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Windows 7 Machine Makes Router Drop -All- Wireless Connections

- by Hammer Bro.

Some background: My home network consists of my Desktop, a two-month old Windows 7 (x64) machine which is online most frequently (N-spec), as well as three other Windows XP laptops (all G) that only connect every now and then (one for work, one for Netflix, and the other for infrequent regular laptop uses). I used to have a Belkin F5D8236-4 wireless router, and everything worked great. A week ago, however, I found out that the Belkin absolutely in no way would establish a VPN connection, something that has become important for work. So I bought a Netgear WNR3500v2/U/L. The wireless was acting a little sketchy at first for just the Windows 7 machine, but I thought it had something to do with 802.11N and I was in a hurry so I just fished up an ethernet cable and disabled the computer's wireless. It has now become apparent, though, that whenever the Windows 7 machine is connected to the router, all wireless connections become unstable. I was using my work laptop for a solid six hours today with no trouble, having multiple SSH connections open over VPN and streaming internet radio in the background. Then, within two minutes of turning on this Windows 7 box, I had lost all connectivity over the wireless. And I was two feet away from the router. The same sort of thing happens on all of the other laptops -- Netflix can be playing stuff all weekend, but if I come up here and do things on this (W7) computer, the streaming will be dead within ten minutes. So here are my basic observations: If the Windows 7 machine is off, then all connections will have a Signal Strength of Very Good or Excellent and a Speed of 48-54 Mbps for an indefinite amount of time. Shortly after the Windows 7 machine is turned on, all wireless connections will experience a consistent decline in Speed down to 1.0 Mbps, eventually losing their connection entirely. These machines will continue to maintain 70% signal strength, as observed by themselves and router. Once dropped, a wireless connection will have difficulty reconnecting. And, if a connection manages to become established, it will quickly drop off again. The Windows 7 machine itself will continue to function just fine if it's using a wired connection, although it will experience these same issues over the wireless. All of the drivers and firmwares are up to date, and this happened both with the stock Netgear firmware as well as the (current) DD-WRT. What I've tried: Making sure each computer is being assigned a distinct IP. (They are.) Disabling UPnP and Stateful Packet Inspection on the router. Disabling Network Sharing, SSDP Discovery, TCP/IP NetBios Helper and Computer Browser services on the Windows 7 machine. Disabling QoS Packet Scheduler, IPv6, and Link Layer Topology Discovery options on my ethernet controller (leaving only Client for Microsoft Networks, File and Printer Sharing, and IPv4 enabled). What I think: It seems awfully similar to the problems discussed in detail at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wsk/thread/1064e397-9d9b-4ae2-bc8e-c8798e591915 (which was both the most relevant and concrete information I could dig up on the internet). I still think that something the Windows 7 IP stack (or just Operating System itself) is doing is giving the router fits. However, I could be wrong, because I have two key differences. One is that most instances of this problem are reported as the entire router dying or restarting, and mine still works just fine over the wired connection. The other is that it's a new router, tested with both the factory firmware and the (I assume) well-maintained DD-WRT project. Even if Windows 7 is still secretly sending IPv6 packets or the TCP Window Scaling implementation that I hear Vista caused some trouble with (even though I've tried my best to disable anything fancy), this router should support those functions. I don't want to get a new or a replacement router unless someone can convince me that this is a defective unit. But the problem seems too specific and predictable by my instincts to be a hardware hiccup. And I don't want to deal with the inevitable problems that always seem to take half a day to resolve when getting a new router, since I'm frantically working (including tomorrow) to complete a project by next week's deadline. Plus, I think in the worst case scenario, I could keep this router connected directly to the modem, disable its wireless entirely, and connect the old Belkin to it directly. That should allow me to still use VPN (although I'll have to plug my work laptop directly into that router), and then maintain wireless connections for all of the other computers. But that feels so wrong to me. Anyone have any ideas what the cause and possible solution could be? Clarifications: The Windows 7 machine is directly connected via an ethernet cable to the router for everything above. But while it is online, all other computers' wireless connections become unusable. It is not an issue of signal strength or interference -- no other devices within scanning range are using Channel 1, and the problem will affect computers that are literally feet away from the router with 95% signal strength.

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Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD

- by Trevor Bekolay

There are lots of utilities to recover deleted files, but what if you can’t boot up your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? We’ll show you some tools that will dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole hard drive partitions. We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely. Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so. Our setup To show these tools, we’ve set up a small 1 GB hard drive, with half of the space partitioned as ext2, a file system used in Linux, and half the space partitioned as FAT32, a file system used in older Windows systems. We stored ten random pictures on each hard drive. We then wiped the partition table from the hard drive by deleting the partitions in GParted. Is our data lost forever? Installing the tools All of the tools we’re going to use are in Ubuntu’s universe repository. To enable the repository, open Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left, then Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Click on Settings > Repositories and add a check in the box labelled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close, and then in the main Synaptic Package Manager window, click the Reload button. Once the package list has reloaded, and the search index rebuilt, search for and mark for installation one or all of the following packages: testdisk, foremost, and scalpel. Testdisk includes TestDisk, which can recover lost partitions and repair boot sectors, and PhotoRec, which can recover many different types of files from tons of different file systems. Foremost, originally developed by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, recovers files based on their headers and other internal structures. Foremost operates on hard drives or drive image files generated by various tools. Finally, scalpel performs the same functions as foremost, but is focused on enhanced performance and lower memory usage. Scalpel may run better if you have an older machine with less RAM. Recover hard drive partitions If you can’t mount your hard drive, then its partition table might be corrupted. Before you start trying to recover your important files, it may be possible to recover one or more partitions on your drive, recovering all of your files with one step. Testdisk is the tool for the job. Start it by opening a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typing in: sudo testdisk If you’d like, you can create a log file, though it won’t affect how much data you recover. Once you make your choice, you’re greeted with a list of the storage media on your machine. You should be able to identify the hard drive you want to recover partitions from by its size and label. TestDisk asks you select the type of partition table to search for. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT32, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. Highlight Analyse and press enter. In our case, our small hard drive has previously been formatted as NTFS. Amazingly, TestDisk finds this partition, though it is unable to recover it. It also finds the two partitions we just deleted. We are able to change their attributes, or add more partitions, but we’ll just recover them by pressing Enter. If TestDisk hasn’t found all of your partitions, you can try doing a deeper search by selecting that option with the left and right arrow keys. We only had these two partitions, so we’ll recover them by selecting Write and pressing Enter. Testdisk informs us that we will have to reboot. Note: If your Ubuntu Live CD is not persistent, then when you reboot you will have to reinstall any tools that you installed earlier. After restarting, both of our partitions are back to their original states, pictures and all. Recover files of certain types For the following examples, we deleted the 10 pictures from both partitions and then reformatted them. PhotoRec Of the three tools we’ll show, PhotoRec is the most user-friendly, despite being a console-based utility. To start recovering files, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: sudo photorec To begin, you are asked to select a storage device to search. You should be able to identify the right device by its size and label. Select the right device, and then hit Enter. PhotoRec asks you select the type of partition to search. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. You are given a list of the partitions on your selected hard drive. If you want to recover all of the files on a partition, then select Search and hit enter. However, this process can be very slow, and in our case we only want to search for pictures files, so instead we use the right arrow key to select File Opt and press Enter. PhotoRec can recover many different types of files, and deselecting each one would take a long time. Instead, we press “s” to clear all of the selections, and then find the appropriate file types – jpg, gif, and png – and select them by pressing the right arrow key. Once we’ve selected these three, we press “b” to save these selections. Press enter to return to the list of hard drive partitions. We want to search both of our partitions, so we highlight “No partition” and “Search” and then press Enter. PhotoRec prompts for a location to store the recovered files. If you have a different healthy hard drive, then we recommend storing the recovered files there. Since we’re not recovering very much, we’ll store it on the Ubuntu Live CD’s desktop. Note: Do not recover files to the hard drive you’re recovering from. PhotoRec is able to recover the 20 pictures from the partitions on our hard drive! A quick look in the recup_dir.1 directory that it creates confirms that PhotoRec has recovered all of our pictures, save for the file names. Foremost Foremost is a command-line program with no interactive interface like PhotoRec, but offers a number of command-line options to get as much data out of your had drive as possible. For a full list of options that can be tweaked via the command line, open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: foremost –h In our case, the command line options that we are going to use are: -t, a comma-separated list of types of files to search for. In our case, this is “jpeg,png,gif”. -v, enabling verbose-mode, giving us more information about what foremost is doing. -o, the output folder to store recovered files in. In our case, we created a directory called “foremost” on the desktop. -i, the input that will be searched for files. This can be a disk image in several different formats; however, we will use a hard disk, /dev/sda. Our foremost invocation is: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda Your invocation will differ depending on what you’re searching for and where you’re searching for it. Foremost is able to recover 17 of the 20 files stored on the hard drive. Looking at the files, we can confirm that these files were recovered relatively well, though we can see some errors in the thumbnail for 00622449.jpg. Part of this may be due to the ext2 filesystem. Foremost recommends using the –d command-line option for Linux file systems like ext2. We’ll run foremost again, adding the –d command-line option to our foremost invocation: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –d –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda This time, foremost is able to recover all 20 images! A final look at the pictures reveals that the pictures were recovered with no problems. Scalpel Scalpel is another powerful program that, like Foremost, is heavily configurable. Unlike Foremost, Scalpel requires you to edit a configuration file before attempting any data recovery. Any text editor will do, but we’ll use gedit to change the configuration file. In a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type in: sudo gedit /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf scalpel.conf contains information about a number of different file types. Scroll through this file and uncomment lines that start with a file type that you want to recover (i.e. remove the “#” character at the start of those lines). Save the file and close it. Return to the terminal window. Scalpel also has a ton of command-line options that can help you search quickly and effectively; however, we’ll just define the input device (/dev/sda) and the output folder (a folder called “scalpel” that we created on the desktop). Our invocation is: sudo scalpel /dev/sda –o scalpel Scalpel is able to recover 18 of our 20 files. A quick look at the files scalpel recovered reveals that most of our files were recovered successfully, though there were some problems (e.g. 00000012.jpg). Conclusion In our quick toy example, TestDisk was able to recover two deleted partitions, and PhotoRec and Foremost were able to recover all 20 deleted images. Scalpel recovered most of the files, but it’s very likely that playing with the command-line options for scalpel would have enabled us to recover all 20 images. These tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If your data is on the hard drive somewhere, then one of these tools will track it down! 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T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots. I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year. Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept. I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques. It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance. It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works. It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals. I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it. Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information. And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line. For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names. There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings. You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish. (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad. And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.) Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there. As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting. I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences. For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons. He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne". Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts. Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed. As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons. And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan. What the heck is a hekaton? Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English. I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure. I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton. Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting! The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code". Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command? Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance? Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected) Hmm. Well that didn't find much. Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading. I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure. And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0) And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc. (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats. But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%' I'll leave that to you as more homework. I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features. That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server! Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server? As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit. While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server. And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones. Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!) And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else. It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn? We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server. We've even learned how to use command-line utilities! We are now 1337 h4X0rz! (Not really. I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post. I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination. There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals. It's not The Matrix. It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting! Microsoft are not really evil! It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION #tsql2sday

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C#: String Concatenation vs Format vs StringBuilder

- by James Michael Hare

I was looking through my groups’ C# coding standards the other day and there were a couple of legacy items in there that caught my eye. They had been passed down from committee to committee so many times that no one even thought to second guess and try them for a long time. It’s yet another example of how micro-optimizations can often get the best of us and cause us to write code that is not as maintainable as it could be for the sake of squeezing an extra ounce of performance out of our software. So the two standards in question were these, in paraphrase: Prefer StringBuilder or string.Format() to string concatenation. Prefer string.Equals() with case-insensitive option to string.ToUpper().Equals(). Now some of you may already know what my results are going to show, as these items have been compared before on many blogs, but I think it’s always worth repeating and trying these yourself. So let’s dig in. The first test was a pretty standard one. When concattenating strings, what is the best choice: StringBuilder, string concattenation, or string.Format()? So before we being I read in a number of iterations from the console and a length of each string to generate. Then I generate that many random strings of the given length and an array to hold the results. Why am I so keen to keep the results? Because I want to be able to snapshot the memory and don’t want garbage collection to collect the strings, hence the array to keep hold of them. I also didn’t want the random strings to be part of the allocation, so I pre-allocate them and the array up front before the snapshot. So in the code snippets below: num – Number of iterations. strings – Array of randomly generated strings. results – Array to hold the results of the concatenation tests. timer – A System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch() instance to time code execution. start – Beginning memory size. stop – Ending memory size. after – Memory size after final GC. So first, let’s look at the concatenation loop: 1: // build num strings using concattenation. 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: results[i] = "This is test #" + i + " with a result of " + strings[i]; 5: } Pretty standard, right? Next for string.Format(): 1: // build strings using string.Format() 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: results[i] = string.Format("This is test #{0} with a result of {1}", i, strings[i]); 5: } Finally, StringBuilder: 1: // build strings using StringBuilder 2: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 3: { 4: var builder = new StringBuilder(); 5: builder.Append("This is test #"); 6: builder.Append(i); 7: builder.Append(" with a result of "); 8: builder.Append(strings[i]); 9: results[i] = builder.ToString(); 10: } So I take each of these loops, and time them by using a block like this: 1: // get the total amount of memory used, true tells it to run GC first. 2: start = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(true); 3: 4: // restart the timer 5: timer.Reset(); 6: timer.Start(); 7: 8: // *** code to time and measure goes here. *** 9: 10: // get the current amount of memory, stop the timer, then get memory after GC. 11: stop = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(false); 12: timer.Stop(); 13: other = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(true); So let’s look at what happens when I run each of these blocks through the timer and memory check at 500,000 iterations: 1: Operator + - Time: 547, Memory: 56104540/55595960 - 500000 2: string.Format() - Time: 749, Memory: 57295812/55595960 - 500000 3: StringBuilder - Time: 608, Memory: 55312888/55595960 – 500000 Egad! string.Format brings up the rear and + triumphs, well, at least in terms of speed. The concat burns more memory than StringBuilder but less than string.Format(). This shows two main things: StringBuilder is not always the panacea many think it is. The difference between any of the three is miniscule! The second point is extremely important! You will often here people who will grasp at results and say, “look, operator + is 10% faster than StringBuilder so always use StringBuilder.” Statements like this are a disservice and often misleading. For example, if I had a good guess at what the size of the string would be, I could have preallocated my StringBuffer like so: 1: for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) 2: { 3: // pre-declare StringBuilder to have 100 char buffer. 4: var builder = new StringBuilder(100); 5: builder.Append("This is test #"); 6: builder.Append(i); 7: builder.Append(" with a result of "); 8: builder.Append(strings[i]); 9: results[i] = builder.ToString(); 10: } Now let’s look at the times: 1: Operator + - Time: 551, Memory: 56104412/55595960 - 500000 2: string.Format() - Time: 753, Memory: 57296484/55595960 - 500000 3: StringBuilder - Time: 525, Memory: 59779156/55595960 - 500000 Whoa! All of the sudden StringBuilder is back on top again! But notice, it takes more memory now. This makes perfect sense if you examine the IL behind the scenes. Whenever you do a string concat (+) in your code, it examines the lengths of the arguments and creates a StringBuilder behind the scenes of the appropriate size for you. But even IF we know the approximate size of our StringBuilder, look how much less readable it is! That’s why I feel you should always take into account both readability and performance. After all, consider all these timings are over 500,000 iterations. That’s at best 0.0004 ms difference per call which is neglidgable at best. The key is to pick the best tool for the job. What do I mean? Consider these awesome words of wisdom: Concatenate (+) is best at concatenating. StringBuilder is best when you need to building. Format is best at formatting. Totally Earth-shattering, right! But if you consider it carefully, it actually has a lot of beauty in it’s simplicity. Remember, there is no magic bullet. If one of these always beat the others we’d only have one and not three choices. The fact is, the concattenation operator (+) has been optimized for speed and looks the cleanest for joining together a known set of strings in the simplest manner possible. StringBuilder, on the other hand, excels when you need to build a string of inderterminant length. Use it in those times when you are looping till you hit a stop condition and building a result and it won’t steer you wrong. String.Format seems to be the looser from the stats, but consider which of these is more readable. Yes, ignore the fact that you could do this with ToString() on a DateTime. 1: // build a date via concatenation 2: var date1 = (month < 10 ? string.Empty : "0") + month + '/' 3: + (day < 10 ? string.Empty : "0") + '/' + year; 4: 5: // build a date via string builder 6: var builder = new StringBuilder(10); 7: if (month < 10) builder.Append('0'); 8: builder.Append(month); 9: builder.Append('/'); 10: if (day < 10) builder.Append('0'); 11: builder.Append(day); 12: builder.Append('/'); 13: builder.Append(year); 14: var date2 = builder.ToString(); 15: 16: // build a date via string.Format 17: var date3 = string.Format("{0:00}/{1:00}/{2:0000}", month, day, year); 18: So the strength in string.Format is that it makes constructing a formatted string easy to read. Yes, it’s slower, but look at how much more elegant it is to do zero-padding and anything else string.Format does. So my lesson is, don’t look for the silver bullet! Choose the best tool. Micro-optimization almost always bites you in the end because you’re sacrificing readability for performance, which is almost exactly the wrong choice 90% of the time. I love the rules of optimization. They’ve been stated before in many forms, but here’s how I always remember them: For Beginners: Do not optimize. For Experts: Do not optimize yet. It’s so true. Most of the time on today’s modern hardware, a micro-second optimization at the sake of readability will net you nothing because it won’t be your bottleneck. Code for readability, choose the best tool for the job which will usually be the most readable and maintainable as well. Then, and only then, if you need that extra performance boost after profiling your code and exhausting all other options… then you can start to think about optimizing.

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Observable Collections

- by SGWellens

I didn't think it was possible, but .NET surprised me yet again with a cool feature I never knew existed: The ObservableCollection. This became available in .NET 3.0. In essence, an ObservableCollection is a collection with an event you can connect to. The event fires when the collection changes. As usual, working with the .NET classes is so ridiculously easy, it feels like cheating. The following is small test program to illustrate how the ObservableCollection works. To start, create an ObservableCollection and then store it in the Session object so it will persist between page post backs. I also added the code to pull it out of Session state when there is a page post back: public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page{ public ObservableCollection<int> MyInts; // ---- Page_Load ------------------------------ protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (IsPostBack == false) { MyInts = new ObservableCollection<int>(); MyInts.CollectionChanged += CollectionChangedHandler; Session["MyInts"] = MyInts; // store for use between postbacks } else { MyInts = Session["MyInts"] as ObservableCollection<int>; } } Here's the event handler I hooked up to the ObservableCollection, it writes status strings to a ListBox. Note: The event handler fires in a different thread than the IIS process thread. // ---- CollectionChangedHandler ----------------------------------- // // Something changed in the Observable collection public void CollectionChangedHandler(object sender, NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e) { // need to dig around to get the current page and control to write to: // (because this is in a separate thread) Page CurrentPage = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Handler as Page; ListBox LB = CurrentPage.FindControl("ListBoxHistory") as ListBox; switch (e.Action) { case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Add: LB.Items.Add("Add: " + e.NewItems[0]); break; case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Remove: LB.Items.Add("Remove: " + e.OldItems[0]); break; case NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset: LB.Items.Add("Reset: "); break; default: LB.Items.Add(e.Action.ToString()); break; } } Next, add some buttons and code to exercise the ObservableCollection: <br /> <asp:Button ID="ButtonAdd" runat="server" Text="Add" OnClick="ButtonAdd_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="ButtonRemove" runat="server" Text="Remove" OnClick="ButtonRemove_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="ButtonReset" runat="server" Text="Reset" OnClick="ButtonReset_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="ButtonList" runat="server" Text="List" OnClick="ButtonList_Click" /> <br /> <asp:TextBox ID="TextBoxInt" runat="server" Width="51px"></asp:TextBox> <br /> <asp:ListBox ID="ListBoxHistory" runat="server" Height="255px" Width="195px"> </asp:ListBox> // ---- Add Button -------------------------------------- protected void ButtonAdd_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { int Temp; if (int.TryParse(TextBoxInt.Text, out Temp) == true) MyInts.Add(Temp); } // ---- Remove Button -------------------------------------- protected void ButtonRemove_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { int Temp; if (int.TryParse(TextBoxInt.Text, out Temp) == true) MyInts.Remove(Temp); } // ---- Button Reset ----------------------------------- protected void ButtonReset_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { MyInts.Clear(); } // ---- Button List -------------------------------------- protected void ButtonList_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { ListBoxHistory.Items.Add("MyInts:"); foreach (int i in MyInts) { // a bit of tweaking to get the text to be indented ListItem LI = new ListItem("  " + i.ToString()); LI.Text = Server.HtmlDecode(LI.Text); ListBoxHistory.Items.Add(LI); } } Here's what it looks like after entering some numbers and clicking some buttons: An interesting note is that I had to use: System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response to write to a control on the page. As mentioned earlier, this implies that the notification event is in a thread separate from the IIS thread. Another interesting note: From the online help: Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe What does that mean to Asp.Net developers? If you are going to share an ObservableCollection among different sessions, you'd better make it a static object. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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Routing to a Controller with no View in Angular

- by Rick Strahl

I've finally had some time to put Angular to use this week in a small project I'm working on for fun. Angular's routing is great and makes it real easy to map URL routes to controllers and model data into views. But what if you don't actually need a view, if you effectively need a headless controller that just runs code, but doesn't render a view?Preserve the ViewWhen Angular navigates a route and and presents a new view, it loads the controller and then renders the view from scratch. Views are not cached or stored, but displayed and then removed. So if you have routes configured like this:'use strict'; // Declare app level module which depends on filters, and services window.myApp = angular.module('myApp', ['myApp.filters', 'myApp.services', 'myApp.directives', 'myApp.controllers']). config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider) { $routeProvider.when('/map', { template: "partials/map.html ", controller: 'mapController', reloadOnSearch: false, animation: 'slide' }); … $routeProvider.otherwise({redirectTo: '/map'}); }]); Angular routes to the mapController and then re-renders the map.html template with the new data from the $scope filled in.But, but… I don't want a new View!Now in most cases this works just fine. If I'm rendering plain DOM content, or textboxes in a form interface that is all fine and dandy - it's perfectly fine to completely re-render the UI.But in some cases, the UI that's being managed has state and shouldn't be redrawn. In this case the main page in question has a Google Map on it. The map is going to be manipulated throughout the lifetime of the application and the rest of the pages. In my application I have a toolbar on the bottom and the rest of the content is replaced/switched out by the Angular Views:The problem is that the map shouldn't be redrawn each time the Location view is activated. It should maintain its state, such as the current position selected (which can move), and shouldn't redraw due to the overhead of re-rendering the initial map.Originally I set up the map, exactly like all my other views - as a partial, that is rendered with a separate file, but that didn't work.The Workaround - Controller Only RoutesThe workaround for this goes decidedly against Angular's way of doing things:Setting up a Template-less RouteIn-lining the map view directly into the main pageHiding and showing the map view manuallyLet's see how this works.Controller Only RouteThe template-less route is basically a route that doesn't have any template to render. This is not directly supported by Angular, but thankfully easy to fake. The end goal here is that I want to simply have the Controller fire and then have the controller manage the display of the already active view by hiding and showing the map and any other view content, in effect bypassing Angular's view display management.In short - I want a controller action, but no view rendering.The controller-only or template-less route looks like this: $routeProvider.when('/map', { template: " ", // just fire controller controller: 'mapController', animation: 'slide' });Notice I'm using the template property rather than templateUrl (used in the first example above), which allows specifying a string template, and leaving it blank. The template property basically allows you to provide a templated string using Angular's HandleBar like binding syntax which can be useful at times. You can use plain strings or strings with template code in the template, or as I'm doing here a blank string to essentially fake 'just clear the view'. In-lined ViewSo if there's no view where does the HTML go? Because I don't want Angular to manage the view the map markup is in-lined directly into the page. So instead of rendering the map into the Angular view container, the content is simply set up as inline HTML to display as a sibling to the view container.<div id="MapContent" data-icon="LocationIcon" ng-controller="mapController" style="display:none"> <div class="headerbar"> <div class="right-header" style="float:right"> <a id="btnShowSaveLocationDialog" class="iconbutton btn btn-sm" href="#/saveLocation" style="margin-right: 2px;"> <i class="icon-ok icon-2x" style="color: lightgreen; "></i> Save Location </a> </div> <div class="left-header">GeoCrumbs</div> </div> <div class="clearfix"></div> <div id="Message"> <i id="MessageIcon"></i> <span id="MessageText"></span> </div> <div id="Map" class="content-area"> </div> </div> <div id="ViewPlaceholder" ng-view></div>Note that there's the #MapContent element and the #ViewPlaceHolder. The #MapContent is my static map view that is always 'live' and is initially hidden. It is initially hidden and doesn't get made visible until the MapController controller activates it which does the initial rendering of the map. After that the element is persisted with the map data already loaded and any future access only updates the map with new locations/pins etc.Note that default route is assigned to the mapController, which means that the mapController is fired right as the page loads, which is actually a good thing in this case, as the map is the cornerstone of this app that is manipulated by some of the other controllers/views.The Controller handles some UISince there's effectively no view activation with the template-less route, the controller unfortunately has to take over some UI interaction directly. Specifically it has to swap the hidden state between the map and any of the other views.Here's what the controller looks like:myApp.controller('mapController', ["$scope", "$routeParams", "locationData", function($scope, $routeParams, locationData) { $scope.locationData = locationData.location; $scope.locationHistory = locationData.locationHistory; if ($routeParams.mode == "currentLocation") { bc.getCurrentLocation(false); } bc.showMap(false,"#LocationIcon"); }]);bc.showMap is responsible for a couple of display tasks that hide/show the views/map and for activating/deactivating icons. The code looks like this:this.showMap = function (hide,selActiveIcon) { if (!hide) $("#MapContent").show(); else { $("#MapContent").hide(); } self.fitContent(); if (selActiveIcon) { $(".iconbutton").removeClass("active"); $(selActiveIcon).addClass("active"); } };Each of the other controllers in the app also call this function when they are activated to basically hide the map and make the View Content area visible. The map controller makes the map.This is UI code and calling this sort of thing from controllers is generally not recommended, but I couldn't figure out a way using directives to make this work any more easily than this. It'd be easy to hide and show the map and view container using a flag an ng-show, but it gets tricky because of scoping of the $scope. I would have to resort to storing this setting on the $rootscope which I try to avoid. The same issues exists with the icons.It sure would be nice if Angular had a way to explicitly specify that a View shouldn't be destroyed when another view is activated, so currently this workaround is required. Searching around, I saw a number of whacky hacks to get around this, but this solution I'm using here seems much easier than any of that I could dig up even if it doesn't quite fit the 'Angular way'.Angular nice, until it's notOverall I really like Angular and the way it works although it took me a bit of time to get my head around how all the pieces fit together. Once I got the idea how the app/routes, the controllers and views snap together, putting together Angular pages becomes fairly straightforward. You can get quite a bit done never going beyond those basics. For most common things Angular's default routing and view presentation works very well.But, when you do something a bit more complex, where there are multiple dependencies or as in this case where Angular doesn't appear to support a feature that's absolutely necessary, you're on your own. Finding information on more advanced topics is not trivial especially since versions are changing so rapidly and the low level behaviors are changing frequently so finding something that works is often an exercise in trial and error. Not that this is surprising. Angular is a complex piece of kit as are all the frameworks that try to hack JavaScript into submission to do something that it was really never designed to. After all everything about a framework like Angular is an elaborate hack. A lot of shit has to happen to make this all work together and at that Angular (and Ember, Durandel etc.) are pretty amazing pieces of JavaScript code. So no harm, no foul, but I just can't help feeling like working in toy sandbox at times :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Angular JavaScript 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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Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

- by BuckWoody

As part of my professional development, I’ve created a list of books to read throughout the year, starting in June of 2011. This a review of the first one, called Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan. You can find my entire list of books I’m reading for my career here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/06/07/head-in-the-clouds-eyes-on-the-books.aspx Why I Chose This Book: As part of my learning style, I try to read multiple books about a single subject. I’ve found that at least 3 books are necessary to get the right amount of information to me. This is a “technical” work, meaning that it deals with technology and not business, writing or other facets of my career. I’ll have a mix of all of those as I read along. I chose this work in addition to others I’ve read since it covers everything from an introduction to more advanced topics in a single book. It also has some practical examples of actually working with the product, particularly on storage. Although it’s dated, many examples normally translate. I also saw that it had pretty good reviews. What I learned: I learned a great deal about storage, and many useful code snippets. I do think that there could have been more of a focus on the application fabric - but of course that wasn’t as mature a feature when this book was written. I learned some great architecture examples, and in one section I learned more about encryption. In that example, however, I would rather have seen the examples go the other way - the book focused on moving data from on-premise to Azure storage in an encrypted fashion. Using the Application Fabric I would rather see sensitive data left in a hybrid fashion on premise, and connect to for the Azure application. Even so, the examples were very useful. If you’re looking for a good “starter” Azure book, this is a good choice. I also recommend the last chapter as a quick read for a DBA, or Database Administrator. It’s not very long, but useful. Note that the limits described are incorrect - which is one of the dangers of reading a book about any cloud offering. The services offered are updated so quickly that the information is in constant danger of being “stale”. Even so, I found this a useful book, which I believe will help me work with Azure better. Raw Notes: I take notes as I read, calling that process “reading with a pencil”. I find that when I do that I pay attention better, and record some things that I need to know later. I’ll take these notes, categorize them into a OneNote notebook that I synchronize in my Live.com account, and that way I can search them from anywhere. I can even read them on the web, since the Live.com has a OneNote program built in. Note that these are the raw notes, so they might not make a lot of sense out of context - I include them here so you can watch my though process. Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan: Learning about how to select applications suitable for Distributed Technology. Application Fabric gets the least attention; probably because it was newer at the time. Very clear (Chapter One) Good foundation Background and history, but not too much I normally arrange my descriptions differently, starting with the use-cases and moving to physicality, but this difference helps me. Interesting that I am reading this using Safari Books Online, which uses many of these concepts. Taught me some new aspects of a Hypervisor – very low-level information about the Azure Fabric (not to be confused with the Application Fabric feature) (Chapter Two) Good detail of what is included in the SDK. Even more is available now. CS = Cloud Service (Chapter 3) Place Storage info in the configuration file, since it can be streamed in-line with a running app. Ditto for logging, and keep separated configs for staging and testing. Easy-switch in and switch out. (Chapter 4) There are two Runtime API’s, one of external and one for internal. Realizing how powerful this paradigm really is. Some places seem light, and to drop off but perhaps that’s best. Managing API is not charged, which is nice. I don’t often think about the price, until it comes to an actual deployment (Chapter 5) Csmanage is something I want to dig into deeper. API requires package moves to Blob storage first, so it needs a URL. Csmanage equivalent can be written in Unix scripting using openssl. Upgrades are possible, and you use the upgradeDomainCount attribute in the Service-Definition.csdef file Always use a low-privileged account to test on the dev fabric, since Windows Azure runs in partial trust. Full trust is available, but can be dangerous and must be well-thought out. (Chapter 6) Learned how to run full CMD commands in a web window – not that you would ever do that, but it was an interesting view into those links. This leads to a discussion on hosting other runtimes (such as Java or PHP) in Windows Azure. I got an expanded view on this process, although this is where the book shows its age a little. Books can be a problem for Cloud Computing for this reason – things just change too quickly. Windows Azure storage is not eventually consistent – it is instantly consistent with multi-phase commit. Plumbing for this is internal, not required to code that. (Chapter 7) REST API makes the service interoperable, hybrid, and consistent across code architectures. Nicely done. Use affinity groups to keep data and code together. Side note: e-book readers need a common “notes” feature. There’s a decent quick description of REST in this chapter. Learned about CloudDrive code – PowerShell sample that mounts Blob storage as a local provider. Works against Dev fabric by default, can be switched to Account. Good treatment in the storage chapters on the differences between using Dev storage and Azure storage. These can be mitigated. No, blobs are not of any size or number. Not a good statement (Chapter 8) Blob storage is probably Azure’s closest play to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). Blob change operations must be authenticated, even when public. Chapters on storage are pretty in-depth. Queue Messages are base-64 encoded (Chapter 9) The visibility timeout ensures processing of message in a disconnected system. Order is not guaranteed for a message, so if you need that set an increasing number in the queue mechanism. While Queues are accessible via REST, they are not public and are secured by default. Interesting – the header for a queue request includes an estimated count. This can be useful to create more worker roles in a dynamic system. Each Entity (row) in the Azure Table service is atomic – all or nothing. (Chapter 10) An entity can have up to 255 Properties Use “ID” for the class to indicate the key value, or use the [DataServiceKey] Attribute. LINQ makes working with the Azure Table Service much easier, although Interop is certainly possible. Good description on the process of selecting the Partition and Row Key. When checking for continuation tokens for pagination, include logic that falls out of the check in case you are at the last page. On deleting a storage object, it is instantly unavailable, however a background process is dispatched to perform the physical deletion. So if you want to re-create a storage object with the same name, add retry logic into the code. Interesting approach to deleting an index entity without having to read it first – create a local entity with the same keys and apply it to the Azure system regardless of change-state. Although the “Indexes” description is a little vague, it’s interesting to see a Folding and Stemming discussion a-la the Porter Stemming Algorithm. (Chapter 11) Presents a better discussion of indexes (at least inverted indexes) later in the chapter. Great treatment for DBA’s in Chapter 11. We need to work on getting secondary indexes in Table storage. There is a limited form of transactions called “Entity Group Transactions” that, although they have conditions, makes a transactional system more possible. Concurrency also becomes an issue, but is handled well if you’re using Data Services in .NET. It watches the Etag and allows you to take action appropriately. I do not recommend using Azure as a location for secure backups. In fact, I would rather have seen the examples in (Chapter 12) go the other way, showing how data could be brought back to a local store as a DR or HA strategy. Good information on cryptography and so on even so. Chapter seems out of place, and should be combined with the Blob chapter. (Chapter 13) on SQL Azure is dated, although the base concepts are OK. Nice example of simple ADO.NET access to a SQL Azure (or any SQL Server Really) database.

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Top 5 Developer Enabling Nuggets in MySQL 5.6

- by Rob Young

MySQL 5.6 is truly a better MySQL and reflects Oracle's commitment to the evolution of the most popular and widelyused open source database on the planet. The feature-complete 5.6 release candidate was announced at MySQL Connect in late September and the production-ready, generally available ("GA") product should be available in early 2013. While the message around 5.6 has been focused mainly on mass appeal, advanced topics like performance/scale, high availability, and self-healing replication clusters, MySQL 5.6 also provides many developer-friendly nuggets that are designed to enable those who are building the next generation of web-based and embedded applications and services. Boiling down the 5.6 feature set into a smaller set, of simple, easy to use goodies designed with developer agility in mind, these things deserve a quick look:Subquery Optimizations Using semi-JOINs and late materialization, the MySQL 5.6 Optimizer delivers greatly improved subquery performance. Specifically, the optimizer is now more efficient in handling subqueries in the FROM clause; materialization of subqueries in the FROM clause is now postponed until their contents are needed during execution. Additionally, the optimizer may add an index to derived tables during execution to speed up row retrieval. Internal tests run using the DBT-3 benchmark Query #13, shown below, demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in execution times (from days to seconds) over previous versions. select c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalprice, sum(l_quantity)from customer, orders, lineitemwhere o_orderkey in ( select l_orderkey from lineitem group by l_orderkey having sum(l_quantity) > 313 ) and c_custkey = o_custkey and o_orderkey = l_orderkeygroup by c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalpriceorder by o_totalprice desc, o_orderdateLIMIT 100;What does this mean for developers? For starters, simplified subqueries can now be coded instead of complex joins for cross table lookups: SELECT title FROM film WHERE film_id IN (SELECT film_id FROM film_actor GROUP BY film_id HAVING count(*) > 12); And even more importantly subqueries embedded in packaged applications no longer need to be re-written into joins. This is good news for both ISVs and their customers who have access to the underlying queries and who have spent development cycles writing, testing and maintaining their own versions of re-written queries across updated versions of a packaged app.The details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Online DDL OperationsToday's web-based applications are designed to rapidly evolve and adapt to meet business and revenue-generationrequirements. As a result, development SLAs are now most often measured in minutes vs days or weeks. For example, when an application must quickly support new product lines or new products within existing product lines, the backend database schema must adapt in kind, and most commonly while the application remains available for normal business operations. MySQL 5.6 supports this level of online schema flexibility and agility by providing the following new ALTER TABLE online DDL syntax additions: CREATE INDEX DROP INDEX Change AUTO_INCREMENT value for a column ADD/DROP FOREIGN KEY Rename COLUMN Change ROW FORMAT, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE for a table Change COLUMN NULL, NOT_NULL Add, drop, reorder COLUMN Again, the details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Key-value access to InnoDB via Memcached APIMany of the next generation of web, cloud, social and mobile applications require fast operations against simple Key/Value pairs. At the same time, they must retain the ability to run complex queries against the same data, as well as ensure the data is protected with ACID guarantees. With the new NoSQL API for InnoDB, developers have allthe benefits of a transactional RDBMS, coupled with the performance capabilities of Key/Value store.MySQL 5.6 provides simple, key-value interaction with InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. Implemented via a new Memcached daemon plug-in to mysqld, the new Memcached protocol is mapped directly to the native InnoDB API and enables developers to use existing Memcached clients to bypass the expense of query parsing and go directly to InnoDB data for lookups and transactional compliant updates. The API makes it possible to re-use standard Memcached libraries and clients, while extending Memcached functionality by integrating a persistent, crash-safe, transactional database back-end. The implementation is shown here:So does this option provide a performance benefit over SQL? Internal performance benchmarks using a customized Java application and test harness show some very promising results with a 9X improvement in overall throughput for SET/INSERT operations:You can follow the InnoDB team blog for the methodology, implementation and internal test cases that generated these results here. How to get started with Memcached API to InnoDB is here. New Instrumentation in Performance SchemaThe MySQL Performance Schema was introduced in MySQL 5.5 and is designed to provide point in time metrics for key performance indicators. MySQL 5.6 improves the Performance Schema in answer to the most common DBA and Developer problems. New instrumentations include: Statements/Stages What are my most resource intensive queries? Where do they spend time? Table/Index I/O, Table Locks Which application tables/indexes cause the most load or contention? Users/Hosts/Accounts Which application users, hosts, accounts are consuming the most resources? Network I/O What is the network load like? How long do sessions idle? Summaries Aggregated statistics grouped by statement, thread, user, host, account or object. The MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema is now enabled by default in the my.cnf file with optimized and auto-tune settings that minimize overhead (< 5%, but mileage will vary), so using the Performance Schema ona production server to monitor the most common application use cases is less of an issue. In addition, new atomic levels of instrumentation enable the capture of granular levels of resource consumption by users, hosts, accounts, applications, etc. for billing and chargeback purposes in cloud computing environments.The MySQL docs are an excellent resource for all that is available and that can be done with the 5.6 Performance Schema. Better Condition Handling - GET DIAGNOSTICSMySQL 5.6 enables developers to easily check for error conditions and code for exceptions by introducing the new MySQL Diagnostics Area and corresponding GET DIAGNOSTICS interface command. The Diagnostic Area can be populated via multiple options and provides 2 kinds of information:Statement - which provides affected row count and number of conditions that occurredCondition - which provides error codes and messages for all conditions that were returned by a previous operation The addressable items for each are: The new GET DIAGNOSTICS command provides a standard interface into the Diagnostics Area and can be used via the CLI or from within application code to easily retrieve and handle the results of the most recent statement execution. An example of how it is used might be:mysql> DROP TABLE test.no_such_table; ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' mysql> GET DIAGNOSTICS CONDITION 1 -> @p1 = RETURNED_SQLSTATE, @p2 = MESSAGE_TEXT; mysql> SELECT @p1, @p2; +-------+------------------------------------+| @p1 | @p2 | +-------+------------------------------------+| 42S02 | Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' | +-------+------------------------------------+ Options for leveraging the MySQL Diagnotics Area and GET DIAGNOSTICS are detailed in the MySQL Docs.While the above is a summary of some of the key developer enabling 5.6 features, it is by no means exhaustive. You can dig deeper into what MySQL 5.6 has to offer by reading this developer zone article or checking out "What's New in MySQL 5.6" in the MySQL docs.BONUS ALERT! If you are developing on Windows or are considering MySQL as an alternative to SQL Server for your next project, application or shipping product, you should check out the MySQL Installer for Windows. The installer includes the MySQL 5.6 RC database, all drivers, Visual Studio and Excel plugins, tray monitor and development tools all a single download and GUI installer. So what are your next steps? Register for Dec. 13 "MySQL 5.6: Building the Next Generation of Web-Based Applications and Services" live web event. Hurry! Seats are limited. Download the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate (look under the Development Releases tab) Provide Feedback <link to http://bugs.mysql.com/> Join the Developer discussion on the MySQL Forums Explore all MySQL Products and Developer Tools As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL!

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Windows 7 Machine Makes Router Drop -All- Wireless Connections [closed]

- by Hammer Bro.

Note: I accidentally originally posted this question over at SuperUser, and I still think the issue is caused by some low-level networking practice of Windows 7, but I think the expertise here would be more apt to figuring it out. Apologies for the cross-post. Some background: My home network consists of my Desktop, a two-month old Windows 7 (x64) machine which is online most frequently (N-spec), as well as three other Windows XP laptops (all G) that only connect every now and then (one for work, one for Netflix, and the other for infrequent regular laptop uses). I used to have a Belkin F5D8236-4 wireless router, and everything worked great. A week ago, however, I found out that the Belkin absolutely in no way would establish a VPN connection, something that has become important for work. So I bought a Netgear WNR3500v2/U/L. The wireless was acting a little sketchy at first for just the Windows 7 machine, but I thought it had something to do with 802.11N and I was in a hurry so I just fished up an ethernet cable and disabled the computer's wireless. It has now become apparent, though, that whenever the Windows 7 machine is connected to the router, all wireless connections become unstable. I was using my work laptop for a solid six hours today with no trouble, having multiple SSH connections open over VPN and streaming internet radio in the background. Then, within two minutes of turning on this Windows 7 box, I had lost all connectivity over the wireless. And I was two feet away from the router. The same sort of thing happens on all of the other laptops -- Netflix can be playing stuff all weekend, but if I come up here and do things on this (W7) computer, the streaming will be dead within ten minutes. So here are my basic observations: If the Windows 7 machine is off, then all connections will have a Signal Strength of Very Good or Excellent and a Speed of 48-54 Mbps for an indefinite amount of time. Shortly after the Windows 7 machine is turned on, all wireless connections will experience a consistent decline in Speed down to 1.0 Mbps, eventually losing their connection entirely. These machines will continue to maintain 70% signal strength, as observed by themselves and router. Once dropped, a wireless connection will have difficulty reconnecting. And, if a connection manages to become established, it will quickly drop off again. The Windows 7 machine itself will continue to function just fine if it's using a wired connection, although it will experience these same issues over the wireless. All of the drivers and firmwares are up to date, and this happened both with the stock Netgear firmware as well as the (current) DD-WRT. What I've tried: Making sure each computer is being assigned a distinct IP. (They are.) Disabling UPnP and Stateful Packet Inspection on the router. Disabling Network Sharing, SSDP Discovery, TCP/IP NetBios Helper and Computer Browser services on the Windows 7 machine. Disabling QoS Packet Scheduler, IPv6, and Link Layer Topology Discovery options on my ethernet controller (leaving only Client for Microsoft Networks, File and Printer Sharing, and IPv4 enabled). What I think: It seems awfully similar to the problems discussed in detail at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wsk/thread/1064e397-9d9b-4ae2-bc8e-c8798e591915 (which was both the most relevant and concrete information I could dig up on the internet). I still think that something the Windows 7 IP stack (or just Operating System itself) is doing is giving the router fits. However, I could be wrong, because I have two key differences. One is that most instances of this problem are reported as the entire router dying or restarting, and mine still works just fine over the wired connection. The other is that it's a new router, tested with both the factory firmware and the (I assume) well-maintained DD-WRT project. Even if Windows 7 is still secretly sending IPv6 packets or the TCP Window Scaling implementation that I hear Vista caused some trouble with (even though I've tried my best to disable anything fancy), this router should support those functions. I don't want to get a new or a replacement router unless someone can convince me that this is a defective unit. But the problem seems too specific and predictable by my instincts to be a hardware hiccup. And I don't want to deal with the inevitable problems that always seem to take half a day to resolve when getting a new router, since I'm frantically working (including tomorrow) to complete a project by next week's deadline. Plus, I think in the worst case scenario, I could keep this router connected directly to the modem, disable its wireless entirely, and connect the old Belkin to it directly. That should allow me to still use VPN (although I'll have to plug my work laptop directly into that router), and then maintain wireless connections for all of the other computers. But that feels so wrong to me. Anyone have any ideas what the cause and possible solution could be? Clarifications: The Windows 7 machine is directly connected via an ethernet cable to the router for everything above. But while it is online, all other computers' wireless connections become unusable. It is not an issue of signal strength or interference -- no other devices within scanning range are using Channel 1, and the problem will affect computers that are literally feet away from the router with 95% signal strength.

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How to resolve "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" errors from iCal/CalDAV server after upgrade to Snow Leopard Server?

- by morgant

We recently upgraded our Open Directory Master & Replica to Mac OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard Server. We had a mismatched server FQDN & LDAP Search Base/Kerberos Realm, so we exported all users & groups, created the new Open Directory Master w/matching FQDN & Search Base/Realm, reimported users & groups, and re-bound all servers & workstations to the new OD Master. At the same time as all of this, we upgraded our iCal/CalDAV server to Mac OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard Server. Ever since doing so, we've seen the following issues with our iCal/CalDAV server and iCal clients on both Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard & Mac OS X 10.6: If a user attempts to move or delete an event (single or repeating) that was created prior to the upgrade to 10.6 Server, they get the following error: Access to "blah" in "blah" in account "blah" is not permitted. The server responded: "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation. New users added to the directory get the following error when attempting to add their account to in iCal's preferences: The user "blah" has no configured pricipals. Confirm with your network administrator that your account has at least one CalDAV principal configured. Interestingly, we've since discovered that users seem to be able to delete individual events from an old repeating event without error, but that's a massive amount of work to get rid of a repeating event. I will note that we have not yet added an SRV record in DNS as instructed on page 19 of iCal_Server_Admin_v10.6.pdf. Further Investigation: In this particular case, a user is attempting to decline repeating events created prior to the upgrade to Snow Leopard Server. Granting the user full write access with sudo calendarserver_manage_principals --add-write-proxy users:user1 users:user2 (which did work) doesn't allow deletion of the events. Still get the usual error: Access to "blah blah" in "blah blah" in account "blah blah" is not permitted. The server responded: "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation. The error that shows up in /var/log/caldavd/error.log on the iCal Server when attempting to delete one of the events is: 2011-03-17 15:14:30-0400 [-] [caldav-8009] [PooledMemCacheProtocol,client] [twistedcaldav.extensions#info] PUT /calendars/__uids__/XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX/calendar/XXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX.ics HTTP/1.1 2011-03-17 15:14:30-0400 [-] [caldav-8009] [PooledMemCacheProtocol,client] [twistedcaldav.scheduling.implicit#error] Cannot change ORGANIZER: UID:XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX And the error in /var/log/system.log on the client is: Mar 17 15:14:30 192-168-21-169-dhcp iCal[33509]: CalDAV CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation failed: status 'HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden' request:\n\nBEGIN:VCALENDAR^M\nVERSION:2.0^M\nPRODID:-//Apple Inc.//iCal 3.0//EN^M\nCALSCALE:GREGORIAN^M\nBEGIN:VTIMEZONE^M\nTZID:US/Eastern^M\nBEGIN:DAYLIGHT^M\nTZOFFSETFROM:-0500^M\nTZOFFSETTO:-0400^M\nDTSTART:20070311T020000^M\nRRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU^M\nTZNAME:EDT^M\nEND:DAYLIGHT^M\nBEGIN:STANDARD^M\nTZOFFSETFROM:-0400^M\nTZOFFSETTO:-0500^M\nDTSTART:20071104T020000^M\nRRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU^M\nTZNAME:EST^M\nEND:STANDARD^M\nEND:VTIMEZONE^M\nBEGIN:VEVENT^M\nSEQUENCE:5^M\nDTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20090117T094500^M\nDTSTAMP:20081227T143043Z^M\nSUMMARY:blah blah^M\nATTENDEE;CN="First Last";CUTYPE=INDIVIDUAL;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT:urn:uuid^M\n :XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX^M\nATTENDEE;CN="First Last";CUTYPE=INDIVIDUAL;PARTSTAT=ACCEPTED:mailto:user@d^M\n omain.tld^M\nEXDATE;TZID=US/Eastern:20110319T094500^M\nDTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20090117T183000^M\nRRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=1^M\nTRANSP:OPAQUE^M\nUID:XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX^M\nORGANIZER;CN="First Last":mailto:[email protected]^M\nX-WR-ITIPSTATUSML:UNCLEAN^M\nCREATED:20110317T191348Z^M\nEND:VEVENT^M\nEND:VCALENDAR^M\n\n\n... response:\nHTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden^M\nDate: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:14:30 GMT^M\nDav: 1, access-control, calendar-access, calendar-schedule, calendar-auto-schedule, calendar-availability, inbox-availability, calendar-proxy, calendarserver-private-events, calendarserver-private-comments, calendarserver-principal-property-search^M\nContent-Type: text/xml^M\nContent-Length: 134^M\nServer: Twisted/8.2.0 TwistedWeb/8.2.0 TwistedCalDAV/2.5 (iCal Server v12.56.21)^M\n^M\n<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><error xmlns='DAV:'>^M\n <valid-attendee-change xmlns='urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:caldav'/>^M\n</error> One thing I have noticed, and I'm not sure if this has any real effect is that in many of these pre-Snow Leopard Server migration events, the ORGANIZER is specified like the following: ORGANIZER;CN=First Last:mailto:[email protected] But newer ones are more like one of the two following: ORGANIZER;CN=First Last;[email protected];SCHEDULE-STATUS=1 ORGANIZER;CN=First Last;[email protected]:urn:uuid:XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX iCal_Server_Admin_v10.6.pdf notes that the ".db.sqlite" files are completely disposable, they're merely a performance cache and are re-built on the fly, so are safe to delete. I did delete the one for the organizer's calendars and it took longer to process the attempted event delete while it rebuilt the database, but still errored out in the end. FWIW the error is thrown by this code: https://trac.calendarserver.org/browser/CalendarServer/trunk/twistedcaldav/scheduling/implicit.py Any further suggestions? I see lots of questions about this in my Google searches, but not solutions and this is a widespread problem on our iCal Server. Now, we mostly try to get users to ignore them (hence the amount of time this question has been open), but every now and then I dig in deeper trying to find the culprit and/or solution.

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Matrix Multiplication with C++ AMP

- by Daniel Moth

As part of our API tour of C++ AMP, we looked recently at parallel_for_each. I ended that post by saying we would revisit parallel_for_each after introducing array and array_view. Now is the time, so this is part 2 of parallel_for_each, and also a post that brings together everything we've seen until now. The code for serial and accelerated Consider a naïve (or brute force) serial implementation of matrix multiplication 0: void MatrixMultiplySerial(std::vector<float>& vC, const std::vector<float>& vA, const std::vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 1: { 2: for (int row = 0; row < M; row++) 3: { 4: for (int col = 0; col < N; col++) 5: { 6: float sum = 0.0f; 7: for(int i = 0; i < W; i++) 8: sum += vA[row * W + i] * vB[i * N + col]; 9: vC[row * N + col] = sum; 10: } 11: } 12: } We notice that each loop iteration is independent from each other and so can be parallelized. If in addition we have really large amounts of data, then this is a good candidate to offload to an accelerator. First, I'll just show you an example of what that code may look like with C++ AMP, and then we'll analyze it. It is assumed that you included at the top of your file #include <amp.h> 13: void MatrixMultiplySimple(std::vector<float>& vC, const std::vector<float>& vA, const std::vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 14: { 15: concurrency::array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 16: concurrency::array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 17: concurrency::array_view<concurrency::writeonly<float>,2> c(M, N, vC); 18: concurrency::parallel_for_each(c.grid, 19: [=](concurrency::index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d) { 20: int row = idx[0]; int col = idx[1]; 21: float sum = 0.0f; 22: for(int i = 0; i < W; i++) 23: sum += a(row, i) * b(i, col); 24: c[idx] = sum; 25: }); 26: } First a visual comparison, just for fun: The beginning and end is the same, i.e. lines 0,1,12 are identical to lines 13,14,26. The double nested loop (lines 2,3,4,5 and 10,11) has been transformed into a parallel_for_each call (18,19,20 and 25). The core algorithm (lines 6,7,8,9) is essentially the same (lines 21,22,23,24). We have extra lines in the C++ AMP version (15,16,17). Now let's dig in deeper. Using array_view and extent When we decided to convert this function to run on an accelerator, we knew we couldn't use the std::vector objects in the restrict(direct3d) function. So we had a choice of copying the data to the the concurrency::array<T,N> object, or wrapping the vector container (and hence its data) with a concurrency::array_view<T,N> object from amp.h – here we used the latter (lines 15,16,17). Now we can access the same data through the array_view objects (a and b) instead of the vector objects (vA and vB), and the added benefit is that we can capture the array_view objects in the lambda (lines 19-25) that we pass to the parallel_for_each call (line 18) and the data will get copied on demand for us to the accelerator. Note that line 15 (and ditto for 16 and 17) could have been written as two lines instead of one: extent<2> e(M, W); array_view<const float, 2> a(e, vA); In other words, we could have explicitly created the extent object instead of letting the array_view create it for us under the covers through the constructor overload we chose. The benefit of the extent object in this instance is that we can express that the data is indeed two dimensional, i.e a matrix. When we were using a vector object we could not do that, and instead we had to track via additional unrelated variables the dimensions of the matrix (i.e. with the integers M and W) – aren't you loving C++ AMP already? Note that the const before the float when creating a and b, will result in the underling data only being copied to the accelerator and not be copied back – a nice optimization. A similar thing is happening on line 17 when creating array_view c, where we have indicated that we do not need to copy the data to the accelerator, only copy it back. The kernel dispatch On line 18 we make the call to the C++ AMP entry point (parallel_for_each) to invoke our parallel loop or, as some may say, dispatch our kernel. The first argument we need to pass describes how many threads we want for this computation. For this algorithm we decided that we want exactly the same number of threads as the number of elements in the output matrix, i.e. in array_view c which will eventually update the vector vC. So each thread will compute exactly one result. Since the elements in c are organized in a 2-dimensional manner we can organize our threads in a two-dimensional manner too. We don't have to think too much about how to create the first argument (a grid) since the array_view object helpfully exposes that as a property. Note that instead of c.grid we could have written grid<2>(c.extent) or grid<2>(extent<2>(M, N)) – the result is the same in that we have specified M*N threads to execute our lambda. The second argument is a restrict(direct3d) lambda that accepts an index object. Since we elected to use a two-dimensional extent as the first argument of parallel_for_each, the index will also be two-dimensional and as covered in the previous posts it represents the thread ID, which in our case maps perfectly to the index of each element in the resulting array_view. The kernel itself The lambda body (lines 20-24), or as some may say, the kernel, is the code that will actually execute on the accelerator. It will be called by M*N threads and we can use those threads to index into the two input array_views (a,b) and write results into the output array_view ( c ). The four lines (21-24) are essentially identical to the four lines of the serial algorithm (6-9). The only difference is how we index into a,b,c versus how we index into vA,vB,vC. The code we wrote with C++ AMP is much nicer in its indexing, because the dimensionality is a first class concept, so you don't have to do funny arithmetic calculating the index of where the next row starts, which you have to do when working with vectors directly (since they store all the data in a flat manner). I skipped over describing line 20. Note that we didn't really need to read the two components of the index into temporary local variables. This mostly reflects my personal choice, in some algorithms to break down the index into local variables with names that make sense for the algorithm, i.e. in this case row and col. In other cases it may i,j,k or x,y,z, or M,N or whatever. Also note that we could have written line 24 as: c(idx[0], idx[1])=sum or c(row, col)=sum instead of the simpler c[idx]=sum Targeting a specific accelerator Imagine that we had more than one hardware accelerator on a system and we wanted to pick a specific one to execute this parallel loop on. So there would be some code like this anywhere before line 18: vector<accelerator> accs = MyFunctionThatChoosesSuitableAccelerators(); accelerator acc = accs[0]; …and then we would modify line 18 so we would be calling another overload of parallel_for_each that accepts an accelerator_view as the first argument, so it would become: concurrency::parallel_for_each(acc.default_view, c.grid, ...and the rest of your code remains the same… how simple is that? Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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DNS problems on CentOS fresh install

- by Rick Koshi

I'm having some DNS issues on a new box I'm installing with CentOS 6.2. I am able to look up names using nslookup, dig, or host. I am able to ping machines by name or by IP address. However, when I try other tools, such as ssh, wget, or yum, they are unable to resolve names. For example: # wget http://www.google.com --2012-03-08 14:48:06-- http://www.google.com/ Resolving www.google.com... failed: Name or service not known. wget: unable to resolve host address `www.google.com' # ssh www.google.com ssh: Could not resolve hostname www.google.com: Name or service not known # ping -c 1 www.google.com PING www.l.google.com (74.125.113.106) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from vw-in-f106.1e100.net (74.125.113.106): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=43.6 ms --- www.l.google.com ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 59ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 43.665/43.665/43.665/0.000 ms # host www.google.com www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.99 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.103 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.104 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.105 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.106 www.l.google.com has address 74.125.113.147 My /etc/nsswitch.conf file is the default, including this (standard) line: hosts: files dns /etc/resolv.conf is as set up by DHCP: ; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script nameserver 192.168.1.254 192.168.1.254 is a working DNS server (my DSL modem, working for years with other machines) Anyone know why ping would work, but ssh/wget would fail? Per NcA's suggestion, I tried changing /etc/resolv.conf to point to 8.8.8.8. Oddly enough, this does make it work. Obviously, my DSL modem is responding to DNS requests in some way that some parts of Linux's resolution system don't like. Looking at the tcpdump, I am unable to see what the difference is. Certainly, both servers are sending the same addresses. Here's the output from tcpdump -nn -X with the server set to the DNS server on the DSL modem. It's clearly replying with the correct addresses, but ssh/wget don't seem happy with it for some reason: 15:53:52.133580 IP 192.168.1.254.53 > 192.168.1.2.54836: 33157 7/0/0 CNAME www.l.google.com., A 74.125.115.105, A 74.125.115.106, A 74.125.115.147, A 74.125.115.99, A 74.125.115.103, A 74.125.115.104 (148) 0x0000: 4500 00b0 e33a 0000 ff11 53b1 c0a8 01fe E....:....S..... 0x0010: c0a8 0102 0035 d634 009c 7528 8185 8180 .....5.4..u(.... 0x0020: 0001 0007 0000 0000 0377 7777 0667 6f6f .........www.goo 0x0030: 676c 6503 636f 6d00 0001 0001 c00c 0005 gle.com......... 0x0040: 0001 0007 acd0 0008 0377 7777 016c c010 .........www.l.. 0x0050: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 7369 .,..........J}si 0x0060: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 736a .,..........J}sj 0x0070: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 7393 .,..........J}s. 0x0080: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 7363 .,..........J}sc 0x0090: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 7367 .,..........J}sg 0x00a0: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0001 0004 4a7d 7368 .,..........J}sh 15:53:52.135669 IP 192.168.1.254.53 > 192.168.1.2.54836: 65062- 0/0/0 (32) 0x0000: 4500 003c e33b 0000 ff11 5424 c0a8 01fe E..<.;....T$.... 0x0010: c0a8 0102 0035 d634 0028 98f9 fe26 8000 .....5.4.(...&.. 0x0020: 0001 0000 0000 0000 0377 7777 0667 6f6f .........www.goo 0x0030: 676c 6503 636f 6d00 001c 0001 gle.com..... I'm not enough of an expert to know if this is malformed in some way, but ping seems to do the right thing with it. For comparison, here's the same thing when querying 8.8.8.8: 15:57:27.990270 IP 8.8.8.8.53 > 192.168.1.2.49028: 59114 7/0/0 CNAME www.l.google.com., A 74.125.113.105, A 74.125.113.103, A 74.125.113.106, A 74.125.113.147, A 74.125.113.104, A 74.125.113.99 (148) 0x0000: 4500 00b0 5530 0000 2f11 6453 0808 0808 E...U0../.dS.... 0x0010: c0a8 0102 0035 bf84 009c 39f8 e6ea 8180 .....5....9..... 0x0020: 0001 0007 0000 0000 0377 7777 0667 6f6f .........www.goo 0x0030: 676c 6503 636f 6d00 0001 0001 c00c 0005 gle.com......... 0x0040: 0001 0001 516a 0008 0377 7777 016c c010 ....Qj...www.l.. 0x0050: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 7169 .,..........J}qi 0x0060: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 7167 .,..........J}qg 0x0070: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 716a .,..........J}qj 0x0080: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 7193 .,..........J}q. 0x0090: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 7168 .,..........J}qh 0x00a0: c02c 0001 0001 0000 0116 0004 4a7d 7163 .,..........J}qc 15:57:28.018909 IP 8.8.8.8.53 > 192.168.1.2.49028: 31984 1/1/0 CNAME www.l.google.com. (102) 0x0000: 4500 0082 7b1b 0000 2f11 3e96 0808 0808 E...{.../.>..... 0x0010: c0a8 0102 0035 bf84 006e c67e 7cf0 8180 .....5...n.~|... 0x0020: 0001 0001 0001 0000 0377 7777 0667 6f6f .........www.goo 0x0030: 676c 6503 636f 6d00 001c 0001 c00c 0005 gle.com......... 0x0040: 0001 0001 517f 0008 0377 7777 016c c010 ....Q....www.l.. 0x0050: c030 0006 0001 0000 0258 0026 036e 7334 .0.......X.&.ns4 0x0060: c010 0964 6e73 2d61 646d 696e c010 0016 ...dns-admin.... 0x0070: 91f3 0000 0384 0000 0384 0000 0708 0000 ................ 0x0080: 003c .< I still don't know why the server's reply is adequate for ping but not for ssh/wget. If anyone has ideas, I'd be happy to hear them. For now, though, I can either refer to an outside DNS server or set up my own server on the new box. It's a workaround that seems like it should be unnecessary, but will allow me to proceed.

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CSC folder data access AND roaming profiles issues (Vista with Server 2003, then 2008)

- by Alex Jones

I'm a junior sysadmin for an IT contractor that helps small, local government agencies, like little towns and the like. One of our clients, a public library with ~ 50 staff users, was recently migrated from Server 2003 Standard to Server 2008 R2 Standard in a very short timeframe; our senior employee, the only network engineer, had suddenly put in his two weeks notice, so management pushed him to do this project before quitting. A bit hasty on management's part? Perhaps. Could we do anything about that? Nope. Do I have to fix this all by myself? Pretty much. The network is set up like this: a) 50ish staff workstations, all running Vista Business SP2. All staff use MS Outlook, which uses RPC-over-HTTPS ("Outlook Anywhere") for cached Exchange access to an offsite location. b) One new (virtualized) Server 2008 R2 Standard instance, running atop a Server 2008 R2 host via Hyper-V. The VM is the domain's DC, and also the site's one and only file server. Let's call that VM "NEWBOX". c) One old physical Server 2003 Standard server, running the same roles. Let's call it "OLDBOX". It's still on the network and accessible, but it's been demoted, and its shares have been disabled. No data has been deleted. c) Gigabit Ethernet everywhere. The organization's only has one domain, and it did not change during the migration. d) Most users were set up for a combo of redirected folders + offline files, but some older employees who had been with the organization a long time are still on roaming profiles. To sum up: the servers in question handle user accounts and files, nothing else (eg, no TS, no mail, no IIS, etc.) I have two major problems I'm hoping you can help me with: 1) Even though all domain users have had their redirected folders moved to the new server, and loggin in to their workstations and testing confirms that the Documents/Music/Whatever folders point to the new paths, it appears some users (not laptops or anything either!) had been working offline from OLDBOX for a long time, and nobody realized it. Here's the ugly implication: a bunch of their data now lives only in their CSC folders, because they can't access the share on OLDBOX and sync with it finally. How do I get this data out of those CSC folders, and onto NEWBOX? 2) What's the best way to migrate roaming profile users to non-roaming ones, without losing vital data like documents, any lingering PSTs, etc? Things I've thought about trying: For problem 1: a) Reenable the documents share on OLDBOX, force an Offline Files sync for ALL domain users, then copy OLDBOX's share's data to the equivalent share on NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How do I safely force a domain-wide Offline Files sync? Could I lose data by reenabling the share on OLDBOX and forcing the sync? Afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? b) Determine which users have unsynced changes to OLDBOX (again, how?), search each user's CSC folder domain-wide via workstation admin shares, and grab the unsynched data. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: How can I detect which users have unsynched changes with a script? How can I search each user's CSC folder, when the ownership and permissions set for CSC folders are so restrictive? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? c) Manually visit each workstation, copy the contents of the CSC folder, and manually copy that data onto NEWBOX. Reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user. With this: Again, how do I 'break into' the CSC folder and get to its data? As an experiment, I took one workstation's HD offsite, imaged it for safety, and then tried the following with one of our shop PCs, after attaching the drive: grant myself full control of the folder (failed), grant myself ownership of the folder (failed), run chkdsk on the whole drive to make sure nothing's messed up (all OK), try to take full control of the entire drive (failed), try to take ownership of the entire drive (failed) MS KB articles and Googling around suggests there's a utility called CSCCMD that's meant for this exact scenario...but it looks like it's available for XP, not Vista, no? Again, afterwards, how can I reinitialize the Offline Files cache for every user, without doing it manually, workstation by workstation? For problem 2: a) Figure out which users are on roaming profiles, and where their profiles 'live' on the server. Create new folders for them in the redirected folders repository, migrate existing data, and disable the roaming. With this: Finding out who's roaming isn't hard. But what's the best way to disable the roaming itself? In AD Users and Computers, or on each user's workstation? Doing it centrally on the server seems more efficient; that said, all of the KB research I've done turns up articles on how to go from local to roaming, not the other way around, so I don't have good documentation on this. In closing: we have good backups of NEWBOX and OLDBOX, but not of the workstations themselves, so anything drastic on the client side would need imaging and testing for safety. Thanks for reading along this far! Hopefully you can help me dig us out of this mess.

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Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part IV)

So finally we get to the fun part the fruits of all of our middle-tier/back end labors of generating classes to interface with an XML data source that the previous posts were about can now be presented quickly and easily to an end user. I think. Well see. Well be using a WPF window to display all of our various MFL information that weve collected in the two XML files, and well provide a means of adding, updating and deleting each of these entities using as little code as possible. Additionally, I would like to dig into the performance of this solution as well as the flexibility of it if were were to modify the underlying XML schema. So first things first, lets create a WPF project and include our xml data in a data folder within. On the main window, well drag out the following controls: A combo box to contain all of the teams A list box to show the players of the selected team, along with add/delete player buttons A text box tied to the selected players name, with a save button to save any changes made to the player name A combo box of all the available positions, tied to the currently selected players position A data grid tied to the statistics of the currently selected player, with add/delete statistic buttons This monstrosity of a form and its associated project will look like this (dont forget to reference the DataFoundation project from the Presentation project): To get to the visual data binding, as we learned in a previous post, you have to first make sure the project containing your bindable classes is compiled. Do so, and then open the Data Sources pane to add a reference to the Teams and Positions classes in the DataFoundation project: Why only Team and Position? Well, we will get to Players from Teams, and Statistics from Players so no need to make an interface for them as well see in a second. As for Positions, well need a way to bind the dropdown to ALL positions they dont appear underneath any of the other classes so we need to reference it directly. After adding these guys, expand every node in your Data Sources pane and see how the Team node allows you to drill into Players and then Statistics. This is why there was no need to bring in a reference to those classes for the UI we are designing: Now for the seriously hard work of binding all of our controls to the correct data sources. Drag the following items from the Data Sources pane to the specified control on the window design canvas: Team.Name > Teams combo box Team.Players.Name > Players list box Team.Players.Name > Player name text box Team.Players.Statistics > Statistics data grid Position.Name > Positions combo box That is it! Really? Well, no, not really there is one caveat here in that the Positions combo box is not bound the selected players position. To do so, we will apply a binding to the position combo boxs SelectedValue to point to the current players PositionId value: That should do the trick now, all we need to worry about is loading the actual data. Sadly, it appears as if we will need to drop to code in order to invoke our IO methods to load all teams and positions. At least Visual Studio kindly created the stubs for us to do so, ultimately the code should look like this: Note the weirdness with the InitializeDataFiles call that is my current means of telling an IO where to load the data for each of the entities. I havent thought of a more intuitive way than that yet, but do note that all data is loaded from Teams.xml besides for positions, which is loaded from Lookups.xml. I think that may be all we need to do to at least load all of the data, lets run it and see: Yay! All of our glorious data is being displayed! Er, wait, whats up with the position dropdown? Why is it red? Lets select the RB and see if everything updates: Crap, the position didnt update to reflect the selected player, but everything else did. Where did we go wrong in binding the position to the selected player? Thinking about it a bit and comparing it to how traditional data binding works, I realize that we never set the value member (or some similar property) to tell the control to join the Id of the source (positions) to the position Id of the player. I dont see a similar property to that on the combo box control, but I do see a property named SelectedValuePath that might be it, so I set it to Id and run the app again: Hey, all right! No red box around the positions combo box. Unfortunately, selecting the RB does not update the dropdown to point to Runningback. Hmmm. Now what could it be? Maybe the problem is that we are loading teams before we are loading positions, so when it binds position Id, all of the positions arent loaded yet. I went to the code behind and switched things so position loads first and no dice. Same result when I run. Why? WHY? Ok, ok, calm down, take a deep breath. Get something with caffeine or sugar (preferably both) and think rationally. Ok, gigantic chocolate chip cookie and a mountain dew chaser have never let me down in the past, so dont fail me now! Ah ha! of course! I didnt even have to finish the mountain dew and I think Ive got it: Data Context. By default, when setting on the selected value binding for the dropdown, the data context was list_team. I dont even know what the heck list_team is, we want it to be bound to our team players view source resource instead, like this: Running it now and selecting the various players: Done and done. Everything read and bound, thank you caffeine and sugar! Oh, and thank you Visual Studio 2010. Lets wire up some of those buttons now There has got to be a better way to do this, but it works for now. What the add player button does is add a new player object to the currently selected team. Unfortunately, I couldnt get the new object to automatically show up in the players list (something about not using an observable collection gotta look into this) so I just save the change immediately and reload the screen. Terrible, but it works: Lets go after something easier: The save button. By default, as we type in new text for the players name, it is showing up in the list box as updated. Cool! Why couldnt my add new player logic do that? Anyway, the save button should be as simple as invoking MFL.IO.Save for the selected player, like this: MFL.IO.Save((MFL.Player)lbTeamPlayers.SelectedItem, true); Surprisingly, that worked on the first try. Lets see if we get as lucky with the Delete player button: MFL.IO.Delete((MFL.Player)lbTeamPlayers.SelectedItem); Refresh(); Note the use of the Refresh method again I cant seem to figure out why updates to the underlying data source are immediately reflected, but adds and deletes are not. That is a problem for another day, and again my hunch is that I should be binding to something more complex than IEnumerable (like observable collection). Now that an example of the basic CRUD methods are wired up, I want to quickly investigate the performance of this beast. Im going to make a special button to add 30 teams, each with 50 players and 10 seasons worth of stats. If my math is right, that will end up with 15000 rows of data, a pretty hefty amount for an XML file. The save of all this new data took a little over a minute, but that is acceptable because we wouldnt typically be saving batches of 15k records, and the resulting XML file size is a little over a megabyte. Not huge, but big enough to see some read performance numbers or so I thought. It reads this file and renders the first team in under a second. That is unbelievable, but we are lazy loading and the file really wasnt that big. I will increase it to 50 teams with 100 players and 20 seasons each - 100,000 rows. It took a year and a half to save all of that data, and resulted in an 8 megabyte file. Seriously, if you are loading XML files this large, get a freaking database! Despite this, it STILL takes under a second to load and render the first team, which is interesting mostly because I thought that it was loading that entire 8 MB XML file behind the scenes. I have to say that I am quite impressed with the performance of the LINQ to XML approach, particularly since I took no efforts to optimize any of this code and was fairly new to the concept from the start. There might be some merit to this little project after all Look out SQL Server and Oracle, use XML files instead! Next up, I am going to completely pull the rug out from under the UI and change a number of entities in our model. How well will the code be regenerated? How much effort will be required to tie things back together in the UI?Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Understanding the memory consumption on iPhone

- by zoul

Hello! I am working on a 2D iPhone game using OpenGL ES and I keep hitting the 24 MB memory limit – my application keeps crashing with the error code 101. I tried real hard to find where the memory goes, but the numbers in Instruments are still much bigger than what I would expect. I ran the application with the Memory Monitor, Object Alloc, Leaks and OpenGL ES instruments. When the application gets loaded, free physical memory drops from 37 MB to 23 MB, the Object Alloc settles around 7 MB, Leaks show two or three leaks a few bytes in size, the Gart Object Size is about 5 MB and Memory Monitor says the application takes up about 14 MB of real memory. I am perplexed as where did the memory go – when I dig into the Object Allocations, most of the memory is in the textures, exactly as I would expect. But both my own texture allocation counter and the Gart Object Size agree that the textures should take up somewhere around 5 MB. I am not aware of allocating anything else that would be worth mentioning, and the Object Alloc agrees. Where does the memory go? (I would be glad to supply more details if this is not enough.) Update: I really tried to find where I could allocate so much memory, but with no results. What drives me wild is the difference between the Object Allocations (~7 MB) and real memory usage as shown by Memory Monitor (~14 MB). Even if there were huge leaks or huge chunks of memory I forget about, the should still show up in the Object Allocations, shouldn’t they? I’ve already tried the usual suspects, ie. the UIImage with its caching, but that did not help. Is there a way to track memory usage “debugger-style”, line by line, watching each statement’s impact on memory usage? What I have found so far: I really am using that much memory. It is not easy to measure the real memory consumption, but after a lot of counting I think the memory consumption is really that high. My fault. I found no easy way to measure the memory used. The Memory Monitor numbers are accurate (these are the numbers that really matter), but the Memory Monitor can’t tell you where exactly the memory goes. The Object Alloc tool is almost useless for tracking the real memory usage. When I create a texture, the allocated memory counter goes up for a while (reading the texture into the memory), then drops (passing the texture data to OpenGL, freeing). This is OK, but does not always happen – sometimes the memory usage stays high even after the texture has been passed on to OpenGL and freed from “my” memory. This means that the total amount of memory allocated as shown by the Object Alloc tool is smaller than the real total memory consumption, but bigger than the real consumption minus textures (real – textures < object alloc < real). Go figure. I misread the Programming Guide. The memory limit of 24 MB applies to textures and surfaces, not the whole application. The actual red line lies a bit further, but I could not find any hard numbers. The consensus is that 25–30 MB is the ceiling. When the system gets short on memory, it starts sending the memory warning. I have almost nothing to free, but other applications do release some memory back to the system, especially Safari (which seems to be caching the websites). When the free memory as shown in the Memory Monitor goes zero, the system starts killing. I had to bite the bullet and rewrite some parts of the code to be more efficient on memory, but I am probably still pushing it. I

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Changing html <-> ajax <-> php/mysql to threaded approach

- by Saif Bechan

I have an application that needs to be updated real-time. There are various counters and other information that have to come from the database and the system needs to be up to date for the user. My approach now is just a normal ajax request every second to get the new values from the database. There is a JavaScript which loops every second getting the values trough ajax. This works fine but I think its very inefficient. The problem There is an ajax script that loops every second requesting data from php # On the server it has to load the PHP interpeter The PHP file has to get the data and format it correctly # PHP has to make a connection with the mysql database Work with the database(reads,never writes) Format the data so it can be send Send the data back to the browser # Close the database connection, and close the php interpeter Last the browser has to read these values and update the various html parts Now with this approach it has to load the interpreter and make a db connection every second. I was thinking of a way to make this more efficient, and maybe use a threaded approach to this. Threaded aprouch Do a post to the PHP when you enter the page and keep the connection alive In PHP only load the interpreter once, and make a connection to the DB ones Every second send an ajax response to the javascript listener The javascript listener than just changes values as the response from php arrives. I think this approach will be a great optimization to the server load and overall performance. But I can spot some weak point in the system and i need some help with these. Problems with the approach PHP execution time limit I don't think PHP is designed for such a setup. I know there is a time limit on php script execution. I don't know if an everlasting loop in PHP will cause any serious cpu/memory problems. Sending ajax request without breaking I don't know if it is possible to have just one ajax post action and have open and accepting data. user exists the page What will happen when the user exists the page and the PHP script is still going. Will it go on forever. security issues so far i can't think of any security issues. Almost every setup you use have some security issues. Maybe there are some with this solution I do not know of. Open to other solution I really want to change the setup as it is now and move to a threaded approach or better. If someone has a better approach to tackle this I definitely want to hear that. Maybe the usage of some other scripts is better suited for having an ongoing runtime. I only know php and java so any suggestions are welcome and I am willing to dig trough. I know there are things like perl, python etcetera that are used for this type of threaded but i don't know which one is best suited. When using other script If the best way is to go with other type of script like perl,python etcetera I do have some critera. The script has to be accessible via ajax post If it accepts some kind of json encode/decode it would be nice The script has to be able to access the session file This is essential because I need to know if the user is logged in The script has to be able to easily talk to MySQL All comments are welcome, and I hope this question is helpful to other also. Cheers!

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Objective-C NSArray NEWBIE Question:

- by clearbrian

Hi I have a weird problems with NSArray where some of the members of the objects in my array are going out of scope but not the others: I have a simple object called Section. It has 3 members. @interface Section : NSObject { NSNumber *section_Id; NSNumber *routeId; NSString *startLocationName; } @property(nonatomic,retain) NSNumber *section_Id; @property(nonatomic,retain) NSNumber *routeId; @property(nonatomic,retain) NSString *startLocationName; @end @implementation Section @synthesize section_Id; @synthesize routeId; @synthesize startLocationName; //Some static finder methods to get list of Sections from the db + (NSMutableArray *) findAllSections:{ - (void)dealloc { [section_Id release]; [routeId release]; [startLocationName release]; [super dealloc]; } @end I fill it from a database in a method called findAllSection self.sections = [Section findAllSections]; In find all sections I create some local variables fill them with data from db. NSNumber *secId = [NSNumber numberWithInt:id_section]; NSNumber *rteId = [NSNumber numberWithInt:id_route]; NSString *startName = @""; Then create a new Section and store these local variable's data in the Section Section *section = [[Section alloc] init]; section.section_Id = secId; section.routeId = rteId; section.startLocationName = startName; Then I add the section to the array [sectionsArray addObject:section]; Then I clean up, releasing local variables and the section I added to the array [secId release]; [rteId release]; [startName release]; [locEnd_name release]; [section release]; In a loop repeat for all Sections (release local variables and section is done in every loop) The method returns and I check the array and all the Sections are there. I cant seem to dig further down to see the values of the Section objects in the array (is this possible) Later I try and retrieve one of the Sections I get it from the array Section * section = [self.sections objectAtIndex:row]; Then check the value NSLog(@" SECTION SELECTED:%@",section.section_Id); BUT call to section.section_Id crashed as section.section_Id is out of scope. I check the other members of this Section object and theyre ok. After some trial and error I find that by commenting out the release of the member variable the object is OK. //[secId release]; [rteId release]; [startName release]; [locEnd_name release]; [section release]; My questions are: Am I cleaning up ok? Should I release the object added to an array and the local variable in the function? Is my dealloc ok in Section? Does this code look ok and should I be looking elsewhere for the problem? I'm not doing anything complicated just filling array from DB use it in Table Cell. If its a stupid mistake then tell me (I did put NEWBIE on the question so dont be shocked it was asked) I can comment out the release but would prefer to know why or if code looks ok then ill need further digging. the only place that secId is released is in the dealloc. Thanks

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Windows Phone 7 Connect to SharePoint via SOAP

- by Mitchell Skurnik

I am making my second application for the Windows 7 Phone Series platform and I cannot seem to connect to a SharePoint server using https. 99% of the following is not my code. I have borrowed it from http://blog.daisley-harrison.com/blog/post/Practical-Silverlight-and-SharePoint-Integration-Part-Two.aspx untill I can further understand how SOAP works in W7P Series. I know that I need some way of sending credentials over but the win 7 API does not seem to let you. ServiceReferences.ClientConfig <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="ViewsSoap" maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" transferMode="Buffered"> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"/> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://my.secureconnection.com/_vti_bin/views.asmx" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="ViewsSoap" contract="SharePointListService.ViewsSoap" name="ViewsSoap" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> This is my maincode page: public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait | SupportedPageOrientation.Landscape; try { Uri serviceUri = new Uri("https://my.secureconnection.com" + SERVICE_LISTS_URL); BasicHttpBinding binding; if (serviceUri.Scheme == "https") { binding = new BasicHttpBinding(BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport); } else { binding = new BasicHttpBinding(BasicHttpSecurityMode.None); } EndpointAddress endpoint = new EndpointAddress(serviceUri); ListsSoapClient listSoapClient = new ListsSoapClient(binding, endpoint); NetworkCredential creds = new NetworkCredential("administrator", "iSynergy1", "server001"); //listSoapClient.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = TokenImpersonationLevel.Identification; //listSoapClient.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential = creds; listSoapClient.GetListCollectionCompleted += new EventHandler<GetListCollectionCompletedEventArgs>(listSoapClient_GetListCollectionCompleted); listSoapClient.GetListCollectionAsync(); } catch (Exception exception) { handleException("Failed to get list collection", exception); } } #region ShowExceptionDetail Property public static readonly DependencyProperty ShowExceptionDetailDependencyProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("ShowExceptionDetail",typeof(bool),typeof(Page),new PropertyMetadata(true)); public bool ShowExceptionDetail { get { return (bool)GetValue(ShowExceptionDetailDependencyProperty); } set { SetValue(ShowExceptionDetailDependencyProperty, value); } } #endregion private void handleException(string context, Exception exception) { this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate() { bool showExceptionDetail = this.ShowExceptionDetail; string message = ""; Exception next = exception; do { if (message.Length > 0) { message += ";" + Environment.NewLine; } if (next.Message == null || next.Message.Length == 0) { message += next.GetType().FullName; } else { message += next.Message; } if (showExceptionDetail) { if (next.Data.Count > 0) { bool first = true; message += " {"; foreach (string key in next.Data.Keys) { if (first) { first = false; } else { message += ", "; } message += key + "=\"" + next.Data[key] + "\""; } message += "}"; } if (next.InnerException != next) { next = next.InnerException; continue; } } next = null; } while (next != null); MessageBox.Show(message, context, MessageBoxButton.OK); }); } private const string SERVICE_LISTS_URL = "/_vti_bin/lists.asmx"; void listSoapClient_GetListCollectionCompleted(object sender, GetListCollectionCompletedEventArgs e) { try { myList.Text = e.Result.ToString(); } catch (Exception exception) { handleException("Failed to get list collection", exception); } } } When I run this and it gets to the "ListsSoapClient" part, it breaks. If you dig down into the error output it says access is denied. I have tried various methods of sending credentials but none seem to work. "ClientCredentials.Windows" is not supported and ClientCredentials.UsersName.Username is read only.

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Beginner questions on Java Regular Expression

- by Robert

Hello everyone. I began studying Java Regular Expression recently and I found some really intersting task.For example,I now need to dig out "Product Name","Product Description" and "Sellers for this product" out of the following HTML code.(I am sorry for the big chunck of code,but it is very straightforward) <td class="sr-check"> <input type="checkbox" name="cptitle" value="678560038" /></td> <td class="sr-image" style="width: 80px;"><a href="/Nikon-D300S-12-3-678560038/prices-html" class="strictRule" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://img01.static-nextag.com/image/Nikon-D300S-12-3-MP-Digital-SLR-Camera-Body-Black/0/000/006/789/461/678946110.jpg" alt="Nikon D300S 12.3 MP Digital SLR Camera Body - Black" class="imageLink strictRule" height="75" width="75" id="opILink_0" title="Nikon Digital Cameras - Nikon D300S 12.3 MP Digital SLR Camera Body - Black" /></a><div class="breaker"> </div></td> <td class="sr-info"> <div class="sr-info"> <a id="opPNLink_0" class="underline" style="font-size:16px" href="/Nikon-D300S-12-3-678560038 /prices-html" >Nikon D300S 12.3 MP <b>Digital</b> SLR <b>Camera</b> Body - Black</a> <div class="sr-subinfo"> <div class="sr-info-description">SLR - 13.1MP, 12.3MP - 1x Optical Zoom - CompactFlash, SD/MMC Memory Card - 3in.</div> <div class="rating"> <img src="http://img01.static-nextag.com/imagefiles/stars/stars4_10px.gif" alt="4/5 stars" title="4/5 stars" /> (92 user ratings)</div> <div style="clear: both;">  <a id="_atl_0" style="" href="http://www.nextag.com/serv/main/buyer/MyPDir.jsp?list=_transCookieList&cmd=add&ptitle=678560038" rel="nofollow">+ Add to Shopping List</a>  |   <a rel="nofollow" id="mltLink_0" class="mlt-link" href="/Digital-Cameras--zz500001z2z678560038zB2dgz5---html">See More Like This</a> </div> <div id="fsLink_0" class="featuredSeller"> <a rel="nofollow" class="featuredSeller" id="opFSLink_0_0" href="/norob/PtitleSeller.jsp?chnl=main&tag=785646073amp;ctx=x%2BN%2Fs9zy56l4u8RXCzALE1jeLesDMzeK09rPQEdK3Yjx395ZzX9cMh9N5JAxjk7xPqF9hjk2ztM5IRXU5nspLubIXYaVzI%2B%2Fg7h1Qz58TzgvrWuNawV8qEIqqSmClArWMq6mpzNRuSlgg2xCXYObNnaIH00iKSUmBawDRvecwbCpAxhXgXoLEiEinTwr3EipComdzxL9UHFYTLoWUToUB5SRSsolQmEJ3mgnnvu83%2FC8W34TGpN9mJo%2BnyAeTkt4&ptitle=678560038" target="_blank" >Thundercameras</a>:$1,289   <a rel="nofollow" class="featuredSeller" id="opFSLink_0_1" href="/norob/PtitleSeller.jsp?chnl=main&tag=797076595&ctx=x%2BN%2Fs9zy56l4u8RXCzALE1jeLesDMzeK09rPQEdK3Yjx395ZzX9cMh9N5JAxjk7xPqF9hjk2ztM5IRXU5nspLubIXYaVzI%2B%2Fg7h1Qz58TzgvrWuNawV8qEIqqSmClArWMq6mpzNRuSlgg2xCXYObNrcWLhL%2BhryuAGhXNhYSPE%2BpAxhXgXoLEiEinTwr3EipComdzxL9UHFYTLoWUToUB5SRSsolQmEJ3mgnnvu83%2FC8W34TGpN9mJo%2BnyAeTkt4&ptitle=678560038" target="_blank" >PhotoVideoSuperStore</a>:$1,269   <a rel="nofollow" class="featuredSeller" id="opFSLink_0_2" href="/norob/PtitleSeller.jsp?chnl=main&tag=803555293&ctx=x%2BN%2Fs9zy56l4u8RXCzALE1jeLesDMzeK09rPQEdK3Yjx395ZzX9cMh9N5JAxjk7xPqF9hjk2ztM5IRXU5nspLubIXYaVzI%2B%2Fg7h1Qz58TzgvrWuNawV8qEIqqSmClArWMq6mpzNRuSlgg2xCXYObNt06qcvLJ5UQz7S3zKd4urWpAxhXgXoLEiEinTwr3EipComdzxL9UHFYTLoWUToUB5SRSsolQmEJ3mgnnvu83%2FC8W34TGpN9mJo%2BnyAeTkt4&ptitle=678560038" target="_blank" >Digitalelect</a>:$1,279  </div> I would think of : (1) digging out the product name from <td class="sr-image >tag,and using regular expression exp ="<td><span\\s+class=\"sr-image\"[^>]*>" + ".*?</span><a href=\"" + "([^\"]+)" + "\"[^>]*>" + "([^<]+)" + "</a>.*?</td>"; (2) digging out the product info from the <div class="sr-info-description"> tag. exp = "<div class="sr-info-description"> [^>]*>" (3) digging out the Sellers' names from <div id="fsLink_0" class="featuredSeller"> tag. exp = "<div id="fslink_0" class="featuredSeller[^>]*>" + ".*?</span><a rel=\"" + "([^\"]+)" + "\"[^>]*>" + "([^<]+)" + "</a>.*?</td>"; I am just beginning learing using Java Regular Expression,I would be grateful if you could correct me if I am in the wrong track or my regular expressiona are wrong. Thanks a lot,guys.

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Different setter behavior between DbContext and ObjectContext

- by Paul

(This is using EntityFramework 4.2 CTP) I haven't found any references to this on the web yet, although it's likely I'm using the wrong terminology while searching. There's also a very likely scenario where this is 100% expected behavior, just looking for confirmation and would rather not dig through the tt template (still new to this). Assuming I have a class with a boolean field called Active and I have one row that already has this value set to true. I have code that executes to set said field to True regardless of it's existing value. If I use DbContext to update the value to True no update is made. If I use ObjectContext to update the value an update is made regardless of the existing value. This is happening in the exact same EDMX, all I did was change the code generation template from DbContext to EntityObject. Update: Ok, found the confirmation I was looking for...consider this a dupe...next time I'll do MOAR SEARCHING! Entity Framework: Cancel a property change if no change in value ** Update 2: ** Problem: the default tt template wraps the "if (this != value)" in the setter with "if (iskey), so only primarykey fields receive this logic. Solution: it's not the most graceful thing, but I removed this check...we'll see how it pans out in real usage. I included the entire tt template, my changes are denoted with "**"... //////// //////// Write SimpleType Properties. //////// private void WriteSimpleTypeProperty(EdmProperty simpleProperty, CodeGenerationTools code) { MetadataTools ef = new MetadataTools(this); #> /// <summary> /// <#=SummaryComment(simpleProperty)#> /// </summary><#=LongDescriptionCommentElement(simpleProperty, 1)#> [EdmScalarPropertyAttribute(EntityKeyProperty= <#=code.CreateLiteral(ef.IsKey(simpleProperty))#>, IsNullable=<#=code.CreateLiteral(ef.IsNullable(simpleProperty))#>)] [DataMemberAttribute()] <#=code.SpaceAfter(NewModifier(simpleProperty))#><#=Accessibility.ForProperty(simpleProperty)#> <#=MultiSchemaEscape(simpleProperty.TypeUsage, code)#> <#=code.Escape(simpleProperty)#> { <#=code.SpaceAfter(Accessibility.ForGetter(simpleProperty))#>get { <#+ if (ef.ClrType(simpleProperty.TypeUsage) == typeof(byte[])) { #> return StructuralObject.GetValidValue(<#=code.FieldName(simpleProperty)#>); <#+ } else { #> return <#=code.FieldName(simpleProperty)#>; <#+ } #> } <#=code.SpaceAfter(Accessibility.ForSetter((simpleProperty)))#>set { <#+ **//if (ef.IsKey(simpleProperty)) **//{ if (ef.ClrType(simpleProperty.TypeUsage) == typeof(byte[])) { #> if (!StructuralObject.BinaryEquals(<#=code.FieldName(simpleProperty)#>, value)) <#+ } else { #> if (<#=code.FieldName(simpleProperty)#> != value) <#+ } #> { <#+ PushIndent(CodeRegion.GetIndent(1)); **//} #> <#=ChangingMethodName(simpleProperty)#>(value); ReportPropertyChanging("<#=simpleProperty.Name#>"); <#=code.FieldName(simpleProperty)#> = <#=CastToEnumType(simpleProperty.TypeUsage, code)#>StructuralObject.SetValidValue(<#=CastToUnderlyingType(simpleProperty.TypeUsage, code)#>value<#=OptionalNullableParameterForSetValidValue(simpleProperty, code)#>, "<#=simpleProperty.Name#>"); ReportPropertyChanged("<#=simpleProperty.Name#>"); <#=ChangedMethodName(simpleProperty)#>(); <#+ //if (ef.IsKey(simpleProperty)) //{ PopIndent(); #> } <#+ //} #> } }

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How can I add a previous button to this Jquery Content Slider?

- by user1269988

I did this nice tutorial for a Jquery Content Slider: http://brenelz.com/blog/build-a-content-slider-with-jquery/ Here is my test page: http://www.gregquinn.com/oneworld/brenez_slider_test.html But the Left button is hidden on the first slide and I do not want it to be. I don't know much about jquery but I tried to set the left button from opacity o to 100 or 1 and it didn't work the button showed up once but did not work. Does anyone know how to do this? Here is the code: (function($) { $.fn.ContentSlider = function(options) { var defaults = { leftBtn : 'images/panel_previous_btn.gif', rightBtn : 'images/panel_next_btn.gif', width : '900px', height : '400px', speed : 400, easing : 'easeOutQuad', textResize : false, IE_h2 : '26px', IE_p : '11px' } var defaultWidth = defaults.width; var o = $.extend(defaults, options); var w = parseInt(o.width); var n = this.children('.cs_wrapper').children('.cs_slider').children('.cs_article').length; var x = -1*w*n+w; // Minimum left value var p = parseInt(o.width)/parseInt(defaultWidth); var thisInstance = this.attr('id'); var inuse = false; // Prevents colliding animations function moveSlider(d, b) { var l = parseInt(b.siblings('.cs_wrapper').children('.cs_slider').css('left')); if(isNaN(l)) { var l = 0; } var m = (d=='left') ? l-w : l+w; if(m<=0&&m>=x) { b .siblings('.cs_wrapper') .children('.cs_slider') .animate({ 'left':m+'px' }, o.speed, o.easing, function() { inuse=false; }); if(b.attr('class')=='cs_leftBtn') { var thisBtn = $('#'+thisInstance+' .cs_leftBtn'); var otherBtn = $('#'+thisInstance+' .cs_rightBtn'); } else { var thisBtn = $('#'+thisInstance+' .cs_rightBtn'); var otherBtn = $('#'+thisInstance+' .cs_leftBtn'); } if(m==0||m==x) { thisBtn.animate({ 'opacity':'0' }, o.speed, o.easing, function() { thisBtn.hide(); }); } if(otherBtn.css('opacity')=='0') { otherBtn.show().animate({ 'opacity':'1' }, { duration:o.speed, easing:o.easing }); } } } function vCenterBtns(b) { // Safari and IE don't seem to like the CSS used to vertically center // the buttons, so we'll force it with this function var mid = parseInt(o.height)/2; b .find('.cs_leftBtn img').css({ 'top':mid+'px', 'padding':0 }).end() .find('.cs_rightBtn img').css({ 'top':mid+'px', 'padding':0 }); } return this.each(function() { $(this) // Set the width and height of the div to the defined size .css({ width:o.width, height:o.height }) // Add the buttons to move left and right .prepend('<a href="#" class="cs_leftBtn"><img src="'+o.leftBtn+'" /></a>') .append('<a href="#" class="cs_rightBtn"><img src="'+o.rightBtn+'" /></a>') // Dig down to the article div elements .find('.cs_article') // Set the width and height of the div to the defined size .css({ width:o.width, height:o.height }) .end() // Animate the entrance of the buttons .find('.cs_leftBtn') .css('opacity','0') .hide() .end() .find('.cs_rightBtn') .hide() .animate({ 'width':'show' }); // Resize the font to match the bounding box if(o.textResize===true) { var h2FontSize = $(this).find('h2').css('font-size'); var pFontSize = $(this).find('p').css('font-size'); $.each(jQuery.browser, function(i) { if($.browser.msie) { h2FontSize = o.IE_h2; pFontSize = o.IE_p; } }); $(this).find('h2').css({ 'font-size' : parseFloat(h2FontSize)*p+'px', 'margin-left' : '66%' }); $(this).find('p').css({ 'font-size' : parseFloat(pFontSize)*p+'px', 'margin-left' : '66%' }); $(this).find('.readmore').css({ 'font-size' : parseFloat(pFontSize)*p+'px', 'margin-left' : '66%' }); } // Store a copy of the button in a variable to pass to moveSlider() var leftBtn = $(this).children('.cs_leftBtn'); leftBtn.bind('click', function() { if(inuse===false) { inuse = true; moveSlider('right', leftBtn); } return false; // Keep the link from firing }); // Store a copy of the button in a variable to pass to moveSlider() var rightBtn = $(this).children('.cs_rightBtn'); rightBtn.bind('click', function() { if(inuse===false) { inuse=true; moveSlider('left', rightBtn); } return false; // Keep the link from firing }); }); } })(jQuery)

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Please clarify how create/update happens against child entities of an aggregate root

- by christian

After much reading and thinking as I begin to get my head wrapped around DDD, I am a bit confused about the best practices for dealing with complex hierarchies under an aggregate root. I think this is a FAQ but after reading countless examples and discussions, no one is quite talking about the issue I'm seeing. If I am aligned with the DDD thinking, entities below the aggregate root should be immutable. This is the crux of my trouble, so if that isn't correct, that is why I'm lost. Here is a fabricated example...hope it holds enough water to discuss. Consider an automobile insurance policy (I'm not in insurance, but this matches the language I hear when on the phone w/ my insurance company). Policy is clearly an entity. Within the policy, let's say we have Auto. Auto, for the sake of this example, only exists within a policy (maybe you could transfer an Auto to another policy, so this is potential for an aggregate as well, which changes Policy...but assume it simpler than that for now). Since an Auto cannot exist without a Policy, I think it should be an Entity but not a root. So Policy in this case is an aggregate root. Now, to create a Policy, let's assume it has to have at least one auto. This is where I get frustrated. Assume Auto is fairly complex, including many fields and maybe a child for where it is garaged (a Location). If I understand correctly, a "create Policy" constructor/factory would have to take as input an Auto or be restricted via a builder to not be created without this Auto. And the Auto's creation, since it is an entity, can't be done beforehand (because it is immutable? maybe this is just an incorrect interpretation). So you don't get to say new Auto and then setX, setY, add(Z). If Auto is more than somewhat trivial, you end up having to build a huge hierarchy of builders and such to try to manage creating an Auto within the context of the Policy. One more twist to this is later, after the Policy is created and one wishes to add another Auto...or update an existing Auto. Clearly, the Policy controls this...fine...but Policy.addAuto() won't quite fly because one can't just pass in a new Auto (right!?). Examples say things like Policy.addAuto(VIN, make, model, etc.) but are all so simple that that looks reasonable. But if this factory method approach falls apart with too many parameters (the entire Auto interface, conceivably) I need a solution. From that point in my thinking, I'm realizing that having a transient reference to an entity is OK. So, maybe it is fine to have a entity created outside of its parent within the aggregate in a transient environment, so maybe it is OK to say something like: auto = AutoFactory.createAuto(); auto.setX auto.setY or if sticking to immutability, AutoBuilder.new().setX().setY().build() and then have it get sorted out when you say Policy.addAuto(auto) This insurance example gets more interesting if you add Events, such as an Accident with its PolicyReports or RepairEstimates...some value objects but most entities that are all really meaningless outside the policy...at least for my simple example. The lifecycle of Policy with its growing hierarchy over time seems the fundamental picture I must draw before really starting to dig in...and it is more the factory concept or how the child entities get built/attached to an aggregate root that I haven't seen a solid example of. I think I'm close. Hope this is clear and not just a repeat FAQ that has answers all over the place.

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Why is Windows Update trying to install an update I don't need?

- by Oliver Salzburg

I have a Windows 7 system that currently has a single update pending: Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems If I try to install the update, Windows Update will: Create a restore point Fail with the error: Code 9C48 Windows Update encountered an error. The event log for the event reads: Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80070643: Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems. If you search the web for that error, there are many other people with the exact same issue. Sadly, I am unable to apply the proposed solutions to my case, because I just installed this system. There is nothing on it, except Windows 7. I installed the system and ran through the updates. I also did the exact same process with this machine several times over the past few days due to a long-term test we just started. I didn't have any problems with any Windows Update on the previous installation runs and I know I didn't do anything different this time because I followed the installation procedures instructions which are to be used during the test. How did this happen and how do I solve it? Further Investigation So, as I always like to do, I ran the update again while running Process Monitor and dug up further details. WindowsUpdate.log First of all, there is a Windows Update log file located at C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log which I didn't know about. But I fail to see any significant entry in it, maybe you're more lucky: 2012-04-10 22:46:58:017 956 728 AU AU received approval from Ux for 1 updates 2012-04-10 22:46:58:017 956 728 AU AU setting pending client directive to 'Progress Ux' 2012-04-10 22:46:58:095 956 728 AU BeginInteractiveInstall invoked for Download 2012-04-10 22:46:58:095 956 728 AU Auto-approving update for download, updateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}.100, ForUx=1, IsOwnerUx=1, HasDeadline=0, IsMinor=0 2012-04-10 22:46:58:095 956 728 AU Auto-approved 1 update(s) for download (for Ux) 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU UpdateDownloadProperties: 0 download(s) are still in progress. 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU ## START ## AU: Download updates 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU # Approved updates = 1 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU AU initiated download, updateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}.100, callId = {35DF928B-B428-4BAC-8C63-55295967EFBB} 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU Setting AU scheduled install time to 2012-04-11 01:00:00 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU Currently showing Progress UX client - so not launching any other client 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr ************* 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr ** START ** DnldMgr: Downloading updates [CallerId = AutomaticUpdatesWuApp] 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr ********* 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr * Call ID = {35DF928B-B428-4BAC-8C63-55295967EFBB} 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr * Priority = 3, Interactive = 1, Owner is system = 0, Explicit proxy = 0, Proxy session id = 1, ServiceId = {9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77} 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr * Updates to download = 1 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 Agent * Title = Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 Agent * UpdateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}.100 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 Agent * Bundles 1 updates: 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 Agent * {6D9A90B7-FAF9-4A47-9EFE-A506264873B3}.100 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 bb8 DnldMgr *********** DnldMgr: New download job [UpdateId = {6D9A90B7-FAF9-4A47-9EFE-A506264873B3}.100] *********** 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU # Pending download calls = 1 2012-04-10 22:46:58:110 956 728 AU ## RESUMED ## AU: Download update [UpdateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}, succeeded] 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 bb8 Agent ** END ** Agent: Downloading updates [CallerId = AutomaticUpdatesWuApp] 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 bb8 Agent ************* 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU ## END ## AU: Download updates 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU Setting AU scheduled install time to 2012-04-11 01:00:00 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU Currently showing Progress UX client - so not launching any other client 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 718 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 aac AU Getting featured update notifications. fIncludeDismissed = true 2012-04-10 22:46:58:313 956 aac AU No featured updates available. 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU BeginInteractiveInstall invoked for Install 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU Auto-approving update for install, updateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}.100, ForUx=1, IsOwnerUx=1, HasDeadline=0, IsMinor=0 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU Auto-approved 1 update(s) for install (for Ux), installType=1 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU ## START ## AU: Install updates 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU # Initiating manual install 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU # Approved updates = 1 2012-04-10 22:47:00:107 956 aac AU ## RESUMED ## AU: Installing update [UpdateId = {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9}] 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773 2232 9fc Handler : WARNING: Exit code = 0x8024200B 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773 956 718 AU # WARNING: Install failed, error = 0x80070643 / 0x00009C48 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773 2232 9fc Handler ::::::::: 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773 2232 9fc Handler :: END :: Handler: Command Line Install 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773 2232 9fc Handler ::::::::::::: 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 a7c Agent ********* 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 a7c Agent ** END ** Agent: Installing updates [CallerId = AutomaticUpdates] 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU Install call completed. 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 a7c Agent ************* 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU # WARNING: Install call completed, reboot required = No, error = 0x00000000 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU ## END ## AU: Installing updates [CallId = {FCFF2A5C-25AB-4FB9-AB2B-35C65CCA6A9F}] 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU Install complete for all calls, reboot NOT needed 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU Setting AU scheduled install time to 2012-04-11 01:00:00 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 718 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 498 AU Getting featured update notifications. fIncludeDismissed = true 2012-04-10 22:47:13:851 956 498 AU No featured updates available. 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU No featured updates notifications to show 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU UpdateDownloadProperties: 0 download(s) are still in progress. 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU Triggering Offline detection (non-interactive) 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU AU setting pending client directive to 'Install Complete Ux' 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU Changing existing AU client directive from 'Progress Ux' to 'Install Complete Ux', session id = 0x1 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 168 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 b78 AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 b78 AU ## START ## AU: Search for updates 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 b78 AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:47:14:366 956 b78 AU ## RESUMED ## AU: Search for updates [CallId = {0198DD3A-D7B0-48F5-A77D-795F8A1BDCE8}] 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU # 1 updates detected 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU ######### 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU ## END ## AU: Search for updates [CallId = {0198DD3A-D7B0-48F5-A77D-795F8A1BDCE8}] 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU ############# 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU No featured updates notifications to show 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU Setting AU scheduled install time to 2012-04-11 01:00:00 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:47:16:097 956 718 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2012-04-10 22:47:16:113 956 55c AU Getting featured update notifications. fIncludeDismissed = true 2012-04-10 22:47:16:113 956 55c AU No featured updates available. 2012-04-10 22:47:18:780 956 bb8 Report REPORT EVENT: {27479C66-E930-4F9C-AFF2-27EDD76DED8F} 2012-04-10 22:47:13:773+0200 1 182 101 {B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9} 100 80070643 AutomaticUpdates Failure Content Install Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80070643: Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems. 2012-04-10 22:47:18:780 956 bb8 Report CWERReporter::HandleEvents - WER report upload completed with status 0x8 2012-04-10 22:47:18:780 956 bb8 Report WER Report sent: 7.5.7601.17514 0x80070643 B33ACEC1-3265-4D01-9C37-AC0892E95ED9 Install 101 Unmanaged 2012-04-10 22:47:18:780 956 bb8 Report CWERReporter finishing event handling. (00000000) WU-IE9-Windows7-x64.exe The actual update that is executed is downloaded and stored at the following location: C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\Install\WU-IE9-Windows7-x64.exe Executing that file manually, results in the following error message: IE9_main.log The IE9 installer/updater also creates an own log file located at C:\Windows\IE9_main.log For the update session in question, the installer logged: 00:00.000: ==================================================================== 00:00.016: Started: 2012/04/10 (Y/M/D) 23:10:53.897 (local) 00:00.032: Time Format in this log: MM:ss.mmm (minutes:seconds.milliseconds) 00:00.063: Command line: "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\Install\WU-IE9-Windows7-x64.exe" 00:00.078: INFO: Setup installer for Internet Explorer: 9.0.8112.16421 00:00.094: INFO: Previous version of Internet Explorer: 9.0.8112.16443 00:00.110: INFO: Checking if iexplore.exe's current version is between 9.0.6001.0... 00:00.125: INFO: ...and 9.1.0.0... 00:00.141: INFO: Maximum version on which to run IEAK branding is: 9.1.0.0... 00:00.156: ERROR: A newer version of Internet Explorer is already installed on the system. 00:00.188: ERROR: Internet Explorer version check failed. 01:03.789: INFO: Setup exit code: 0x00009C48 (40008) - A more recent version of Internet Explorer is installed. 01:03.820: INFO: Scheduling upload to IE SQM server: http://sqm.microsoft.com/sqm/ie/sqmserver.dll 01:03.852: INFO: SQM Upload returned 403 01:03.867: INFO: Cleaning up temporary files in: C:\Windows\TEMP\IE978E.tmp 01:03.883: INFO: Unable to remove directory C:\Windows\TEMP\IE978E.tmp, marking for deletion on reboot. 01:03.898: INFO: Released Internet Explorer Installer Mutex Which pretty much confirms what the error message says when executing the update manually; it's simply already installed or even obsolete because a newer version is installed. So, why does it try to keep installing the update? Possible solutions? Uninstalling Windows Internet Explorer 9 and manually installing the cached C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\Install\WU-IE9-Windows7-x64.exe will result in the same error after applying all pending updates. Applying the FixIt for the issue You receive “0x80070643” or “0x643” error codes when you try to install .NET Framework updates through Windows Update or Microsoft Updates will not resolve the issue. Applying the suggested solution for the issue Error message when you try to install updates by using the Windows Update or Microsoft Update Web site: "0x80070003" will not resolve the issue. Running the FixIt Automatically diagnose and fix common problems with Windows Update does report having resolved issues with Windows Update, but didn't resolve the issue. Running the FixIt for the issue How to troubleshoot Windows Update or Microsoft Update when you are repeatedly offered an update does not resolve the issue. Neither with normal nor with aggressive settings.

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Authoritative sources about Database vs. Flatfile decision

- by FastAl

<tldr>looking for a reference to a book or other undeniably authoritative source that gives reasons when you should choose a database vs. when you should choose other storage methods. I have provided an un-authoritative list of reasons about 2/3 of the way down this post.</tldr> I have a situation at my company where a database is being used where it would be better to use another solution (in this case, an auto-generated piece of source code that contains a static lookup table, searched by binary sort). Normally, a database would be an OK solution even though the problem does not require a database, e.g, none of the elements of ACID are needed, as it is read-only data, updated about every 3-5 years (also requiring other sourcecode changes), and fits in memory, and can be keyed into via binary search (a tad faster than db, but speed is not an issue). The problem is that this code runs on our enterprise server, but is shared with several PC platforms (some disconnected, some use a central DB, etc.), and parts of it are managed by multiple programming units, parts by the DBAs, parts even by mathematicians in another department, etc. These hit their own platform’s version of their databases (containing their own copy of the static data). What happens is that every implementation, every little change, something different goes wrong. There are many other issues as well. I can’t even use a flatfile, because one mode of running on our enterprise server does not have permission to read files (only databases, and of course, its own literal storage, e.g., in-source table). Of course, other parts of the system use databases in proper, less obscure manners; there is no problem with those parts. So why don’t we just change it? I don’t have administrative ability to force a change. But I’m affected because sometimes I have to help fix the problems, but mostly because it causes outages and tons of extra IT time by other programmers and d*mmit that makes me mad! The reason neither management, nor the designers of the system, can see the problem is that they propose a solution that won’t work: increase communication; implement more safeguards and standards; etc. But every time, in a different part of the already-pared-down but still multi-step processes, a few different diligent, hard-working, top performing IT personnel make a unique subtle error that causes it to fail, sometimes after the last round of testing! And in general these are not single-person failures, but understandable miscommunications. And communication at our company is actually better than most. People just don't think that's the case because they haven't dug into the matter. However, I have it on very good word from somebody with extensive formal study of sociology and psychology that the relatively small amount of less-than-proper database usage in this gigantic cross-platform multi-source, multi-language project is bureaucratically un-maintainable. Impossible. No chance. At least with Human Beings in the loop, and it can’t be automated. In addition, the management and developers who could change this, though intelligent and capable, don’t understand the rigidity of this ‘how humans are’ issue, and are not convincible on the matter. The reason putting the static data in sourcecode will solve the problem is, although the solution is less sexy than a database, it would function with no technical drawbacks; and since the sharing of sourcecode already works very well, you basically erase any database-related effort from this section of the project, along with all the drawbacks of it that are causing problems. OK, that’s the background, for the curious. I won’t be able to convince management that this is an unfixable sociological problem, and that the real solution is coding around these limits of human nature, just as you would code around a bug in a 3rd party component that you can’t change. So what I have to do is exploit the unsuitableness of the database solution, and not do it using logic, but rather authority. I am aware of many reasons, and posts on this site giving reasons for one over the other; I’m not looking for lists of reasons like these (although you can add a comment if I've miss a doozy): WHY USE A DATABASE? instead of flatfile/other DB vs. file: if you need... Random Read / Transparent search optimization Advanced / varied / customizable Searching and sorting capabilities Transaction/rollback Locks, semaphores Concurrency control / Shared users Security 1-many/m-m is easier Easy modification Scalability Load Balancing Random updates / inserts / deletes Advanced query Administrative control of design, etc. SQL / learning curve Debugging / Logging Centralized / Live Backup capabilities Cached queries / dvlp & cache execution plans Interleaved update/read Referential integrity, avoid redundant/missing/corrupt/out-of-sync data Reporting (from on olap or oltp db) / turnkey generation tools [Disadvantages:] Important to get right the first time - professional design - but only b/c it's meant to last s/w & h/w cost Usu. over a network, speed issue (best vs. best design vs. local=even then a separate process req's marshalling/netwk layers/inter-p comm) indicies and query processing can stand in the way of simple processing (vs. flatfile) WHY USE FLATFILE: If you only need... Sequential Row processing only Limited usage append only (no reading, no master key/update) Only Update the record you're reading (fixed length recs only) Too big to fit into memory If Local disk / read-ahead network connection Portability / small system Email / cut & Paste / store as document by novice - simple format Low design learning curve but high cost later WHY USE IN-MEMORY/TABLE (tables, arrays, etc.): if you need... Processing a single db/ff record that was imported Known size of data Static data if hardcoding the table Narrow, unchanging use (e.g., one program or proc) -includes a class that will be shared, but encapsulates its data manipulation Extreme speed needed / high transaction frequency Random access - but search is dependent on implementation Following are some other posts about the topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1499239/database-vs-flat-text-file-what-are-some-technical-reasons-for-choosing-one-over http://stackoverflow.com/questions/332825/are-flat-file-databases-any-good http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2356851/database-vs-flat-files http://stackoverflow.com/questions/514455/databases-vs-plain-text/514530 What I’d like to know is if anybody could recommend a hard, authoritative source containing these reasons. I’m looking for a paper book I can buy, or a reputable website with whitepapers about the issue (e.g., Microsoft, IBM), not counting the user-generated content on those sites. This will have a greater change to elicit a change that I’m looking for: less wasted programmer time, and more reliable programs. Thanks very much for your help. You win a prize for reading such a large post!

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How do I prove I should put a table of values in source code instead of a database table?

- by FastAl

<tldr>looking for a reference to a book or other undeniably authoritative source that gives reasons when you should choose a database vs. when you should choose other storage methods. I have provided an un-authoritative list of reasons about 2/3 of the way down this post.</tldr> I have a situation at my company where a database is being used where it would be better to use another solution (in this case, an auto-generated piece of source code that contains a static lookup table, searched by binary sort). Normally, a database would be an OK solution even though the problem does not require a database, e.g, none of the elements of ACID are needed, as it is read-only data, updated about every 3-5 years (also requiring other sourcecode changes), and fits in memory, and can be keyed into via binary search (a tad faster than db, but speed is not an issue). The problem is that this code runs on our enterprise server, but is shared with several PC platforms (some disconnected, some use a central DB, etc.), and parts of it are managed by multiple programming units, parts by the DBAs, parts even by mathematicians in another department, etc. These hit their own platform’s version of their databases (containing their own copy of the static data). What happens is that every implementation, every little change, something different goes wrong. There are many other issues as well. I can’t even use a flatfile, because one mode of running on our enterprise server does not have permission to read files (only databases, and of course, its own literal storage, e.g., in-source table). Of course, other parts of the system use databases in proper, less obscure manners; there is no problem with those parts. So why don’t we just change it? I don’t have administrative ability to force a change. But I’m affected because sometimes I have to help fix the problems, but mostly because it causes outages and tons of extra IT time by other programmers and d*mmit that makes me mad! The reason neither management, nor the designers of the system, can see the problem is that they propose a solution that won’t work: increase communication; implement more safeguards and standards; etc. But every time, in a different part of the already-pared-down but still multi-step processes, a few different diligent, hard-working, top performing IT personnel make a unique subtle error that causes it to fail, sometimes after the last round of testing! And in general these are not single-person failures, but understandable miscommunications. And communication at our company is actually better than most. People just don't think that's the case because they haven't dug into the matter. However, I have it on very good word from somebody with extensive formal study of sociology and psychology that the relatively small amount of less-than-proper database usage in this gigantic cross-platform multi-source, multi-language project is bureaucratically un-maintainable. Impossible. No chance. At least with Human Beings in the loop, and it can’t be automated. In addition, the management and developers who could change this, though intelligent and capable, don’t understand the rigidity of this ‘how humans are’ issue, and are not convincible on the matter. The reason putting the static data in sourcecode will solve the problem is, although the solution is less sexy than a database, it would function with no technical drawbacks; and since the sharing of sourcecode already works very well, you basically erase any database-related effort from this section of the project, along with all the drawbacks of it that are causing problems. OK, that’s the background, for the curious. I won’t be able to convince management that this is an unfixable sociological problem, and that the real solution is coding around these limits of human nature, just as you would code around a bug in a 3rd party component that you can’t change. So what I have to do is exploit the unsuitableness of the database solution, and not do it using logic, but rather authority. I am aware of many reasons, and posts on this site giving reasons for one over the other; I’m not looking for lists of reasons like these (although you can add a comment if I've miss a doozy): WHY USE A DATABASE? instead of flatfile/other DB vs. file: if you need... Random Read / Transparent search optimization Advanced / varied / customizable Searching and sorting capabilities Transaction/rollback Locks, semaphores Concurrency control / Shared users Security 1-many/m-m is easier Easy modification Scalability Load Balancing Random updates / inserts / deletes Advanced query Administrative control of design, etc. SQL / learning curve Debugging / Logging Centralized / Live Backup capabilities Cached queries / dvlp & cache execution plans Interleaved update/read Referential integrity, avoid redundant/missing/corrupt/out-of-sync data Reporting (from on olap or oltp db) / turnkey generation tools [Disadvantages:] Important to get right the first time - professional design - but only b/c it's meant to last s/w & h/w cost Usu. over a network, speed issue (best vs. best design vs. local=even then a separate process req's marshalling/netwk layers/inter-p comm) indicies and query processing can stand in the way of simple processing (vs. flatfile) WHY USE FLATFILE: If you only need... Sequential Row processing only Limited usage append only (no reading, no master key/update) Only Update the record you're reading (fixed length recs only) Too big to fit into memory If Local disk / read-ahead network connection Portability / small system Email / cut & Paste / store as document by novice - simple format Low design learning curve but high cost later WHY USE IN-MEMORY/TABLE (tables, arrays, etc.): if you need... Processing a single db/ff record that was imported Known size of data Static data if hardcoding the table Narrow, unchanging use (e.g., one program or proc) -includes a class that will be shared, but encapsulates its data manipulation Extreme speed needed / high transaction frequency Random access - but search is dependent on implementation Following are some other posts about the topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1499239/database-vs-flat-text-file-what-are-some-technical-reasons-for-choosing-one-over http://stackoverflow.com/questions/332825/are-flat-file-databases-any-good http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2356851/database-vs-flat-files http://stackoverflow.com/questions/514455/databases-vs-plain-text/514530 What I’d like to know is if anybody could recommend a hard, authoritative source containing these reasons. I’m looking for a paper book I can buy, or a reputable website with whitepapers about the issue (e.g., Microsoft, IBM), not counting the user-generated content on those sites. This will have a greater change to elicit a change that I’m looking for: less wasted programmer time, and more reliable programs. Thanks very much for your help. You win a prize for reading such a large post!

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