { } Any code which is particular to a single instance of the PopupHelp behavior should be placed in the constructor function. For example, the default value of the _helpText field is assigned in the constructor function: this._helpText = "Help Text"; Any code which is shared among all instances of the PopupHelp behavior should be added to the PopupHelp behavior’s prototype. For example, the public HelpText property is added to the prototype: get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, Registering a JavaScript Class After you create the PopupHelp behavior, you must register the behavior as a class by using the Microsoft Ajax registerClass() method like this: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); This call to registerClass() registers PopupHelp behavior as a class which derives from the base Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase class. Like the ExtenderControlBase class on the server side, the BehaviorBase class on the client side contains method used by every behavior. The documentation for the BehaviorBase class can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb311020.aspx The most important methods and properties of the BehaviorBase class are the following: dispose() – Use this method to clean up all resources used by your behavior. In the case of the PopupHelp behavior, the dispose() method is used to remote the event handlers created by the behavior and disposed the Popup behavior. get_element() -- Use this property to get the DOM element associated with the behavior. In other words, the DOM element which the behavior extends. get_id() – Use this property to the ID of the current behavior. initialize() – Use this method to initialize the behavior. This method is called after all of the properties are set by the $create() method. Creating Debug and Release Scripts You might have noticed that the PopupHelp behavior uses two scripts named PopupHelpBehavior.js and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js. However, you never create these two scripts. Instead, you only create a single script named PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js. The pre in PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js stands for preprocessor. When you build the Ajax Control Toolkit (or the sample Visual Studio Solution at the end of this blog entry), a build task named JSBuild generates the PopupHelpBehavior.js release script and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js debug script automatically. The JSBuild preprocessor supports the following directives: #IF #ELSE #ENDIF #INCLUDE #LOCALIZE #DEFINE #UNDEFINE The preprocessor directives are used to mark code which should only appear in the debug version of the script. The directives are used extensively in the Microsoft Ajax Library. For example, the Microsoft Ajax Library Array.contains() method is created like this: $type.contains = function Array$contains(array, item) { //#if DEBUG var e = Function._validateParams(arguments, [ {name: "array", type: Array, elementMayBeNull: true}, {name: "item", mayBeNull: true} ]); if (e) throw e; //#endif return (indexOf(array, item) >= 0); } Notice that you add each of the preprocessor directives inside a JavaScript comment. The comment prevents Visual Studio from getting confused with its Intellisense. The release version, but not the debug version, of the PopupHelpBehavior script is also minified automatically by the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. The minifier is invoked by a build step in the project file. Conclusion The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can create custom AJAX Control Toolkit controls. In the first part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the server-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. You learned how to derive a new control from the ExtenderControlBase class and decorate its properties with the necessary attributes. Next, in the second part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the client-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control by creating a client-side behavior with JavaScript. You learned how to use the methods of the Microsoft Ajax Library to extend your client behavior from the BehaviorBase class. Download the Custom ACT Starter Solution

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• JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c5{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 2pt 0pt 2pt} .c7{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c4{background-color:#ffffff} .c14{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c6{height:11pt;text-align:center} .c13{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c3{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c0{border-collapse:collapse} .c12{text-align:center} .c1{direction:ltr} .c8{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c2{line-height:1.0} .c11{font-style:italic} .c10{height:11pt} .c9{font-weight:bold} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt}.subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-style:italic;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-style:italic;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} This example shows the steps to create a simple JMS queue in WebLogic Server 11g for testing purposes. For example, to use with the two sample programs QueueSend.java and QueueReceive.java which will be shown in later examples. Additional, detailed information on JMS can be found in the following Oracle documentation: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Configuring and Managing JMS for Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.6) Part Number E13738-06 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13738/toc.htm 1. Introduction and Definitions A JMS queue in Weblogic Server is associated with a number of additional resources: JMS Server A JMS server acts as a management container for resources within JMS modules. Some of its responsibilities include the maintenance of persistence and state of messages and subscribers. A JMS server is required in order to create a JMS module. JMS Module A JMS module is a definition which contains JMS resources such as queues and topics. A JMS module is required in order to create a JMS queue. Subdeployment JMS modules are targeted to one or more WLS instances or a cluster. Resources within a JMS module, such as queues and topics are also targeted to a JMS server or WLS server instances. A subdeployment is a grouping of targets. It is also known as advanced targeting. Connection Factory A connection factory is a resource that enables JMS clients to create connections to JMS destinations. JMS Queue A JMS queue (as opposed to a JMS topic) is a point-to-point destination type. A message is written to a specific queue or received from a specific queue. The objects used in this example are: Object Name Type JNDI Name TestJMSServer JMS Server TestJMSModule JMS Module TestSubDeployment Subdeployment TestConnectionFactory Connection Factory jms/TestConnectionFactory TestJMSQueue JMS Queue jms/TestJMSQueue 2. Configuration Steps The following steps are done in the WebLogic Server Console, beginning with the left-hand navigation menu. 2.1 Create a JMS Server Services > Messaging > JMS Servers Select New Name: TestJMSServer Persistent Store: (none) Target: soa_server1  (or choose an available server) Finish The JMS server should now be visible in the list with Health OK. 2.2 Create a JMS Module Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select New Name: TestJMSModule Leave the other options empty Targets: soa_server1  (or choose the same one as the JMS server)Press Next Leave “Would you like to add resources to this JMS system module” unchecked and  press Finish . 2.3 Create a SubDeployment A subdeployment is not necessary for the JMS queue to work, but it allows you to easily target subcomponents of the JMS module to a single target or group of targets. We will use the subdeployment in this example to target the following connection factory and JMS queue to the JMS server we created earlier. Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule Select the Subdeployments  tab and New Subdeployment Name: TestSubdeployment Press Next Here you can select the target(s) for the subdeployment. You can choose either Servers (i.e. WebLogic managed servers, such as the soa_server1) or JMS Servers such as the JMS Server created earlier. As the purpose of our subdeployment in this example is to target a specific JMS server, we will choose the JMS Server option. Select the TestJMSServer created earlier Press Finish 2.4  Create a Connection Factory Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule  and press New Select Connection Factory  and Next Name: TestConnectionFactory JNDI Name: jms/TestConnectionFactory Leave the other values at default On the Targets page, select the Advanced Targeting  button and select TestSubdeployment Press Finish The connection factory should be listed on the following page with TestSubdeployment and TestJMSServer as the target. 2.5 Create a JMS Queue Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule  and press New Select Queue and Next Name: TestJMSQueueJNDI Name: jms/TestJMSQueueTemplate: NonePress Next Subdeployments: TestSubdeployment Finish The TestJMSQueue should be listed on the following page with TestSubdeployment and TestJMSServer. Confirm the resources for the TestJMSModule. Using the Domain Structure tree, navigate to soa_domain > Services > Messaging > JMS Modules then select TestJMSModule You should see the following resources The JMS queue is now complete and can be accessed using the JNDI names jms/TestConnectionFactory andjms/TestJMSQueue. In the following blog post in this series, I will show you how to write a message to this queue, using the WebLogic sample Java program QueueSend.java.

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• AMD-V is not enable in virtualbox in amd APU

  - by shantanu

  I am running Dual core AMD E450 APU. When i tried to run a 64-bit OS that requires hardware virtualization using virtual-box it showed me an error "AMD-V is not enable". My AMD processor should provide AMD-V support. And i can find no option for AMD-V in BIOS. How can i solve this problem? How could i enable AMD-V for my APU? Thanks in advance lscpu :- Architecture: x86_64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 NUMA node(s): 1 Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD CPU family: 20 Model: 2 Stepping: 0 CPU MHz: 1650.000 BogoMIPS: 3291.72 Virtualization: AMD-V L1d cache: 32K L1i cache: 32K L2 cache: 512K NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1 EDITED:- Error of virtualBOX:- Failed to open a session for the virtual machine XXX. AMD-V is disabled in the BIOS. (VERR_SVM_DISABLED). Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) Component: Console Interface: IConsole {1968b7d3-e3bf-4ceb-99e0-cb7c913317bb}

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 12, More on Task Decomposition

  - by Reed

  Many tasks can be decomposed using a Data Decomposition approach, but often, this is not appropriate.  Frequently, decomposing the problem into distinctive tasks that must be performed is a more natural abstraction. However, as I mentioned in Part 1, Task Decomposition tends to be a bit more difficult than data decomposition, and can require a bit more effort.  Before we being parallelizing our algorithm based on the tasks being performed, we need to decompose our problem, and take special care of certain considerations such as ordering and grouping of tasks. Up to this point in this series, I’ve focused on parallelization techniques which are most appropriate when a problem space can be decomposed by data.  Using PLINQ and the Parallel class, I’ve shown how problem spaces where there is a collection of data, and each element needs to be processed, can potentially be parallelized. However, there are many other routines where this is not appropriate.  Often, instead of working on a collection of data, there is a single piece of data which must be processed using an algorithm or series of algorithms.  Here, there is no collection of data, but there may still be opportunities for parallelism. As I mentioned before, in cases like this, the approach is to look at your overall routine, and decompose your problem space based on tasks.  The idea here is to look for discrete “tasks,” individual pieces of work which can be conceptually thought of as a single operation. Let’s revisit the example I used in Part 1, an application startup path.  Say we want our program, at startup, to do a bunch of individual actions, or “tasks”.  The following is our list of duties we must perform right at startup: Display a splash screen Request a license from our license manager Check for an update to the software from our web server If an update is available, download it Setup our menu structure based on our current license Open and display our main, welcome Window Hide the splash screen The first step in Task Decomposition is breaking up the problem space into discrete tasks. This, naturally, can be abstracted as seven discrete tasks.  In the serial version of our program, if we were to diagram this, the general process would appear as: These tasks, obviously, provide some opportunities for parallelism.  Before we can parallelize this routine, we need to analyze these tasks, and find any dependencies between tasks.  In this case, our dependencies include: The splash screen must be displayed first, and as quickly as possible. We can’t download an update before we see whether one exists. Our menu structure depends on our license, so we must check for the license before setting up the menus. Since our welcome screen will notify the user of an update, we can’t show it until we’ve downloaded the update. Since our welcome screen includes menus that are customized based off the licensing, we can’t display it until we’ve received a license. We can’t hide the splash until our welcome screen is displayed. By listing our dependencies, we start to see the natural ordering that must occur for the tasks to be processed correctly. The second step in Task Decomposition is determining the dependencies between tasks, and ordering tasks based on their dependencies. Looking at these tasks, and looking at all the dependencies, we quickly see that even a simple decomposition such as this one can get quite complicated.  In order to simplify the problem of defining the dependencies, it’s often a useful practice to group our tasks into larger, discrete tasks.  The goal when grouping tasks is that you want to make each task “group” have as few dependencies as possible to other tasks or groups, and then work out the dependencies within that group.  Typically, this works best when any external dependency is based on the “last” task within the group when it’s ordered, although that is not a firm requirement.  This process is often called Grouping Tasks.  In our case, we can easily group together tasks, effectively turning this into four discrete task groups: 1. Show our splash screen – This needs to be left as its own task.  First, multiple things depend on this task, mainly because we want this to start before any other action, and start as quickly as possible. 2. Check for Update and Download the Update if it Exists - These two tasks logically group together.  We know we only download an update if the update exists, so that naturally follows.  This task has one dependency as an input, and other tasks only rely on the final task within this group. 3. Request a License, and then Setup the Menus – Here, we can group these two tasks together.  Although we mentioned that our welcome screen depends on the license returned, it also depends on setting up the menu, which is the final task here.  Setting up our menus cannot happen until after our license is requested.  By grouping these together, we further reduce our problem space. 4. Display welcome and hide splash - Finally, we can display our welcome window and hide our splash screen.  This task group depends on all three previous task groups – it cannot happen until all three of the previous groups have completed. By grouping the tasks together, we reduce our problem space, and can naturally see a pattern for how this process can be parallelized.  The diagram below shows one approach: The orange boxes show each task group, with each task represented within.  We can, now, effectively take these tasks, and run a large portion of this process in parallel, including the portions which may be the most time consuming.  We’ve now created two parallel paths which our process execution can follow, hopefully speeding up the application startup time dramatically. The main point to remember here is that, when decomposing your problem space by tasks, you need to: Define each discrete action as an individual Task Discover dependencies between your tasks Group tasks based on their dependencies Order the tasks and groups of tasks

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• Oracle Coherence, Split-Brain and Recovery Protocols In Detail

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  This article provides a high level conceptual overview of Split-Brain scenarios in distributed systems. It will focus on a specific example of cluster communication failure and recovery in Oracle Coherence. This includes a discussion on the witness protocol (used to remove failed cluster members) and the panic protocol (used to resolve Split-Brain scenarios). Note that the removal of cluster members does not necessarily indicate a Split-Brain condition. Oracle Coherence does not (and cannot) detect a Split-Brain as it occurs, the condition is only detected when cluster members that previously lost contact with each other regain contact. Cluster Topology and Configuration In order to create an good didactic for the article, let's assume a cluster topology and configuration. In this example we have a six member cluster, consisting of one JVM on each physical machine. The member IDs are as follows: Member ID  IP Address  1  10.149.155.76  2  10.149.155.77  3  10.149.155.236  4  10.149.155.75  5  10.149.155.79  6  10.149.155.78 Members 1, 2, and 3 are connected to a switch, and members 4, 5, and 6 are connected to a second switch. There is a link between the two switches, which provides network connectivity between all of the machines. Member 1 is the first member to join this cluster, thus making it the senior member. Member 6 is the last member to join this cluster. Here is a log snippet from Member 6 showing the complete member set: 2010-02-26 15:27:57.390/3.062 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=main, member=6): Started DefaultCacheServer... SafeCluster: Name=cluster:0xDDEB Group{Address=224.3.5.3, Port=35465, TTL=4} MasterMemberSet ( ThisMember=Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) OldestMember=Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) ActualMemberSet=MemberSet(Size=6, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:49.095, Address=10.149.155.79:8088, MachineId=1103, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:3229, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) RecycleMillis=120000 RecycleSet=MemberSet(Size=0, BitSetCount=0 ) ) At approximately 15:30, the connection between the two switches is severed: Thirty seconds later (the default packet timeout in development mode) the logs indicate communication failures across the cluster. In this example, the communication failure was caused by a network failure. In a production setting, this type of communication failure can have many root causes, including (but not limited to) network failures, excessive GC, high CPU utilization, swapping/virtual memory, and exceeding maximum network bandwidth. In addition, this type of failure is not necessarily indicative of a split brain. Any communication failure will be logged in this fashion. Member 2 logs a communication failure with Member 5: 2010-02-26 15:30:32.638/196.928 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=2): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:49.095, Address=10.149.155.79:8088, MachineId=1103, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:3229, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) ) The Coherence clustering protocol (TCMP) is a reliable transport mechanism built on UDP. In order for the protocol to be reliable, it requires an acknowledgement (ACK) for each packet delivered. If a packet fails to be acknowledged within the configured timeout period, the Coherence cluster member will log a packet timeout (as seen in the log message above). When this occurs, the cluster member will consult with other members to determine who is at fault for the communication failure. If the witness members agree that the suspect member is at fault, the suspect is removed from the cluster. If the witnesses unanimously disagree, the accuser is removed. This process is known as the witness protocol. Since Member 2 cannot communicate with Member 5, it selects two witnesses (Members 1 and 4) to determine if the communication issue is with Member 5 or with itself (Member 2). However, Member 4 is on the switch that is no longer accessible by Members 1, 2 and 3; thus a packet timeout for member 4 is recorded as well: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.648/199.938 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=2): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) Member 1 has the ability to confirm the departure of member 4, however Member 6 cannot as it is also inaccessible. At the same time, Member 3 sends a request to remove Member 6, which is followed by a report from Member 3 indicating that Member 6 has departed the cluster: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.706/199.996 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=2): MemberLeft request for Member 6 received from Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) 2010-02-26 15:30:35.709/199.999 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=2): MemberLeft notification for Member 6 received from Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) The log for Member 3 determines how Member 6 departed the cluster: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.161/191.694 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=3): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) ) 2010-02-26 15:30:35.165/191.698 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=3): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:17.847, Address=10.149.155.77:8088, MachineId=1101, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:296, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) In this case, Member 3 happened to select two witnesses that it still had connectivity with (Members 1 and 2) thus resulting in a simple decision to remove Member 6. Given the departure of Member 6, Member 2 is left with a single witness to confirm the departure of Member 4: 2010-02-26 15:30:35.713/200.003 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=2): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=1, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) In the meantime, Member 4 logs a missing heartbeat from the senior member. This message is also logged on Members 5 and 6. 2010-02-26 15:30:07.906/150.453 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=PacketListenerN, member=4): Scheduled senior member heartbeat is overdue; rejoining multicast group. Next, Member 4 logs a TcpRing failure with Member 2, thus resulting in the termination of Member 2: 2010-02-26 15:30:21.421/163.968 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D4> (thread=Cluster, member=4): TcpRing: Number of socket exceptions exceeded maximum; last was "java.net.SocketTimeoutException: connect timed out"; removing the member: 2 For quick process termination detection, Oracle Coherence utilizes a feature called TcpRing which is a sparse collection of TCP/IP-based connections between different members in the cluster. Each member in the cluster is connected to at least one other member, which (if at all possible) is running on a different physical box. This connection is not used for any data transfer, only heartbeat communications are sent once a second per each link. If a certain number of exceptions are thrown while trying to re-establish a connection, the member throwing the exceptions is removed from the cluster. Member 5 logs a packet timeout with Member 3 and cites witnesses Members 4 and 6: 2010-02-26 15:30:29.791/165.037 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=PacketPublisher, member=5): Timeout while delivering a packet; requesting the departure confirmation for Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ) 2010-02-26 15:30:29.798/165.044 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=5): Member departure confirmed by MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:58.635, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) ); removing Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer) Eventually we are left with two distinct clusters consisting of Members 1, 2, 3 and Members 4, 5, 6, respectively. In the latter cluster, Member 4 is promoted to senior member. The connection between the two switches is restored at 15:33. Upon the restoration of the connection, the cluster members immediately receive cluster heartbeats from the two senior members. In the case of Members 1, 2, and 3, the following is logged: 2010-02-26 15:33:14.970/369.066 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=1): The member formerly known as Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:30:35.341, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) has been forcefully evicted from the cluster, but continues to emit a cluster heartbeat; henceforth, the member will be shunned and its messages will be ignored. Likewise for Members 4, 5, and 6: 2010-02-26 15:33:14.343/336.890 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=4): The member formerly known as Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:30:31.64, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) has been forcefully evicted from the cluster, but continues to emit a cluster heartbeat; henceforth, the member will be shunned and its messages will be ignored. This message indicates that a senior heartbeat is being received from members that were previously removed from the cluster, in other words, something that should not be possible. For this reason, the recipients of these messages will initially ignore them. After several iterations of these messages, the existence of multiple clusters is acknowledged, thus triggering the panic protocol to reconcile this situation. When the presence of more than one cluster (i.e. Split-Brain) is detected by a Coherence member, the panic protocol is invoked in order to resolve the conflicting clusters and consolidate into a single cluster. The protocol consists of the removal of smaller clusters until there is one cluster remaining. In the case of equal size clusters, the one with the older Senior Member will survive. Member 1, being the oldest member, initiates the protocol: 2010-02-26 15:33:45.970/400.066 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Warning> (thread=Cluster, member=1): An existence of a cluster island with senior Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) containing 3 nodes have been detected. Since this Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) is the senior of an older cluster island, the panic protocol is being activated to stop the other island's senior and all junior nodes that belong to it. Member 3 receives the panic: 2010-02-26 15:33:45.803/382.336 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=3): Received panic from senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer) caused by Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer) Member 4, the senior member of the younger cluster, receives the kill message from Member 3: 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. In turn, Member 4 requests the departure of its junior members 5 and 6: 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. 2010-02-26 15:33:43.343/349.015 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=6): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=4, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:39.574, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. Once Members 4, 5, and 6 restart, they rejoin the original cluster with senior member 1. The log below is from Member 4. Note that it receives a different member id when it rejoins the cluster. 2010-02-26 15:33:44.921/367.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Error> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Received a Kill message from a valid Member(Id=3, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:24.892, Address=10.149.155.236:8088, MachineId=1260, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:32459, Role=CoherenceServer); stopping cluster service. 2010-02-26 15:33:46.921/369.468 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Service Cluster left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Invocation:InvocationService, member=4): Service InvocationService left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=OptimisticCache, member=4): Service OptimisticCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=ReplicatedCache, member=4): Service ReplicatedCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=DistributedCache, member=4): Service DistributedCache left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Invocation:Management, member=4): Service Management left the cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service Management with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service DistributedCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service ReplicatedCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service OptimisticCache with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member 6 left service InvocationService with senior member 5 2010-02-26 15:33:47.046/369.593 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=4): Member(Id=6, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:33:47.046, Address=10.149.155.78:8088, MachineId=1102, Location=process:228, Role=CoherenceServer) left Cluster with senior member 4 2010-02-26 15:33:49.218/371.765 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=main, member=n/a): Restarting cluster 2010-02-26 15:33:49.421/371.968 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Service Cluster joined the cluster with senior service member n/a 2010-02-26 15:33:49.625/372.172 Oracle Coherence GE 3.5.3/465p2 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): This Member(Id=5, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:33:50.499, Address=10.149.155.75:8088, MachineId=1099, Location=process:800, Role=CoherenceServer, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=1) joined cluster "cluster:0xDDEB" with senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2010-02-26 15:27:06.931, Address=10.149.155.76:8088, MachineId=1100, Location=site:usdhcp.oraclecorp.com,machine:dhcp-burlington6-4fl-east-10-149,process:511, Role=CoherenceServer, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) Cool isn't it?

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• SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution 2

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I had ran puzzle where I asked question regarding size of index table for each index in database over here SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table – A Puzzle to Find Index Size for Each Index on Table. I had received good amount answers and I had blogged about that here SQL SERVER – Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution. As a comment to that blog I have received another very interesting comment and that provides near accurate answers to original question. Many thanks to Rama Mathanmohan for providing wonderful solution. SELECT OBJECT_NAME(i.OBJECT_ID) AS TableName, i.name AS IndexName, i.index_id AS IndexID, 8 * SUM(a.used_pages) AS 'Indexsize(KB)' FROM sys.indexes AS i JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON p.OBJECT_ID = i.OBJECT_ID AND p.index_id = i.index_id JOIN sys.allocation_units AS a ON a.container_id = p.partition_id GROUP BY i.OBJECT_ID,i.index_id,i.name ORDER BY OBJECT_NAME(i.OBJECT_ID),i.index_id Let me know if you have any better script for the same. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Data Storage, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 1, Decomposition

  - by Reed

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

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• Building a database installer with WiX, datadude and Visual Studio 2010

  - by jamiet

  Today I have been using Windows Installer XML (WiX) to build an installer (.msi file) that would install a SQL Server database on a server of my choosing; the source code for that database lives in datadude (a tool which you may know by one of quite a few other names). The basis for this work was a most excellent blog post by Duke Kamstra entitled Implementing a WIX installer that calls the GDR version of VSDBCMD.EXE which coves the delicate intricacies of doing this – particularly how to call Vsdbcmd.exe in a CustomAction. Unfortunately there are a couple of things wrong with Duke’s post: Searching for “datadude wix” didn’t turn it up in the first page of search results and hence it took me a long time to find it. And I knew that it existed. If someone else were after a post on using WiX with datadude its likely that they would never have come across Duke’s post and that would be a great shame because its the definitive post on the matter. It was written in October 2009 and had not been updated for Visual Studio 2010. Well, this blog post is an attempt to solve those problems. Hopefully I’ve solved the first one just by following a few of my blogging SEO tips while writing this blog post, in the rest of it I will explain how I took Duke’s code and updated it to work in Visual Studio 2010. If you need to build a database installer using WiX, datadude and Visual Studio 2010 then you still need to follow Duke’s blog post so go and do that now. Below are the amendments that I made that enabled the project to get built in Visual Studio 2010: In VS2010 datadude’s output files have changed from being called Database.<suffix> to <ProjectName>_Database.<suffix>. Duke’s code was referencing the old file name formats. Duke used $(var.SolutionDir) and relative paths to point to datadude artefacts I have replaced these with Votive Project References http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/votive_project_references.htm I commented out all references to MicrosoftSqlTypesDbschema in DatabaseArtifacts.wxi. I don't think this is produced in VS2010 (I may be wrong about that but it wasn't in the output from my project) Similarly I commented out component MicrosoftSqlTypesDbschema in VsdbcmdArtifacts.wxi. It wasn't where Duke's code said it should have been so am assuming/hoping it isn't needed. Duke's ?define block to work out appropriate SrcArchPath actually wasn't working for me (i.e. <?if $(var.Platform)=x64 ?> was evaluating to false)  so I just took out the conditional stuff and declared the path explicitly to the “Program Files (x86)” path. The old code is still there though if you need to put it back. None of the <RegistrySearch> stuff is needed for VS2010 - so I commented it all out! Changed to use /manifest option rather than /model option on vsdbcmd.exe command-line. Personal preference is all! Added a new component in order to bundle along the vsdbcmd.exe.config file Made the install of the Custom Action dependent on the relevant feature being selected for install. This one is actually really important – deselecting the database feature for installation does not, by default, stop the CustomAction from executing and so would cause an error - so that scenario needs to be catered for I have made my amended solution available for download at: http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20110210/InstallMyDatabase.zip It contains two projects: the WiX project and the datadude project that is the source to be deployed (for demo purposes it only contains one table). I have also made the .msi available although in order that it gets through file blockers I changed the name from InstallMyDatabase.msi to InstallMyDatabase.ms_ – simply rename the file back once you have downloaded it from: http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20110210/InstallMyDatabase.ms%5E_ .You can try it out for yourself – the only thing it does is dump the files into %Program Files%\MyDatabase and uses them to install a database onto a server of your choosing with a name of your choosing - no damaging side-affects. I will caveat this by saying “it works on my machine” and, not having access to a plethora of different machines, I haven’t tested it anywhere else. One potential issue that I know of is that Vsdbcmd.exe has a dependency on SQL Server CE although if you have SQL Server tools or Visual Studio installed you should be fine. Unfortunately its not possible to bundle along the SQL Server CE installer in the .msi because Windows will not allow you to call one installer from inside another – the recommended way to get around this problem is to build a bootstrapper to bundle the whole lot together but doing that is outside the scope of this blog post. If you discover any other issues then please let me know. Here are the screenshots from the installer: And once installed…. Hope this is useful! @jamiet 

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• Sensitive Data Storage - Best Practices

  - by Kenneth

  I recently started working on a personal project where I was connecting to a database using Java. This got me thinking. I have to provide the login information for a database account on the DB server in order to access the database. But if I hard code it in then it would be possible for someone to decompile the program and extract that login info. If I store it in an external setup file then the same problem exists only it would be even easier for them to get it. I could encrypt the data before storing it in either place but it seems like that's not really a fail safe either and I'm no encryption expert by any means. So what are some best practices for storing sensitive setup data for a program?

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• “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

  - by jesschadwick

  Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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• Setting PIdgin up for Lync2013

  - by Stu2000

  I having difficulty setting up pidgin to work with my company's microsoft 365's communicator lync 2013 (not 2010) account. I either receive a message stating authentication failed, or Incompatible authentication scheme chosen: NTLM depending upon the user agent values used from this wiki It appears that both the user agent values that start with UCCAPI provide authentication failed error, which I'm guessing is "closer" to the solution. I have triple checked that the password is correct. Below are some images of my settings (I have changed the company name to "company" for annonymity. I am running pidgin with a script in order to fix a write error issue: export NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0 pidgin -d I am also using the latest version of SIPE (1.10.1) by using this ppa: https://launchpad.net/~aavelar/+archive/ppa What settings do I need to change/add to get it to work?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010New ProjectsBordecal tools for FxCop: Bordecal tools for FxCop provides an extended framework for FxCop rule development. It allows rule developers to avoid using embedded XML resource...DotNetNuke® Skin City: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. We integrate orange color and black colour in this ...DotNetNuke® Skin Dawn: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by allsnnskins. This design reflects the theme of daylight. U...DotNetNuke® Skin Dream: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by WhNuke. Uses the DNNJDMenu skin object.DotNetNuke® Skin Expression: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with ...DotNetNuke® Skin ModernBiz: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by allsnnskins. This simple and unaffected company skin uses...DotNetNuke® Skin Profound: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by WhNuke Technology. This skin is simple and clean and the ...DotNetNuke® Skin Technology: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Standards" category by allsnnskins. It's compatible with common browsers such ...DotNetNuke® Skin Unravel: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin wit...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! (pronounced E-Bang) is a lightweight runtime environment for editing basic ECMAScript scripts with access to .NET Framework class libraries.Easy ArcGIS Library: Easy ArcGIS Library is a set of C# .net classes that wrap the common functionality of ArcObjects, that help ArcGIS developers do a lot of common fu...File Categorizer: The File Categorizer will help people tag the files on their system for easy searching. Instead of keyword searches, you can find files based on v...GMFS Cosmos: This is a file system for Cosmos a OS that was built with C# and we will be implementing this for windows and linuxIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): IFilter C# implementation for you to embed when writing Windows Search capabilities into your application.Image Wall Control for Silverlight: A control for Silverlight that emulates the wall of images in the Zune. imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik is a very simple program and easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.LegoPhysX: LegoPhysX is an atomic based physics enginePersonal Accounting: Personal system for managing financial accounts, which supports multiple accounts in different currencies. It has movement imputation and basic que...Pipes & Filters Engine: The Pipes & Filters Engine allows you to process a sequence of separate operations (filters) asynchronously in a multi-threaded manner. Filters wil...Prerequisites Checker: Check preqrequisites for software. Example: Software S1 is delivered. S1 has prerequisites PR1, PR2... PRN You may load the config file for S...Puzzle Lib: A library for creating grid-and-tile puzzles. Includes two separate UIs for the Tetriminoes puzzle as examples.QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer: The QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer lists quotes from web sites such as quotes4all.net. It's very easy for you to select your favourite ones a...RobiJ2se: Robi j2se Learning!SkinEngine: This is a Skin Framework for C# Winform, It use easy.and Create Skin GreatSQL Azure .NET Connection: This is a demo application that shows how to connect with SQL AzureSupermarket Soft: WPF Application that helps you manage your supermarket shoppings.Tally Marks for Windows Phone 7 Series: Tally Marks is a counting application. It can count almost anything you'd like to count, and it does it with tally marks! Count the number of peo...TwitCast: TwitCast is a simple notifier for Twitter using the [url:http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/] LINQ 2 Twitter library.WodnySwiat: Projekt grupowy wodny światWSS Task Manager Activity: A custom task creation activity that can be used in a sequential or state machine workflow. The activity was specifically developed to handle task ...New ReleasesAddress Book: Address Book: Address BookAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10c: Veresion 1.10 includes most of the bug fix requests. adds createdby and modifiedby columns to the audited base tables. If the user name is set by...blog for umbraco 4: Blog 4 Umbraco 2.0.26: Fixes: -Regex bug in base -Directory urls and rss link bug -Open reader bug -Rss bugDotNetNuke® Skin City: City Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. We integrate orange color and black colour in this ...DotNetNuke® Skin Dawn: Dawn Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by allsnnskins. This design reflects the theme of daylight. U...DotNetNuke® Skin Dream: Dream Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by WhNuke. Uses the DNNJDMenu skin object.DotNetNuke® Skin Expression: Expression Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with ...DotNetNuke® Skin ModernBiz: ModernBiz Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by allsnnskins. This simple and unaffected company skin uses...DotNetNuke® Skin Profound: Profound Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by WhNuke Technology. This skin is simple and clean and the ...DotNetNuke® Skin Technology: Technology Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Standards" category by allsnnskins. It's compatible with common browsers such a...DotNetNuke® Skin Unravel: Unravel Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! beta 1: This is really meant as a learning project for playing with dynamically compiled code, so you'd be better off getting the source code.Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries: Easy ArcGIS Library Last Build (Version 1.1.2.4139)Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries And Documentation: EAGL Latest Build With DocumentationEasy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Documentation: EAGL 1.1.2.4139 DocumentationEnterprise Library Extensions: Release 1.1: This is a service release for version 1.0 The installation process now works as intended. The assemblies are now visible in the Visual Studio As...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.2.1.0: Version 1.2.1.0 Fixed GB radio button not working renamed UK Added fixes for UK regions/shires/counties where country is missing Add country reco...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.0.0: Version 1.3.0.0 Added IGI Search results viewer Tweaked filenames of IGI search so that results window has more informative displayFile Archive: File Archive: If your computer is only word processing machine or document merge machine, this program is really fit for you. It's so...o useful! This program ar...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.4: Fixes bug 7434. Changed version number to the standard format of Major.Minor.ReleaseIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): Stable release: First release of interface implementation.IFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): System.Search.Core: Ifilter interface for implementation in your own Search Providers.imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik_aplikacija: imenik aplikacija is an application easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.KDRE - kernel debugger regular expression extension: KDRE 0.0.2: KDRE - Windbg regexp extension Changes: - amd64 build addedMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 17): This release introduces some minor tweaks to the source code exposing more buffering functionality. This also fixes a problem with selecting point...MockingBird: MockingBird_2.0_RC: This is the V2.0 RC release. The documentation includes notes about the WCF components. Check this blog post for more details about the release. ...MPF for Projects - Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio 2010 - Final Release: This contains the source code for the release of MPF for Projects corresponding to Visual Studio 2010. For Beta 2, you will need the Beta 2 release...Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer: PhysicsHelper 3.0.0.4 ALPHA: This is an initial release that supports Windows Phone 7 Series Development, along with the Silverlight 3 and WPF support. It requires Visual Studi...Pocket GPW: Pocket GPW 1.2: Modyfikacje wg. change set-a 56678. Poprzednia baza danych (z wersji 1.1) jest zgodna z aktualną. Przed instalacją skopiuj poprzednią bazę danych ...Prerequisites Checker: Prerequisites Checker: Check your software prerequisitesPuzzle Lib: Puzzle Lib examples: Tetriminoes examples using a common Puzzle LIB and common Puzzle Implementation library, demonstrating a basic MVC architecture for game developmentRoTwee: RoTwee (8.0.7.0): Now you can rotate tweets by your hand !SharePoint Icon Integration: SharePoint Icon Integration PDF: This is the first stable release of the SPIconIntegration. To install the PDF Icon integration just start the setup.exe file that you will find in ...SkinEngine: SkinEngine-Src-2010-03-17: this is a release on 2010-03-17Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Binary: Fixed a bug in the word indexing in the database.Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Code: Fixed a bug in the indexing of the words in the database. Now insertion of new words in the database is faster.SQL Azure .NET Connection: LittleBlackBook.NET Release 1.0: This was a demo project for a SQL Azure Presentation at ConfooSQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: New release 1.5.5: Whats new: Move preferences to application settings and add a form to edit preferences. Support to add, modify and delete operations could be made ...SuperModel - A Dynamic View-Model Generator: 1.0.0.1 - Tyra+: Resolving a couple of bugs; models generated using INotifyPropertyChanged were not being created correctly. Property resolution on proxied types w...Survey - web survey & form engine: Survey 1.2.0: The Survey 1.2.0 release is based on the original sources of the Nsurvey 1.9 application. Compared to the Survey 1.1.0 version many new features ...T.S.T. the T-SQL Test Tool: Version 1.5: Version 1.5 changes: Bug fix. In V1.4 and earlier table comparison failed if the tables compared had columns with spaces in them.TwitCast: TwitCast 1.0.0.0: First release of TwitCast. Be warned that this is just a development release and there are a lot of things that remain to be done.unbinder: Unbound.dll: from change set ef6f2303dd32VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30317.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.02.00: Whats New Show only Tags from Pages the Current User has View Acess (As Option) A Url can be specified for a Custom tag Added Module Package fo...WSS Task Manager Activity: 1.0: Download either the source for Moss Task Manager Activity, Workflow sample if you are interested to see how to use the activity in the workflow or ...XML pretty print for python (xmlpp): version 0.92b: Fixes issues when element name contains :Xpress - ASP.NET MVC 个人博客程序: xpress2.1.1.0317.beta: 最新beta版 更改内容： 模板与系统所需配置文件移动到App_Data中 Service对象注入到Controller中 Controller对象放入IOC容器中 邮件发送BUG修正Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMapWindow6NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists

  - by pinaldave

  I had interesting conversation with the attendees of the my SQL Server Performance Tuning course. I was asked if LEFT JOIN can do the same task as RIGHT JOIN by reserving the order of the tables in join, why does RIGHT JOIN exists? The definitions are as following: Left Join – select all the records from the LEFT table and then pick up any matching records from the RIGHT table   Right Join – select all the records from the RIGHT table and then pick up any matching records from the LEFT table Most of us read from LEFT to RIGHT so we are using LEFT join. Do you have any explaination why RIGHT JOIN exists or can you come up with example, where RIGHT JOIN is absolutely required and the task can not be achieved with LEFT JOIN. Other Puzzles: SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Calculating estimated data loss with Always on

  - by blakmk

  Ever wondered how calculate estimated data loss (time) for always on. The metric in the always on dashboard shows the metric quite nicely but there does seem to be a lack of documentation about where the metrics ---come from. Heres a script that calculates the data loss ( lag ) so you can set up alerts based on your DR SLA's:       WITH DR_CTE ( replica_server_name, database_name, last_commit_time) AS                 (                                 select ar.replica_server_name, database_name, rs.last_commit_time                                 from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states  rs                                 inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id                                 inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id                                 where replica_server_name != @@servername                 ) select ar.replica_server_name, dcs.database_name, rs.last_commit_time, DR_CTE.last_commit_time 'DR_commit_time', datediff(ss,  DR_CTE.last_commit_time, rs.last_commit_time) 'lag_in_seconds' from master.sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_states  rs inner join master.sys.availability_replicas ar on rs.replica_id = ar.replica_id inner join sys.dm_hadr_database_replica_cluster_states dcs on dcs.group_database_id = rs.group_database_id and rs.replica_id = dcs.replica_id inner join DR_CTE on DR_CTE.database_name = dcs.database_name where ar.replica_server_name = @@servername order by lag_in_seconds desc

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• Non-Dom Element Event Binding with jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  Yesterday I had a short discussion with Dave Reed on Twitter regarding setting up fake ‘events’ on objects that are hookable. jQuery makes it real easy to bind events on DOM elements and with a little bit of extra work (that I didn’t know about) you can also set up binding to non-DOM element ‘event’ bindings. Assume for a second that you have a simple JavaScript object like this: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; and you want to be notified when the foo function is called. You can use jQuery to bind the handler like this: $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo Hook called'); } ); Binding alone won’t actually cause the handler to be triggered so when you call: item.foo(); you only get the ‘original’ message. In order to fire both the original handler and the bound event hook you have to use the .trigger() function: $(item).trigger("foo"); Now if you do the following complete sequence: var item = { sku: "wwhelp" , foo: function() { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo", function () { alert('foo hook called'); } ); $(item).trigger("foo"); You’ll see the ‘hook’ message first followed by the ‘original’ message fired in succession. In other words, using this mechanism you can hook standard object functions and chain events to them in a way similar to the way you can do with DOM elements. The main difference is that the ‘event’ has to be explicitly triggered in order for this to happen rather than just calling the method directly. .trigger() relies on some internal logic that checks for event bindings on the object (attached via an expando property) which .trigger() searches for in its bound event list. Once the ‘event’ is found it’s called prior to execution of the original function. This is pretty useful as it allows you to create standard JavaScript objects that can act as event handlers and are effectively hookable without having to explicitly override event definitions with JavaScript function handlers. You get all the benefits of jQuery’s event methods including the ability to hook up multiple events to the same handler function and the ability to uniquely identify each specific event instance with post fix string names (ie. .bind("MyEvent.MyName") and .unbind("MyEvent.MyName") to bind MyEvent). Watch out for an .unbind() Bug Note that there appears to be a bug with .unbind() in jQuery that doesn’t reliably unbind an event and results in a elem.removeEventListener is not a function error. The following code demonstrates: var item = { sku: "wwhelp", foo: function () { alert('orginal foo function'); } }; $(item).bind("foo.first", function () { alert('foo hook called'); }); $(item).bind("foo.second", function () { alert('foo hook2 called'); }); $(item).trigger("foo"); setTimeout(function () { $(item).unbind("foo"); // $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); The setTimeout call delays the unbinding and is supposed to remove the event binding on the foo function. It fails both with the foo only value (both if assigned only as “foo” or “foo.first/second” as well as when removing both of the postfixed event handlers explicitly. Oddly the following that removes only one of the two handlers works: setTimeout(function () { //$(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).unbind("foo.first"); // $(item).unbind("foo.second"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); this actually works which is weird as the code in unbind tries to unbind using a DOM method that doesn’t exist. <shrug> A partial workaround for unbinding all ‘foo’ events is the following: setTimeout(function () { $.event.special.foo = { teardown: function () { alert('teardown'); return true; } }; $(item).unbind("foo"); $(item).trigger("foo"); }, 3000); which is a bit cryptic to say the least but it seems to work more reliably. I can’t take credit for any of this – thanks to Dave Reed and Damien Edwards who pointed out some of these behaviors. I didn’t find any good descriptions of the process so thought it’d be good to write it down here. Hope some of you find this helpful.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  

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• Feedback on "market manipulation", a peripheral game mechanic for a satirical MMO

  - by BerndBrot

  This question asks for feedback on a specific game-mechanic. Since there is not one right feedback on a game mechanic, I tried to provide enough context and guidelines to still make it possible for users to rate answers and to accept an answer as the best answer (following these criteria from Writer.SE's meta website). Please comment if you have any suggestions on how I could improve the question in that regard. So, let's begin with the game itself and some of its elements which are relevant for this question. Context I'm working on a satirical, text-based multiplayer adventure and role-playing game set in modern-day London. The game resolves around the concept of sin and features a myriad of (venomous) allusions to all the things that go wrong in this world. Players can choose between character classes like bullshit artist (consultant), bankster, lawyer, mobster, celebrity, politician, etc. In order to complete the game, the player has to live so sinfully with regard to any of the seven deadly sins that a demon is willing to offer them a contract of sponsorship. On their quest to live a sinful live, characters explore more and more locations of modern-day London (on a GoogleMap), fight "monsters" like insurance sales agents or Jehovah's Witnesses, and complete quests, like building a PowerPoint presentation out of marketing buzz words or keeping up a number of substance abuse effects in order to progress on the gluttony path. Battles are turn based with both combatants having a deck of cards, with which they try to make their enemy give in to temptations of all sorts. Tempted enemies sometimes become contacts (an item drop mechanic), which can be exploited for various benefits, depending on their area of influence (finance, underworld, bureaucracy, etc.), level of influence, and kind of sway that the player has over them (bribed, seduced, threatened, etc.) Once a contract has been exploited, the player loses that contact. Most actions require turns. Turns are limited, but refill each day. Criteria A number of peripheral game mechanics are supposed to represent real world abuses and mischief in a humorous way integrate real world data and events to strengthen the feeling of relevance of the game's humor with regard to real world problems add fun ways of interacting with other players add ways for players to express themselves through game-play Market manipulation is one such peripheral game mechanic and should fulfill all of these goals. Market manipulation This is my initial design of the mechanic: Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE) (without paying a turn) LSE displays the stock prices of a number of companies in industries like weapons or tobacco as well as some derivatives based on wheat and corn. The stock prices are calculated based on the actual stock prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time) any market manipulations that were conducted by the players any market corrections of the system Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value (without paying a turn). Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires 1 turn A contact in the financial sector (see above). The higher the level of influence of the contact, the stronger the effect of the manipulation on the stock price, and/or the shorter it takes for the manipulation to manifest itself. Market manipulation also adds a crime to the player's record. (There are a multitude of ways to take care of that, but it is still another "cost" of market manipulations.) The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is. Whenever food prices reach a certain level, in-game stories are posted about hunger catastrophes happening somewhere far, far away (maybe with links to real world news stories). Whenever a player sells a certain number of shares with a sufficiently high margin, they are mentioned in that day's in-game financial news. Since the number of stock options is very limited, players will inevitably collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. Hopefully, it will also be a fun side-arena for guilds and covenants to fight each other. Question(s) What do you think of this mechanism given the criteria for peripheral game mechanics that I specified for my game? Do you have any ideas how the mechanic could be improved with regard to these criteria (or otherwise)? Could it be improved to allow for more expressive game-play, or involve an allusion to some other real world madness (like short selling, leveraging, or some other banking magic)? Are there any game-theoretic problems with this mechanic, like maybe certain dominant individual strategies that, collectively, lead to every player profiting and thus eliminating the idea of market manipulation PVP? Also, if you like (or dislike) this question, feel free to participate in the discussion on GDSE meta: "Should we be more lax with regard to SE's question/answer format to make game design questions possible?"

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